Sociospatial differentiation and urban inequalities have intensified in recent decades in close connection with the commodification and financialization of housing. Although these processes have preferentially been analyzed in large metropolitan areas, their incidence in non-metropolitan medium-sized cities is becoming increasingly relevant. In these cities, housing has ceased to be solely a use-value good linked to social reproduction, increasingly becoming an economic, patrimonial and financial asset. This shift transforms the production of urban space, intensifies residential inequalities, and contributes to new forms of sociospatial fragmentation.
\nMedium-sized cities have specificities that require reconsidering the classic frameworks of urban analysis. Although they are also affected by global processes, they do not mechanically reproduce metropolitan dynamics, yet neither do they remain outside the logics of real-estate investment, selective valorization and precarization of residential access. In these contexts, housing markets tend to be smaller, housing stocks more rigid, access opportunities more segmented, and inequalities more visible at the everyday scale. Pressure on rents, the shortage of affordable housing, the concentration of social or degraded housing in certain neighborhoods, uneven rehabilitation, localized touristification, the conversion of housing into a patrimonial safe haven, and the differentiated action of public, private, financial and real-estate agents produce new urban geographies of inequality.
\nThe process of sociospatial fragmentation acquires particular features in medium-sized cities. The intermediate scale intensifies physical proximity between socially distant groups, but does not guarantee interaction, recognition or equitable access to urban resources. On the contrary, it can make symbolic boundaries, territorial stigmatization, everyday forms of avoidance, and inequalities in the capacity to remain, move about, access services or appropriate certain spaces of the city more visible.
\nWithin this framework, the classic center-periphery opposition proves insufficient to explain current forms of urban inequality. In non-metropolitan medium-sized cities, residential and everyday fragmentation is expressed through more complex logics of valorization and devalorization, concentration of vulnerability, statistically low-visibility segregation, patrimonial inequality, differential mobility, and unequal access to facilities, centralities and opportunities. The financialization of the residential market not only raises costs or restricts access to housing, but also redefines social positions within the city and alters the material conditions of the right to the city.
\nWe invite submissions of research addressing the problem of housing in medium-sized cities and analyzing how the financialization associated with the urban-residential market transforms contemporary forms of differentiation, inequality and sociospatial fragmentation in non-metropolitan medium-sized cities. Contributions are welcome on the residential market and unequal production of space; segregation, displacement, exclusion or residential immobilization; the role of economic, real-estate, financial and institutional agents; effects on everyday life, spatial practices and access to urban opportunities; social housing, vulnerability and territorial stigmatization; as well as public policies, community strategies or forms of resistance to the commodification of housing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[61],"class_list":["post-10663","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-geografia"],"yoast_head":"\n