Right to the Neighborhood: Housing, Gentrification, and the Future of Urban Community

Across the world, neighborhoods have become contested sites of investment, displacement, and belonging. The financialization of housing, the spread of platform-based rentals, accelerated redevelopment, and the retreat of public housing have intensified pressures on urban communities, weakening long-standing community ties while producing new patterns of inequality. Lefebvre's idea of the right to the city is being reclaimed by tenant unions, mutual aid networks, and grassroots place-keepers — yet communities themselves can also close in, draw boundaries, and exclude, revealing the tensions of urban belonging in turbulent times. This session invites empirical and theoretical contributions on housing, gentrification, and the future of urban community. We welcome papers addressing topics such as: the financialization and platformization of housing and their effects on community life; displacement, eviction, and the politics of staying in place; tenant movements and the right to the neighborhood; shrinking, aging, and post-growth neighborhoods; informal settlements and self-built urban communities; state-led redevelopment and its impact on residents; and the racial, ethnic, and class boundaries that housing markets create within urban communities. We particularly encourage comparative and cross-regional perspectives, including contributions on East Asian urban transformations, where rapid demographic change, speculative housing markets, and contested redevelopment are reshaping community at unprecedented speed. By examining both the fractures and the solidarities that housing produces, the session contributes to RC03's ongoing inquiry into community as a site of belonging, contestation, and possibility.