Housing policies and urban power: conflicts and redistributive processes in Boston

Journal title TERRITORIO
Author/s Anna Laura Palazzo
Publishing Year 2026 Issue 2025/112-113
Language Italian Pages 13 P. 260-272 File size 756 KB
DOI 10.3280/TR2025-112025
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Advanced cities are embedded in an increasingly competitive global landscape and deploy policy frameworks aimed at mitigating sociospatial inequalities through redistributive measures and social support instruments, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Boston is a city with a longstanding tradition of public intervention, where municipal action has coupled housing policies, workforce development, and support for entrepreneurship, while instituting participatory arenas involving communities and both market and thirdsector actors. Yet, such processes of empowerment remain inherently ambivalent: policies designed to enhance territorial cohesion and social mobility may generate new tensions and reshape local power relations, ultimately giving rise to unforeseen dynamics of exclusion.

Keywords: housing policies; urban governance; sociospatial inequalities

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Anna Laura Palazzo, Politiche dell’abitare e poteri urbani: conflitti e processi redistributivi a Boston in "TERRITORIO" 112-113/2025, pp 260-272, DOI: 10.3280/TR2025-112025