INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH 90

DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12535

— INTERVENTIONS

— BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN: Pertinence,

Principles, Applications
loïc wacquant

Abstract
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.

Bourdieu comes to York, England

In May 2012, an international roster of researchers spanning sociology,
anthropology, political science, geography and urban design gathered at the University
of York at the invitation of Mike Savage and myself for a two-day workshop
co-sponsored by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research aimed at
assessing the prospects, profits and pitfalls of ‘Taking Bourdieu to Town’, that is,
bringing the distinctive concepts, methods and arguments of the author of Distinction

I would like to thank the participants to the York research seminar on ‘Taking Bourdieu to Town’: first among them
Mike Savage, who shouldered its organization and guided it to intellectual fruition; Simon Parker and Liza Weinstein
for corralling the papers for this special Interventions section, and the editors of IJURR for their boundless patience
and equanimity. I am indebted to Megan Comfort, Chris Herring, Franck Poupeau and David Showalter for their
deft comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

© 2018 urban research publications limited

 BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN 91

(Bourdieu, 1979) squarely to bear upon urban inquiry.1 The agenda of the meeting was
set out as follows:

At this century’s start, the city is again the privileged site of rapid techno­
economic innovation, resurging social inequality, entrenched marginality, and
festering cultural divisions. These assume new and acute forms and generate
innovative forms of protest that call for novel analytic approaches. The work
of Pierre Bourdieu is a major untapped theoretical and empirical resource for
probing them and, in the process, enriching urban sociology. This workshop
will bring together scholars who have used Bourdieu’s signal concepts
(habitus, capital, field, symbolic power, doxa) to dissect gyrations of practice,
structure and politics in the city. They will take stock of their findings, clarify
the implications of their work, and specify the merits and limits of Bourdieu’s
framework for urban analysis.

The idea for that meeting arose after I read Mike Savage’s provocative ‘The lost urban
sociology of Pierre Bourdieu’ (2011) while teaching my fall 2011 course on ‘Metropolis
Unbound: Whither Urban Sociology?’ at Berkeley. The persistent difficulty in identifying
the strands of Bourdieu most pertinent to research on and in the city, the continuing
confusion surrounding the origins and purpose of his theoretical constructs, together
with the slowly rising tide of publications (now turned into a tsunami) making rhetorical
invocations of his concepts without actually putting them to work,2 convinced me that
the moment was ripe for bringing Bourdieu expressly into urban studies.
This would entail three complementary moves: first, to retrieve his early and late
empirical concern for urbanization and the spatial dimension of domination, contrary to
the conventional story that Bourdieu had ‘minimized if not neglected’ the latter (Ripoll,
2013: 365); secondly, to explicate the place of the topological mode of reasoning and
the trialectic of symbolic, social and physical space at the heart of Bourdieu’s vision
of society and history (Wacquant, 2013); and thirdly, and most importantly, to gather
and showcase the significant body of urban research and theorizing already produced
by a new generation of scholars around the world who fruitfully employ Bourdieu’s
principles and propositions. 3 This quickly led to the idea of a working conference
designed to create momentum for this project, which Mike Savage enthusiastically and
generously organized at York the following spring just prior to his move to the London
School of Economics.
By all accounts, the event was energetic and energizing for the participants and
audience alike. The first day featured four extended sessions with researchers who

