*Contemporary Challenges and Future Strategies to Mitigate Social Inequality in Urban Housing… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107999*

regulating (refugee) migration, combatting pandemic or coding capital are instances of attempts of re-territorialization. However, any attempts to conflate territorial with topological geographies must be wary of fetishizing either of these spaces.

A predominantly territorial, containerized imagination of spatial organization nurtures competition among cities and municipalities in attracting (high-income) households because their public budgets rely strongly on taxes redistributed on the number of primary residents. Demographically shrinking municipalities thus lose income and attention, and they are simultaneously enforced to preserve the still existing infrastructure from dereliction. Demographically growing municipalities must locate new housing blocks and infrastructure, and will yield new income by reallocating taxes after some time. Due to the high attractiveness of most Austrian large cities, suburban municipalities benefit from this competition of people. This is, however, not always and necessarily the case, as medium-sized cities like Eisenerz in Styria illustrate. Eisenerz, a town of 3800 inhabitants in 2020, lost more than 9100 people over the past 70 years. On the other hand, the population of some neighboring municipalities likes, for example, Trofaiach grew remarkably during the same period, partly from households that moved from Eisenerz [17].

The competition between municipalities is geographically volatile since real estate investment strategies have to cope with changing households' lifestyle preferences [18], transforming regional economic and labor markets, and staging mainstream aspirations of where to live the most satisfying life [19]. The main phases had been urbanization, suburbanization, counter-urbanization, and re-urbanization. Gentrification is perhaps the most prominent phenomenon of the current reurbanization of middle- and upper-class households [20, 21]. Due to an accelerating number of heat days and tropical nights or other climate-change effects [22], and because of experienced challenges of corona measures, a renaissance of suburbanization might likely happen in the near future.

A containerized spatial organization of housing (markets) relates closely to the problem of "methodological nationalism", which equates society with the nation state's territory. The methodology construes internal homogeneity and external exclusion to secure own political and economic interests. This principle, in other words, legitimates global inequality [23]. Its principle idea can be scaled down to the local level and applied methodologically to the administrative units of municipalities. Complementing this unilateral orientation with a relational spatial organization would mitigate housing poverty because it relieves the comparative competition between territories.
