Panagidis, A., & Roussou, E. (2024). Clientelism and infrastructural gaps in Southern Europe: The implications on housing and urban governance. In: Madrazo, L. (Ed.). Proceedings of the RE-DWELL Conference 2024 - Sustainable Living, Affordable Homes: Meeting the Challenge Together (pp. 137-144). Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain.

Unaffordable and unsustainable housing is widely regarded as a harsh side-effect of the failure of pro-market policies. The issue is often used to articulate the flaws of dominant responses through political-economic ties that tend to reconstruct new cases of dispossession (Dikeç, 2007). When exploring the ongoing housing crisis, the dominant narratives of urgent fixes to the problem enabled governments face when enacting policy without questioning the insecure foundations of uneven spatial development (Heslop & Ormerod, 2020).  The inability of the state to protect disenfranchised groups, and the deficiencies of publicprivate neoliberal models of urban governance have contributed to rising levels of distrust in governance institutions. Adding to the widely regarded problem of the global affordable housing gap (Reid, 2023), the infrastructural gap in the Mediterranean region is identified by the deficits (gaps) in the infrastructures required to mitigate overlapping challenges of sustainable development in general (Dalakoglou, 2016). Moreover, the growing role of the private sector in urban governance and public-private alliances, promoting urban entrepreneurialism (Phelps & Miao, 2020), provide private actors with speculative interests greater degrees of influence in the development of urban infrastructure than society as a whole. A continuation of neoliberal urban planning places real barriers to meaningful citizen participation in the development of sustainable cities.