1 The workshop was held under the aegis of the Centre for Urban Research (CURB) and the York European Centre
for Cultural Exploration (YECCE), with YECCE providing most of the financial support. We wish to thank Josine
Opmeer and Jack Denham for their invaluable administrative support, and all the speakers and delegates who
made the conference such a stimulative event. We are grateful also to Simon Parker for his onsite contributions and
patient help afterwards in shepherding the papers through the review process, and the authors for agreeing to go
through multiple (and seemingly endless) rounds of revisions.
2 This was in sharp contrast to the inability of readers (including my own students) of my book Urban Outcasts (2008)
to discern the parameters of a Bourdieu-inspired investigation, because his conceptual idiolect is not expressly
flaunted in it. In a half-dozen symposia, not a single critic of the book discerned its theoretical inspiration and
implications for rethinking the nexus of symbolic power and physical space in the city. This led me to write a
reflexive postscript specifying how Urban Outcasts implements five analytic principles propounded by Bourdieu
(Wacquant, 2015).
3 This generation builds on the exemplary works of predecessors who deserve flagging at the outset. Along with the
pioneering books of Monique and Michel Pinçon (1989; 1992; 2010) from the 1990s onward, mapping Bourdieu’s
analysis of class, power and culture onto the upscale districts of greater Paris (about which more below), two
monographs boldly extend both the theoretical model and the original methodology of Distinction to encompass
the spatial makeup of the city: Virgílio Pereira’s (2005) exploration of the connections between class, neighborhood
and sociability in Porto and Lennart Rosenlund’s (2009) study of the postindustrial transformation of the Norwegian
harbor of Stavanger. The activities of the Leverhulme Network on Advanced Urban Marginality (2008–2012) also
took Bourdieu’s theories into territories of relegation on four continents (see Wacquant et al., 2014).
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have deployed Bourdieu on the metropolitan front, devoted to territorial seclusion

and the spatialization of inequality; urban migration, ethnicity and precarity; public
policy and the remaking of city space; and symbolic domination, cultural capital and
the urban middle classes. The second day featured intense discussion around shorter
papers by junior scholars (including doctoral students) from places as far-flung as Oslo,
Los Angeles, Bristol, Winnipeg, Amsterdam and Paris, on such topics as power and
privilege in the city, deprivation and disorder in public housing estates, methods for
probing community and cultural divisions, and metropolitan policy. This first part of the
Interventions debate draws on a selection of the papers presented at York along with
additional essays recruited especially for it (from colleagues who were invited to the
British gig but could not attend owing to scheduling conflicts).
One of the major virtues of Bourdieu’s framework is its ability to range along
levels of abstraction and to travel smoothly across analytic scales to link large structures
of power (a country, state or metropolis) and the meso level of institutions (such as fields
of cultural production, science, journalism and politics) to the minutiae of everyday
interaction and the phenomenological texture of subjectivity encapsulated by the
term of practice. A second attractive feature of Bourdieu’s sociology is its abiding
commitment to treat material and symbolic determinants not as final causes, but as
meshing moments in an analysis that endlessly rotates between these two constituents
of social life and as resources that may be mobilized as well as converted in social
strategies. A third is its enticing practice of methodological polytheism that frontally
challenges the conventional opposition between established techniques of inquiry,
exemplified nowadays by the yawning chasm and mutual ignorance of quantitative
studies of ‘global urbanism’ and qualitative investigations of urban sociability and
culture at ground level.4
The contributions gathered here collectively exemplify these qualities. The first
batch of six papers published in this issue takes a macroscopic view from above, relying
on quantitative analysis (surveys and multiple correspondence analysis, the statistical
technique favored and fostered by Bourdieu––cf. Lebaron and le Roux, 2015) and the
tracking of strategies of key protagonists in and about the field of power to illumine
the production and reproduction of urban inequality and change at the structural
level through the fashioning of categories of spatial perception, distinctively urban
forms of cultural capital, and class strategies of control over place and home. A second
batch of essays to follow will migrate down the class and urban structure to offer a
complementary microscopic view from below, relying on ethnographic observation
and in-depth interviews to take the reader deep into the cognitive, emotional, aesthetic,
religious, criminal and political fabric of ordinary existence in La Paz, Istanbul, Buenos
Aires, the housing estates of the Parisian periphery, an Argentine shanty town, small-
town Denmark, and a violent corner of inner-city Philadelphia.

