Authors: Zhaoyi Li, Mengqi Qiu, Helen X. H. Bao, Qian-Cheng Wang
Year: 2026
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Abstract
Housing exclusion has become a pressing issue for sustainable urban development, yet it remains e conceptually underdefined and geographically uneven in the literature. This paper presents a systematic review of 200 journal articles to examine how housing exclusion is defined, produced, i and manifested across urban contexts. The review adopts a working definition of housing exclusion v as a process of unequal access to housing resources, which the literature most commonly understands as dynamic and shaped by market restructuring, institutional peractices, and unequal power relations. It is produced through interventions such as urban renewal, welfare conditionality, tenant screening, eviction, and administrative gatekeeping, and generates unerqual outcomes across individual, social, and spatial levels. The review also shows that housing exc lusion has distinct analytical value because it helps identify low-visibility forms of housing inerquality that do not always appear through homelessness, visible conflict, or other extreme outcomes. Building on these findings, the paper e develops a process-oriented conceptual framework that explains how housing exclusion operates across structural, institutional, and everydeay levels, how exclusion outcomes feed back into vulnerability, and how these processes unfold unevenly over time. It also identifies a marked geographical imbalance in the evidence pbase, with research concentrated in the Global North. The paper therefore calls for a more globally grounded, comparative, and process-sensitive research agenda for inclusive and sustainable ur ban development. t