Cities in Crisis: Housing Unaffordability, Displacement, and Unequal Territorial Futures

Across the world, the housing crisis has become a defining social emergency, reshaping access to cities, rural territories and the opportunities they offer. Rising housing costs, speculative investment, financialization, touristification, lifestyle migration, remote work and decades of underinvestment in social and affordable housing have intensified displacement and housing precarity across metropolitan, peri-urban and rural areas. These processes have reinforced residential segregation, uneven accessibility, socio-spatial inequalities and territorial fragmentation, making housing a central mechanism through which contemporary inequalities are reproduced. At the same time, housing is increasingly interconnected with health, mobility, infrastructure, environmental change and access to essential services, highlighting the need for integrated perspectives that move beyond conventional urban-centered analyzes to examine housing as a multidimensional territorial process.This Research Topic seeks to advance interdisciplinary debates on the structural drivers and lived consequences of housing crises by examining housing unaffordability, displacement, financialization, land commodification, residential segregation and uneven accessibility across urban, peri-urban and rural contexts. It aims to reposition housing as a territorial process shaped by interactions between land markets, planning regimes, infrastructure, environmental change, governance and everyday life.We particularly encourage contributions analyzing how housing inequalities intersect with class, race, gender, age, migration status, indigeneity and rurality, as well as research exploring housing in relation to health, mobility, transport, environmental vulnerability, digital infrastructure and access to public services. The collection also seeks to strengthen dialogue between sociology, geography, planning, public health and spatial sciences by welcoming diverse theoretical perspectives (including political economy, socio-spatial justice and relational approaches to space) that deepen understanding of contemporary housing inequalities and identify institutional, community and policy responses capable of promoting more equitable urban and territorial futures.This Research Topic welcomes original research, reviews, perspectives and methodological contributions employing qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods and spatial analytical approaches (including GIS, geostatistics, remote sensing and spatial modelling). Contributions may address topics including: housing unaffordability and financialization; displacement, eviction and housing precarity; residential segregation and neighborhood change; rural gentrification, lifestyle migration and touristification; second-home and short-term rental markets; housing and health inequalities; ageing, care and migration; accessibility, mobility, transport justice and the 15-minute city; social housing and metropolitan planning; environmental degradation, water and sanitation; infrastructural and digital inequalities; land markets, real estate development and urban restructuring; housing vulnerability mapping; and community resistance, planning, regulation and housing justice. Comparative studies and contributions from underrepresented geographical contexts are particularly encouraged, as are interdisciplinary analyses connecting housing to broader processes of territorial inequality and socio-spatial justice. Topic editors: Ricardo Ayala, Juan Correa-Parra Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84150/cities-in-crisis-housing-unaffordability-displacement-and-unequal-territorial-futures