Bourdieu’s urban pertinence: a brief youthful excursus

This is not the place to scour the voluminous writings of Bourdieu (some 37
books and circa 400 articles) to extract a comprehensive recapitulation of his direct or
indirect investigations of urban forms and forces over the four decades of his prolific
scientific life. But to establish the baseline pertinence of the French sociologist to the
classical and contemporary agendas of urban researchers, it is instructive to focus on a
little known cluster of linked studies that tackle urbanization obliquely, namely, his early

4 These three features are best showcased in La Noblesse d’État (Bourdieu, 1989), which combines ethnographic
observation and interviews, prosopography and archival data, and quantitative analyses to track the mutual
conversion of social structures and mental structures at multiple scales, from the ordinary experiences and
academic strategies of students at elite schools to the structural correspondence between the economic field and
the field of power to the historical invention of the bureaucratic state associated with the rise of cultural capital.
 BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN 93

writings on social upheaval, cultural rupture and subject formation in colonial Algeria
and provincial France.5
In a string of lengthy articles and three books (solo and co-authored with his
Kabyle student and field assistant Abdelmalek Sayad and with a group of mathematicians
from the French office of statistics based in Algiers), published between 1958 and 1964,
the young Bourdieu dissects the contradictions and conflicts ravaging the colonial
society of Algeria, where he had been sent to fulfill his military service, and the crisis
of the peasant society of Béarn, a remote rural region of the Pyrénées mountain range
where he had grown up before moving to Paris to take up his postsecondary schooling.6
On both sites, urbanization is the key vector and expression of social transformation,
and the city, town or camp the site anchoring and materalizing the forces dissolving
the social fabric of the French countryside, on the one side, and overturning French
imperialism in North Africa, on the other.
Based on a study of marriage patterns in his childhood village combining social
history, statistics and ethnography, Bourdieu shows how economic and social standing
influences the rising rates of bachelorhood in a peasant society based on primogeniture
through the mediation of the embodied consciousness that men acquire of this standing.
The scene of a Saturday ball at the margins of which local bachelors gather without
dancing serves to dissect the cultural collision between country and city and the resulting
devaluation of the men from the hamlet as urban categories of judgment penetrate the
rural world:

This small country ball is the scene of real clash of civilizations. Through it,
the whole world of the city, with its cultural models, its music, its dances, its
techniques of the body, bursts into peasant life. The traditional patterns of
festive behavior have been lost or have been superseded by urban patterns.
In this realm as in others, the lead belongs to the people of the town (bourg)
(Bourdieu, [1962] 2002: 582).

Because their upbringing and position in the gender division of labor led them
to be sensitive to ‘tenue’ (clothing, bearing, conduct) as well as open to the ideals
of the town, which for them represents emancipation, young women assimilate the
cultural patterns issued from the city quicker than the men; this dooms the latter
to be measured by yardsticks that make them worthless in the eyes of potential
marriage partners. As the peasant internalizes the devalued image that others form
of him through the prism of urban categories, he comes to perceive his own body as
‘em-peasanted’, burdened by the traces of the activities and attitudes associated with
agricultural life. The wretched consciousness that he gains of his body leads him to
adopt an introverted attitude that amplifies the shyness and gaucheness produced by
social relations marked by extreme segregation between the sexes and repression of
the sharing of emotions. The falling rates of unions that ensue derail the system of
strategies of social reproduction and consign the peasant society to ‘a mortal crisis’
(Bourdieu, [1962] 2002: 126).

5 Bourdieu’s cross-Mediterranean, mixed-method exploration of the death of village society in imperial Kabylia and
his home region of Béarn is the empirical and emotional matrix spawning his epicentral concern for the dialectic
of social and mental structures, his discovery of the specificity of practical logics, and his pragmatic conception of
epistemic reflexivity. It also refutes the academic myth of Bourdieu ‘the reproduction theorist’ by revealing him to
be a shrewd analyst of historical transformation, cultural disjuncture and the fissuring of consciousness (Wacquant,
2004), three properties that are quintessentially urban.
6 These publications are the fluvial 1962 article on ‘Bachelorhood and the peasant condition’, later incorporated
into The Ball of Bachelors (Bourdieu, 2002); the 1958 monograph Sociologie de l’Algérie (with a revamped English
translation appearing in 1962 as The Algerians); the paired studies Le déracinement: la crise de l’agriculture
traditionnelle en Algérie (Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964) and Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Bourdieu et al., 1963),
and a string of articles posthumously collected as Esquisses algériennes (Bourdieu, 2008). To locate and link these
investigations, see the special issue of Ethnography from December 2005 on ‘Pierre Bourdieu in the field’.
 WACQUANT94

