**2. Contemporary challenges in urban housing**

Present urban housing problems and conflicts result, to a large part, in the prevailing neoliberal market regime, which privileges capital value against use value, promotes competition among cities on residents and values the national or global reputation of real estate markets higher than local residents' needs. The following sections shed some light on these conflicts by taking three perspectives: the economic perspective of commodification, the geographical perspective of territorialization and the political perspective of centralization.
