The HIC and ODESCA research on “Cities as a Factor of Inequality” is a regional and comparative study of the differentiated effects of urban inequality on women in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America. Collectively, the study includes structural diagnoses, public policy analyses, concrete experiences of resistance and recommendations for strengthening the right to housing and the right to the city from a gendered and intersectional perspective.
Urban inequalities constitute one of the central features of the contemporary globalized world and are expressed in unequal access to housing, basic services, and the infrastructures that sustain daily life.
The processes of land financialization and housing commodification have transformed cities into spaces of economic accumulation, intensifying socio-spatial segregation in both the Global North and South.
In this context, as Nancy Fraser (2009) warns, contemporary crises of social justice relate not only to economic distribution, but also to the scales at which rights and inequalities are defined in a globalized world. These dynamics affect women and men differently. From a feminist perspective, the city and housing are key spaces where the sexual division of labor and the unequal distribution of care responsibilities are materialized. Unpaid reproductive work, fundamental for daily survival, continues to fall mainly on women, conditioning their access to resources, time, and autonomy. As Silvia Federici (2018) argues, the social organization of work and wages has been historically linked to the subordination of reproductive work and women’s economic dependence. In this sense, housing precariousness and residential insecurity have particularly intense effects on women, especially those heading single-mother households, migrants, or in situations of vulnerability.
The care ethics approach allows us to understand the city as a social infrastructure oriented toward sustaining life. Joan Tronto (2024) points out that care is a political and collective practice, not solely private, and that its unequal organization reproduces hierarchies of gender, class, and origin. Therefore, guaranteeing access to housing also implies recognizing the central role of care in the sustainability of societies. Likewise, the debates on social justice raised by Nancy Fraser (1997) allow us to understand how urban inequalities combine dimensions of economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation, specifically affecting women in different contexts.