In this study, the city emerges as the invisible locus of the school, the mass
media and commercial occupations, that is, institutions whose magnetic attraction and
distant stimuli foster the ‘opening’ of the local social and symbolic space. As a result,
‘the opposition between the urbanite of the town and the peasant of the hamlets’ comes
to supplant the opposition between the eldest son and his younger brothers, between
laborers and servants, and between large and small land-owning families (ibid.: 67, 75)
and it gradually stamps all social ties and cultural hierarchies.7 Bourdieu maps the
changing geographic distribution of people, occupations and activities over a half
century, as well as the spatial organization of the home, to reveal how ‘the opposition
between the peasant and the urbanite arises at the very heart of the village community’
(ibid.: 97) and undermines it from within. He tracks the intensity and directionality of
matrimonial flows between the hamlets and the town by geographic distance between
partners and finds that the proportion of ‘outside marriages’ increases over time as
residents of the town turn away from the hamlets to seek partners in other towns and
cities. It follows that ‘social distance imposes much more stringent limitations than
spatial distance. The circuits of matrimonial exchanges become detached from their
geographic base to become organized around new social units defined by the sharing
of definite conditions of existence and a definite lifestyle’ (Bourdieu, ibid.: 85). In other
words, urban forces cause social space to become autonomized from physical space
through the diffusion of mental constructs spawned by the city––what the mature
Bourdieu ([1992] 2002: 229) will later call ‘the unification of the market in symbolic
goods’. What is more, their effects extend far beyond city limits, which urban sociology
naively takes as the boundary of its empirical domain.
Across the Mediterranean, we find the young Bourdieu probing the two sides
of the cataclysmic makeover of the French colony of Algeria caught in the throes of a
bloody war of independence (1954–1962) that pivoted on the violent control of both
rural and urban spaces. In Le Déracinement (The uprooting) (Bourdieu and Sayad,
1964; see also chapter 6 of Bourdieu, 1958), the French philosopher-turned-sociologist
pairs survey and ethnography to chart the destruction of the native peasantry and its
domestic mode of production based on kinship and honor, through land spoliation,
the commodification of crops fostered by the development of urban markets, and the
forced displacement and resettlement of millions of fellahin (peasants).8 The massive
population transfer imposed by the French military in a desperate bid to undercut
support for the nationalist uprising spawned two distinctive urban constellations:
military-controlled camps and shanty towns mushrooming in and around the colony’s
main cities. Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Work and workers in Algeria) (Bourdieu
et al., 1963) picks up the story on the urban side to document the arrested formation
of the working class massed in the sprawling popular districts and housing estates
of Algiers. It delves deeply into the dialectic of ‘economic structures and temporal
structures’ to track how the former peasants come to acquire (or not) the mental
schemata required for participating in the capitalist economy and for navigating the
disconcerting social scene of the city, including the ‘spirit of calculation’ fostering the
‘rationalization of conduct’ characteristic of modern urbanity.
From these twin studies we learn that the control and marking of space and set-
tlements are epicentral to both the imposition of colonial power and indigenous resis-
tance (involving both Berbers versus Arabs and Algerians versus French), and that the
appropriation of housing in the city is pivotal to the restructuring of the material and

