Bourdieu Comes to Town: Pertinence,Principles, Applications

This article frames the themes of the two‐part Interventions section ‘Bourdieu Comes to Town’. I first establish the pertinence of Bourdieu's sociology for students of the city by revisiting his youthful work on power, space, and the diffusion of urban forms in provincial Béarn and colonial Algeria. In both cases, urbanization is the key vector of transformation, and the city, town, or camp the site anchoring the forces dissolving the social fabric of the French countryside and overturning French imperialism in North Africa. These early studies establish that all social and mental structures have spatial correlates and conditions of possibility; that social distance and power relations are both expressed in and reinforced by spatial distance; and that propinquity to the center of accumulation of capital (economic, military, or cultural) is a key determinant of the force and velocity of social change. Next, I discuss four principles that undergird Bourdieu's investigations and can profitably drive urban inquiry: the Bachelardian moment of epistemological rupture, the Weberian invitation to historicize the agent (habitus), the world (social space) and the categories of the analyst (epistemic reflexivity); the Leibnizian‐Durkheimian imperative to deploy the topological mode of reasoning; and Cassirer's command to heed the constitutive efficacy of symbolic structures. The plasticity and productivity of his concepts suggest that Bourdieu can not only energize urban inquiry but also merge it into a broader analytic of the trialectic of symbolic division, social space, and the built environment. This paves a pathway for reconceptualizing the urban as the domain of accumulation, differentiation and contestation of manifold forms of capital, which makes the city a central ground, product, and prize of historical struggles.     

The Forever Frontier of Urbanism: Historicizing Persian Gulf Cities

In recent years, Persian Gulf cities have become symbols of the most spectacular forms of the ‘globalization of urbanization’. Current scholarship has sought to situate these cities in transnational processes and linkages with conceptualizations of ‘the global city’ and the mechanisms of ‘worlding’. This article builds on but moves beyond this line of analysis by turning to the histories of this region and its built environment to explore the longue‐durée influence of capital and empire operating across multiple scales. From this perspective, the glittering high‐rises and manmade islands are contemporary manifestations of a century of urban forms and logics of social control emanating from company towns, the struggles of state building, and the circulation and fixing of capital. To grasp how the Persian Gulf region has been remade as a frontier for accumulation, the analysis in this article blurs the boundaries between metropole and periphery, reconceptualizing the region not as an eclectic sideshow, but as a central site for global shifts in urbanism, capitalism and architecture in the twentieth century.     

Indigenous Cosmogony and Andean Architecture in El Alto,Bolivia

This essay applies Bourdieu's analysis of the formation of the ‘scholastic habitus’ in medieval times—elaborated in his 1967 afterword to his French translation of Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism—to the correspondence between indigenous mental categories and architectural innovation in the Bolivian ‘rebel city’ of El Alto. The principle of homology between mental categories and building layout (rooted in a shared habitus) can be used to interpret one of the most spectacular features of Bolivia's ‘emerging architectures’, known as chalets. The term chalet designates a hybrid structure consisting of a colorful and ornate penthouse and multi‐story dwelling erected on building rooftops. The chalets are architectural forms embedded within an economy of symbolic goods characterized by a ‘dual truth’: they are at once material and symbolic; they perform economic functions while seeking public visibility. The conspicuous lifestyle advertised by the construction of chalets can be understood by reference to the rising social power of the indigenous elites (cholos) dominating the thriving ‘ethnic economy’ of the city. The fraternities of El Alto emerge as the structural equivalent of the scholastic institution that Bourdieu associated with Gothic architecture: they are the site of production of a specific habitus, shared by native urban categories defined by similar residential locations, economic activities and forms of collective organization.     

Cities in Contemporary Capitalism

This article outlines essential concepts of the political economy approach of urban research and offers critical modifications and clarifications to some of its contentions concerning the functioning of cities as ‘strategic places’ of capital accumulation. The interrelations between contemporary capitalism and urban economic development are discussed at the scale of a transnationally extended urban system. Based on the general context of the global economic downturn, I focus on the role of cities in distinct circuits of capital, the switching of capital flows within the urban system and the different functional roles of cities within the world city network that interconnects cities both in the global North and South. I call into question the established focus of urban economic research on the role of cities as financial and service centres, arguing that cities might redirect their economic development trajectories towards ‘real economy’ activities, in contrast to relying on the disastrous development model of finance‐dominated capitalism.     

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post‐apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieu's concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieu's concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.     

