The gentrification, touristification and housing financialization nexus in Southern European cities

Over the past decade, Southern European cities have experienced an acute housing affordability crisis, manifested in escalating rents, intensifying displacement pressures and deepening socio-spatial inequalities. Far from representing an isolated malfunction of housing markets, this crisis is embedded in broader processes of urban restructuring, variously conceptualized as gentrification, touristification and housing financialization. Although these dynamics are often examined as distinct or even competing phenomena, this Special Issue argues that they are more productively understood as mutually constitutive and structurally intertwined processes that actively generate and sustain contemporary housing crises. Drawing on critical political economy and grounded in the Southern European experience, this article identifies the emergence of a specific nexus through which housing is progressively transformed into a financial asset and vehicle for rent extraction, rather than as a space of social reproduction. Within this nexus, successive waves of gentrification are articulated with shifting growth models, from construction-led development to tourism-oriented and finance-driven accumulation, while short-term rentals, platform-mediated markets and transnational investment flows consolidate new frontiers of assetization. The state plays a pivotal yet contradictory role, operating through hybrid governance arrangements that both facilitate capital accumulation and manage its social consequences. By placing the gentrification–touristification–housing financialization nexus at the centre of analysis, this Special Issue advances a research agenda that shifts attention towards the structural drivers, institutional architectures and financial actors underpinning contemporary housing crises, opening pathways for critically engaging with, and contesting, the evolving geographies of rentier capitalism.