7 The socio-symbolic asymmetry between city and countryside is captured in this pithy observation: ‘While a native
of the hamlet would never, in ordinary circumstances, dream of going to a ball in a nearby town, the urbanites come
often in groups to the countryside balls, where their urban allure gives them a considerable advantage over the
peasants’ (Bourdieu, [1962] 2002: 84).
8 By 1960, some 2.1 million Algerians had been forcibly relocated to militarized camps, while migrants to the cities
numbered another million. Together they amounted to half of the total population of rural origin, making this
‘population displacement one of the most brutal known to history’ (Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964: 13).
 BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN 95

moral economy of the household. Indeed, labor market position and differential access
to housing jointly feed the divergence between a stable working class supporting the
nationalist revolution and a floating subproletariat drawn to millenarism (Bourdieu,
1977). But, surprisingly, it is the meticulous sociography of the making, structure and
functioning of the camps for displaced peasants that offers the clearest blueprint of
Bourdieu’s urban sociology. For the camp is at once a proto-urban and an anti-urban
formation: on the one side, it devalues the customary ways of being, thinking and feeling
of the relocated rural populations and operates as an acclimation chamber to the cultural
models and social relations of the city; on the other side, it thwarts urbanization as it
deprives its occupants of the resources, including the space and time needed, to adapt
to their suspended condition, while scrambling principles of social vision and division.
As an artificial socio-spatial formation born of coercion, the camp offers an accelerated
and extreme social experiment in what Bourdieu christens ‘real and fictive urbanization’.
The chapter of Le Déracinement entitled ‘Urbanites without cities’ is worth
recapping here as it unspools the ‘interdependence that unites the structure of the
organization of space, the structure of social groups, and the type of sociability’ (Bourdieu
and Sayad, 1964: 118). Sudden agglomeration via forced relocation triggers a ‘brutal and
total transformation’ of ‘all levels of social reality’. The increased volume, density and
heterogeneity of settlements––Louis Wirth’s classic 1938 definition of ‘urbanism as a
way of life’––determines a closing of the social distance between established groups
(tribes and lineages) and a swift shift in social organization from the clan to the nuclear
household. The new self-standing housing units for individual families ‘accentuate and
accelerate the weakening of kinship ties’ and foster ‘the emergence of solidarities based
on neighboring and, above all, on the similarity of conditions of existence’ (Bourdieu
and Sayad, 1964: 119, 121). Residence in the compact compound effectively ‘breaks up
the group’ by dispersing its member and increases ‘cultural contagion’ by fueling ‘the
confrontation of differences’ and ‘enlarging one’s awareness and knowledge of the world’
(ibid.: 123). By creating ‘a social field of the urban type’ (ibid.: 132) wherein anonymity
replaces mutual familiarity, the camp fosters the emergence of a new type of sociability,
symbolized by the coffee house and the spread of the veil among women in response
to the disruptive overlap of masculine and feminine spaces. Solidarity ‘inspired by
customary imperatives’ and ‘the sentiment of brotherhood’ is replaced by ‘the solidarity
of misery imposed by promiscuity’ (ibid.: 136–37).
In the ‘quasi-urban situation’ of the camp, the dominant models of behavior and
consumption are those of the city––the camp is called blad, the Berber word for city.
These models ‘devalue peasant virtues, henceforth useless and misplaced’, undermine
age as basis for authority and ‘effect a reversal of traditional hierarchies’ (ibid.: 141) to
the benefit of those lineages most familiar with urban activities, occupations and norms.
Moreover:

the rupture with the old environment and with the routines that used to be
associated with it, the widening of the field of social relations, the very structure of
inhabited space, whether the settlement or the home, incite urban behaviors and
elicit concerns, interests, and aspirations which are those of the urbanite (ibid.: 142).

This is attested, for instance, by the rapid change in consumption profiles

(attendance of coffee houses, medical expenses and tobacco smoking all rise
spectacularly), dress (traditional hairdos are forsaken, the necktie is adopted and the
veil makes its appearance) and the acquisition of a plethora of new domestic objects
(metal beds, cupboards, tin cans and plates, etc.).9 In the camp, income and wealth are

9 The fine-grained statistically based analysis of changing food budgets and habits by location and occupation
(Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964: 144–49) is a remarkable prefiguration of the chapter of La Distinction on class taste
and eating profiles (Bourdieu, 1979).
 WACQUANT96

no longer devoted to upholding kinship relations and collective peasant values. On

the contrary, ‘the newly rich of today, whose wealth rarely comes from the land, strive
to imitate urban dwellers and to mark by every possible means their distance from
peasants’ (ibid.: 143). Strategic individualism and cultural anomie grow in concert:

Due to the scattering of social units, the slackening of traditional social ties, and
the weakening control of opinion, transgression of the rule tends to become the
rule; nothing stands in the way of the individualism introduced by the modern
economy. Inside the resettlement as enormous and disparate aggregates of
isolated individuals, each feels protected by his or her anonymity; everyone
feels responsible of themselves but only of themselves and for themselves
(ibid.: 149–50).