Categorizing Neighborhoods: The Invention of ‘Sensitive Areas’ in France and ‘Historic Districts’ in the United States

This essay offers a reflexive return to two research projects to demonstrate the value of Bourdieu's emphasis on the symbolic for the analysis of contemporary urban transformation. Bourdieu's insistence that we track the social genesis and diffusion of spatial categories of thought and action directs us to the empirical study of the struggles between agents and organizations that promote and/or oppose these categories, as well as the political, economic and other interests animating the agents. A retracing of the parallel invention of the ‘at‐risk neighborhood’ (quartier sensible) coined for and targeted by French urban policy since the late 1980s and the emergence of ‘historic’ or ‘diverse’ neighborhoods touted by gentrifying residents, cultural organizations and real estate agents in the United States since the 1960s challenges misleading oppositions between materiality and representations that often underpin and cramp urban research.     

Dismantled Spatial Fixes in the Aftermath of Recession: Capital Switching and Labour Underutilization in the Greek Capital Metropolitan Region

The article offers a fresh, empirically grounded look at the spatialities of crisis‐triggered employment forms—a largely overlooked issue in contemporary critical geography literature. Specifically, it discusses the interconnection between investment flows from manufacturing to the built environment (capital switching) and underemployment in urban metropolitan regions to substantiate its impact on emerging spatial fixities. The article, which is based on an empirical analysis informed by a radical political economy, investigates changing fixed capital formations in Greece over an extended period prior to and during the recession, from 1995 to 2012. It traces the evolution of part‐time waged work in the capital metropolitan region of Attica (Athens) vis‐à‐vis the rest of the country's regional labour markets, focusing on the polarized 2005–2012 period and the demise of the construction industry. The article highlights that ‘disrupted’ capital switching that occurred in Greece, closely associated with recalibrated sectoral priorities and institutional interventions, resulted in the uneven sprawling of underemployment. Our findings offer insight into how the dismantling of spatial fixes within core metropolitan regions of the southern European Union (and beyond) are connected to labour surplus and successive slumps in manufacturing and construction. The article closes by calling for new theorizations of contemporary urban regional unevenness and its spatiotemporal fixities, which account for the role of changes in labour turnover time.     

Urban Distinctions: Class,Culture and Sociability in the City of Porto

This essay employs Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice and the methodology of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to extend the mapping of the dynamic relations between class and culture presented in Bourdieu's Distinction to encompass urban space, drawing on data from a multi‐method research project on the city of Porto, Portugal. We present a detailed analysis of the formation and structure of local social space and show its relevance for the study of the (re)production of urban lifestyles. Differences in the volume and composition of the capital of city residents are identified and shown to underpin the relations between social positions, dispositions and position takings in various realms of cultural consumption. Meaningful configurations of ‘lifestyle modalities’ have clear roots in the city's social space, which in Portugal, as in France, can be interpreted in terms of distinction, pretension and necessity.     

How did you get up and running? Taking a Bourdieuan perspective towards a framework for negotiating strategic fit

This article suggests a theoretical framework for illustrating significant iterative processes that need to be strategically managed when entering a new field or changing a social position within a field. Applying a process-relational perspective, the framework theoretically underpins what propels individuals to change their behaviour conceptualized as constructing a strategic fit between personal structure and fields. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capitals as a lens the analysis reveals how capital transformations eventually can lead to a social construction of this temporary strategic fit. The article argues that the performance of habitus expresses temporary field specific social positioning as a social materialization of macrostructures (gender, age, class, etc.). This suggested framework is applied to conceptualizing how nascent entrepreneurs successfully negotiate entrepreneurial processes. It is concerned with a small aspect: how to physically start a business (its registration and the start of trading). In this context, the article unpacks how the transformation of capitals mediates nascent entrepreneurs’ social positioning. This article contributes to the growing ‘social turn’ research situating entrepreneurial processes within social relations and context and the emerging Entrepreneurship as Practice field. It offers practical implications for business support and research directions.     

Playing with the Rules of the Game: Social Innovation for Urban Transformation

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation—like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism—may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. This article explores the conceptual and political differences within this pre‐paradigmatic field, and argues for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilize the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalizing social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socio‐economic problems. Dominant market‐ and state‐led economic development policies—likened to a ‘regeneration game’—are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play–game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions this entails, and possible ways forward.     

The Financialization of Housing Production in Brussels

This article focuses on the financialization of housing production in the Brussels‐Capital Region, examining the increased presence and use of financial capital in housing production. Information collected by local administrations when granting building permits is used to undertake a large‐scale examination of companies involved in housing provision in Brussels in the 2000s in order to identify the origins of capital invested in housing development projects and to assess to what extent it can be considered as ‘financialized’. The use of this data set allows me to estimate the ‘market share’ of financial capital in housing production and to analyse the geography of these investments in the built environment. This spatial analysis also provides some insights for a discussion about the possible social consequences of this influx of financial capital into the urban space. The task of empirically ‘measuring’ financialization raises numerous methodological questions. A choice has to be made between a wide range of definitions, both for financial activities and the financialization process. Moreover, for the purpose of quantifying the phenomenon, these concepts are made operational and turned into indicators. In addition to providing information about the investment of financial capital in housing production and the concrete forms it may take in a city such as Brussels, I venture to suggest that this article also contributes to the methodological ‘toolbox’ available to researchers in the field of financialization.     

Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.     

Bourdieu Comes to Town: Part II

This essay introduces the second selection of essays associated with the Interventions forum ‘Bourdieu Comes to Town’, the first of which appeared in 2018. There seems to be a tendency to conflate the relevance of Bourdieu for urban studies by focusing specifically on particular contentious concepts that have been fashioned from Bourdieu's own tools. I briefly discuss this point with respect to the concepts of ‘elective belonging', which I helped introduce, and ‘territorial stigmatization’, which Loïc Wacquant himself has popularized. I argue that whatever the virtues or otherwise of these concepts, Bourdieu offers substantially more to urban studies, namely the capacity to synthesize across sites, to link micro and macro, to engage pragmatist concerns with daily life to a wider political economy, and to foreground the role of accumulation. I briefly show how the four essays in this selection exemplify these qualities.     

The onward sweep of social capital: causes and consequences for understanding cities,communities and urban movements

This article examines the way ‘social capital’ has been deployed by researchers and practitioners in the field of urban movements and community development. It reveals the powerful and in many ways effective role the concept is playing in framing the contemporary reconfigurations of local state‐society relations which impact especially on the trajectory of third or voluntary sector development. The article identifies the gaps and weaknesses the ‘social capital’ perspective responds to, thereby explaining why it looms so large within the urban development discourse. Its own blind spots and ambiguities, however, limit our understanding of contemporary urban change. By prioritizing specific forms of civic engagement (and neglecting others), the concept filters the contemporary reconfigurations in the relationship of civil society, state and market in a peculiar way, which is conducive to supporting the spread of market forces to areas so far beyond the reach of capital. By directing attention to the self‐activation potential of different communities, whether in the form of civic engagement of well‐to‐do volunteers or in the form of activation/reinsertion (into the low‐wage labour market) of the marginalized, this new discourse plays a crucial role not only in current efforts to unburden the local (welfare) state, but also in the expansion of market forces into new areas. L'article examine comment les chercheurs et spécialistes ont fait usage du ‘capital social’ dans le domaine des mouvements urbains et de l'évolution des communautés. Il dévoile le rô le dynamique et, par bien des aspects, efficace que ce concept joue en structurant les reconfigurations contemporaines des relations société‐gouvernement local, lesquelles influent notamment sur les tendances du secteur associatif ou du bénévolat. L'article identifie les lacunes et faiblesses que comble la perspective du ‘capital social’, expliquant ainsi les raisons de son omniprésence dans la rhétorique de l'urbanisme. Ses propres faiblesses et ambiguïtés limitent toutefois notre compréhension du changement urbain contemporain. En mettant en avant des formes spécifiques d'engagement civique (et en en négligeant d'autres), le concept dégage les reconfigurations modernes qui interviennent sur la relation entre société civile, É tat et marché, et ce d'une manière particulière qui contribue à la propagation des forces du marché dans des zones jusqu'alors inaccessibles au capital. En s'intéressant au potentiel d'auto‐activation de diverses communautés, que ce soit sous la forme d'un engagement civique de nantis volontaires ou de l'activation ou la réinsertion (sur le marché du travail des bas salaires) des marginaux, ce nouveau discours est essentiel, non seulement dans le cadre des efforts actuels visant à soulager l'É tat (providence) local, mais aussi dans l'expansion des forces du marché vers des zones nouvelles.     

Creative Cities,Graffiti and Culture-Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima (‘Play Your Part’)

Creative cities and culture-led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite-centric economic development agendas tend to trump ‘civic creativity’ ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture-led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus on decorative projects as part of urban upgrading, which are often associated with ensuing gentrification and displacement of the urban poor. In contrast to focusing on these kinds of regeneration strategies, this article investigates Dlala Indima, a hip-hop-led graffiti project in a rural township in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This article situates graffiti as a critical social and spatial practice to argue that this case challenges normative cultural planning paradigms. Dlala Indima's work is an alternative approach to cultural development by and for young people who are usually marginalized by the mainstream practice of culture-led economic development. The project challenges dominant creative cities and culture-led development discourses in three ways: first, it challenges the normative processes of regeneration; secondly, it grounds participatory practice; and finally, it shifts participation from ‘tyranny to transformation’ through the ubuntu of hip-hop, the notion of ubuntu being based on the communitarian notion of ‘ubuntu, ngubuntu ngabantu’—‘I am because you are’.     

