The book maps how global finance seizes land, housing and urban policy, turning the city into a contested terrain where dispossession, debt and securitisation quietly reorganise everyday life. A second compact text, “The Right to the City: From Theory to Urban Struggles”, reinterprets Lefebvre through the lived realities of eviction, informality and grassroots resistance across Latin America, presenting the right to the city not as rhetoric but as a political practice confronting the state–market nexus. For an even more immediate lens, Rolnik’s UN Special Rapporteur reports (2008–2014), especially those on forced evictions and the financialisation of housing, offer sharp, global diagnostics of how speculation and austerity recast urban dwelling. Taken together, these works articulate a coherent triad: housing as a field of struggle, the city as a contested right, and real-estate violence as a planetary instrument of power, always viewed from the South and delivered with Rolnik’s lucid, incisive urban pedagogy.