Forced proto-urbanization also triggers a transformation of the emotional

profile of daily life: ‘collective melancholia’ sets in, which ‘betrays despair and anxiety’.
Revealingly, the residents of the Kerkera camp use three idioms to express their sense
of being trapped in an untoward space: those of the prison, nakedness and the obscurity
of nighttime (reminiscent of the language of inmates in Nazi concentration camps).10
For everything in the organization of their built environment, from ‘the functional
uniformity of standardized housing units’, to the internal layout of the houses (devoid
of courtyards, fences and openings), the regimented location of shops and fountains, to
the breadth and orientation of the streets, ‘disappoints and contradicts expectations’
brought from the countryside (ibid.: 152). This is most detectable in the ‘body language’
and patterns of circulation of the camp dwellers: instead of taking the quickest route
between two points, the men make detours and walk furtively along the walls, while
the women stay locked inside because they no longer enjoy the protection of exclusive
feminine spaces.
Finally, ‘by overturning the organization of the lifespace, site of technical and
ritual action, the resettlement alters the temporal rhythms associated with it’ and
indeed ‘impacts the whole experience of temporality’ (ibid.: 156). In the camp, the
fellahin and their kin discover the capitalist conception of labor and with it the notion
of time as a scarce commodity, liable to be saved, spent or wasted. They are submitted to
new tempos set by curfews, the opening and closing hours of the schools, bureaucratic
offices, the clinic and the fountain, and by the increased duration of travel. Time is
now carved and stamped, not by traditional activities such as the five prayers of the
day that synchronize everyone, but by the periodic bells and regular telephone rings
of the control tower. On all fronts, the same social and symbolic oppositions between
the peasant and the urbanite as Bourdieu detected in Béarn crystallizes in the camp to
hasten the dissolution of the village society of Kabylia.
This compact recapitulation of Bourdieu’s youthful cross-Mediterranean
investigations of contradiction and change in provincial Béarn and colonial Algeria
demonstrates the direct pertinence of his work to core urban sociology. These works
not only tackle the nexus of power, space and urbanization in two societies, if from the
countryside. They 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. Indeed, these early studies suggest that state power (colonial in
Algeria, central in France) is wielded through the control and penetration of space,

10 The subjective disorientation of camp dwellers springs from the disjunction between their acquired dispositions
and the space in which they are forced to evolve: ‘Because his whole corporeal habitus is “made” by and for the
space of his customary movements, the uprooted peasant is struck in his innermost being, so deeply that he cannot
articulate his disarray and still less define its reason’ (Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964: 152).
 BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN 97

the organization of settlements (via complementary processes of concentration and

dispersal), the geographic distribution of symbolic authorities and the regulation of
physical mobility, according to the rudimentary formula:

power 
physical space 
social structure and relations 
practice and subjectivity

(including the makeup of the self, aspirations, emotions and sense of time). 11
Furthermore, they portray the city as a distinctive social milieu, characterized by
accelerating social and functional differentiation, the disembedding of symbolism
from ordinary relations fostering cultural elaboration and innovation, the spread of
anonymity and individuality, the increased internal heterogeneity and dispersion of
habitus, and the routine dealignment of positions and dispositions. In nuce, Bourdieu’s
youthful studies of Béarn and Algeria constitute his true ‘lost urban sociology’ and
the richest trove of observations and hypotheses he has offered to students of social
structure and experience in the city.
Another virtue of these overlooked publications from the early 1960s is that they
divulge the forgotten foundation for the general problematic of the mutual projection-
conversion of symbolic space, social space and physical space through struggles over the
appropriation and marking of the built environment that Bourdieu would articulate in
his work on social suffering in the metropolis three decades later. In 1990, Bourdieu
received funding from France’s Caisse des Dépots et Consignations (the state financial
institution entrusted with fostering economic development and the building of low-
income housing) to produce a sociological diagnostic of the deepening malaise of the
country’s urban periphery, which had risen to the rank of paramount national problem
in the wake of recurrent street riots (Jazouli, 1992). To articulate the parameters of
the team field study that would eventually grow into the collective book The Weight
of the World (Bourdieu et al., 1993b), Bourdieu agreed to join William Julius Wilson in
co-chairing an international conference on ‘Poverty, Immigration and Urban Marginality
in Advanced Societies’ held at the Maison Suger in Paris in May 1991.12 On that occasion,
he presented a paper that opens and frames the present Interventions section, ‘Bourdieu
Comes to Town’, entitled ‘Social space and the genesis of appropriated physical space’
(Bourdieu, [1991] 2018, this issue). In this piece, a portion of which would later grow
to become the chapter of The Weight of the World devoted to ‘Site effects’ (Bourdieu,
1993a), the French sociologist warns against the fetishization of space and formulates
at an abstract level the relations between social space and physical space that were
concretely manifested in the Béarn and Algerian studies. But how to implement this
analytic agenda? To answer this question we must turn to the principles of research
practice Bourdieu invites students of the city to adopt.

Transversal principles for putting Bourdieu to work

There are many ways to ‘slice and dice’ Bourdieu for use in any domain of inquiry,
and there already exist several standardized introductions and routinized overviews of
his main writings intended for students of space and the city (see, for example, Painter,

11 That the causal chain is initiated by power is clear from the outset in The Uprooting: ‘Algeria was the experimental
site upon which the military mind imprinted its structures, as in a projective test’ (Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964: 26–27),
‘the disciplining of space’ serving as vehicle for ‘the disciplining of the population’. In his recapitulation of settler
penetration, Bourdieu (1958: 106) stresses that colonization rides on ‘disruptions deliberately and methodically
produced to ensure control by the dominant power’ and he singles out the capture of land as the ‘instrument for
the disintegration of the fundamental structures of the [native] economy and society’.
12 I organized this two-day working conference funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Maison des Sciences
de l’Homme. Aside from my two mentors, Bourdieu and Wilson, the participants, coming from five countries,
included Philippe Bourgois, Godfried Engbersen, Enzo Mingione, Alejandro Portes, Paul Osterman, Saskia
Sassen, Roger Waldinger, Margaret Weir and several members of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, including
Abdelmalek Sayad. During this period, Bourdieu grew quite involved with the agencies administering France’s new
‘city policy’. In 1993, when the Collège de France received a small castle located in the outer ring of Paris by way of
charitable donation, he seriously envisaged the creation there of a Center for Research on the City.
 WACQUANT98