Economic restructuring and state intervention in Holdenist suburbia: understanding urban poverty in Australia

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s a particular conjuncture of capital-state relations formed in Australia, leading to the development of a distinctive urban form —‘Holdenist suburbia’: built by government; of a large scale and uniform appearance; constructed of poor quality, cheap materials; home to relatively high percentages of public renters; comprised of predominantly working-class families; adjacent to manufacturing employment; and stigmatized. An examination of one such Holdenist suburban estate in 1966 and 1991 illustrates how certain aspects of economic restructuring and state intervention have forged such spaces as sites of urban poverty. With the broad aim of connecting Australian urban studies to ongoing international debates about the nature of contemporary urban poverty, it is noted that distinctive characteristics of Australian urban and welfare state development render the application of concepts derived from different cultural settings problematic. This paper makes two points. First, a ‘finer-combed’ interpretation of Australian postwar suburban development is required to delineate the role of the state in shaping a particular urban form during this period — the Holdenist suburban form. Second, this delineation is particularly important to understanding contemporary urban poverty in Australia, for the social provisions of state policy have, in contradictory fashion, both prevented the full development of outcast ghettos (Marcuse, 1996) and, in conjunction with the processes of economic restructuring, forged sites of urban poverty.     

Recentering Southeast Asian Cities

For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for the reorganization of the developmental state and the growing importance of private capital and urban social movements in driving urban processes and politics. This symposium offers the fresh lens of ‘recentering’ to discuss the urbanisms emerging from decentralization and the triangulating state–capital–social movement politics of the new urbanisms. Drawing on recent discussions of Manuel Castells' (1983) The City and the Grassroots, we seek to expand the conception of urban activism not just by considering non‐Western cases in the newly democratizing states of Southeast Asia, but also by considering cities as co‐agents of activism. We see the recentering of Southeast Asian cities as referring to political actions that take the city not only as site and repository, but also reflexively as identity in itself to be fought with, for and over.     

Introduction: Towards a Political Understanding of New Ruins

This debate section gathers together contributions from cultural historians, political geographers, urban sociologists and architectural writers on new forms of ruination in contemporary landscapes. Their case studies span examples of ruins in China, North America, Ireland and Ukraine, as well as reviewing cultural representations of ruined, remote and peripheral spaces in England and Greece. Many wider cultural representations of ruined landscapes are primarily visual; whilst these have great value in alerting wider publics to the debris of global capitalism, neoliberalism and state‐sanctioned processes of cultural imperialism, what is needed within academic contributions to the ruinology literature is a deeper understanding and articulation of the wider contexts within which ruination occurs. Therefore, several contributions supplement visual representations of ruination with ethnographic and first‐person accounts of places on the ground, whereas other contributions offer readings of ruined landscapes that are rich in political histories and policy details. Connections are made to wider contemporary debates around ‘forensic architecture’ and critical archaeologies of the present and recent past. What connects these contributions is a commitment to situating ruins within their historical, policy and social contexts, and working through ruination to open out political readings of landscape.     

Re‐reading Castells: Indifference or Irrelevance Twenty Years On?

This essay considers the relevance of The City and the Grassroots to contemporary debates within critical urban analysis. It argues that the book addresses many of the same empirical topics as more recent scholarship, but that shifts in the kinds of questions asked about those topics may make the book seem less relevant to contemporary debates. In particular, Castells’ attempt to abstract from local experience to understand the process of political and social change in something specifically ‘urban’ may be at odds with the goals of contemporary research and of researchers outside Europe, many of whom attempt to provide a differentiated analysis attuned to context and the positionality of agents within social movements. So, while the book makes important contributions to theoretical and empirical arguments because of its deep and rich comparative analysis, intellectual debates and approaches over the past 20 years may have shifted focus.     

Career fields: a small step towards a grand career theory?

Little theory development has been done that accounts for the changes in the forms, actors and contexts of careers that we currently can see. Looking at careers from a ‘grand’ and unified theoretical perspective has a number of advantages. In particular, grand social theories allow the link between a well-elaborated and differentiated framework for social phenomena and for careers. Moreover, looking at careers from a unified perspective allows discussion of the great variety of aspects to careers in a single theoretical language. Based on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper focuses on social fields as one major element of an effort towards a more comprehensive theoretical framework for professional and managerial careers. In particular, it discusses the constituting characteristics of career fields as social fields and the application of this concept to work-related careers. Rather than adopting or adapting a specific theory in order to illuminate a specific national context, this paper, by using Bourdieu's concepts, proposes a framework to illuminate particular aspects sometimes not sufficiently stressed by recent – and more especially Anglo-Saxon – career research. Avoiding a choice between objective or subjective career and macro- or micro-perspective, it allows the strengthening or re-introduction of themes like multi-level analysis, simultaneous actionstructure view, combining ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ perspectives, power distribution, social hierarchy and thus social inequalities into career research.