2000; Cresswell, 2002; Webster, 2010; Fogle, 2011; Lippuner, 2012).13 I provided elsewhere
a detailed discussion of how to deploy and distribute habitus, social space, bureaucratic
field and symbolic power in a comparative investigation of the triadic nexus of ‘Marginality,
ethnicity and penality in the neoliberal city’ (Wacquant, 2014); I sketched a cartography
of the analytic division of labor between these concepts and indicated how they can serve
to forge new ones. Here I want to shine a spotlight on four transversal principles that
undergird and animate Bourdieu’s research practice; these principles are liable to escape
the notice of the rushed reader, but they can more fruitfully guide urban inquiry than
the exegesis of this or that writing. For purposes of mnemotechnic compression, I attach
them to five authors who form central pillars of Bourdieu’s thought: Bachelard, Weber,
Leibniz and Durkheim, and Cassirer.14 I also flag three correlative traps that Bourdieusian
explorers of the city should exercise special care to avoid: the fetishization of concepts
(which stops inquiry where it should start), the seductions of ‘speaking Bourdieuse’
because it is the academic langue du jour, and the forced imposition of his theoretical
framework en bloc when it is more productively used as a kit through transposition.
1––The Bachelard moment: break with common sense (which comes in
three varieties: ordinary, policy and scholarly) to question accepted categories of
analysis, deconstruct prefabricated problematics, and forge robust analytic concepts,
designed by and for empirical analysis, that encompass but depart sharply from folk
notions (Wacquant, 2002). This is a straightforward application of the imperative of
epistemological rupture and vigilance, the foremost teaching of ‘historical epistemology’,
the philosophy of science developed by Bourdieu’s mentors Gaston Bachelard and
Georges Canguilhem, which Bourdieu transplanted from the natural and life sciences
to the social sciences (Bourdieu et al., 1968; Bourdieu, 2001; see Rheinberger, 2010, for a
compact profile of this current). This is a moment of inquiry too often ignored or skipped
as a matter of course: vast sectors of urban research accept the terminology, queries and
worries propounded by city managers, policymakers, journalists or academic fashion
when they should instead detect and neutralize the historical unconscious and social
biases embedded in them by including these in their object of analysis. As Bachelard
([1938] 1999: 26) warns: ‘The scientific mind forbids us to have an opinion on questions
that we do not understand, on questions that we do not know how to formulate clearly.
Above all, one must know how to pose problems’.
2––The Weber moment: effect the triple historicization of the agent (with the
concept of habitus), the world (via the notion of social space, of which field is but a
subtype) and the categories and methods of the analyst (epistemic reflexivity). This
principle expresses Bourdieu’s radically historicist and agonistic vision of social action,
structure and knowledge, which is most germane in spirit and method to the work of
Max Weber––even as the latter was wedded to an analytic individualism thoroughly
alien to Bourdieu’s relationalism (Bourdieu, [2000] 2011). For both authors, domination
pervades social life but takes a multiplicity of forms that are irreducible to some
economic basis and always entail the intercession of a symbolic authority framing the
relation at hand, which leads Weber (1958) to focus on legitimacy and Bourdieu on
the social production of doxa.15 Accordingly, one should grasp urban constellations,

13 These pedagogical capsules of his main theories (always limited to a few major translated publications in the author’s
own language) typically overlook the majority of Bourdieu’s corpus, suffer from predictable disciplinary biases and
blinders, and scarcely indicate how to translate these theories into practical research designs and operations.
14 That these are not the ‘usual suspects’ mentioned in standard presentations of Bourdieu is indicative of the
yawning gap between the actual inspiration and inner makeup of his work and its academic image, formed by the
accumulated layers of decades of truncated or mystified readings.
15 This is why Weber and not Marx is Bourdieu’s anchor here (despite the latter’s historical and relational approach):
like the author of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Bourdieu rejects economic determinism, the search for foundations,
and the neo-Hegelian notion that history is endowed with a directional logic. He stands squarely in the neo-Kantian
lineage that construes philosophy as duty-bound to start and end with ‘the fact of science’ (Bachelard) and engages
a genetic conception of knowledge as a perpetually unfinished synthetic process (this anti-metaphysical view of
Kant was enshrined by the Marburg School, where Cassirer was trained on the advice of Georg Simmel and which
influenced Weber through the works of Windelband and Rickert, leaders of the rival school of Baden neo-Kantianism).
 BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN 99

categories and practices as the products, weapons and stakes of struggles waged over
multiple temporalities, ranging from the longue durée of secular macro-structures to
the mid-level tempos of political cycles and institutional gyrations to the short-term
phenomenological horizon of persons at ground level. This commandment belies the
stale academic tale of Bourdieu ‘the reproduction theorist’ that continues to be spun
even by urban scholars sympathetic to his approach (for example, Harding and Blokland,
2014: 129–30), but it accurately captures both his explicit instructions and his extant
scientific practice (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Wacquant, 2017).
3––The Leibnizian-Durkheimian moment: deploy the topological mode of
reasoning to track the mutual correspondences, transpositions and distortions between
symbolic space (the grid of mental classifications that guide persons in their cognitive
and conative construction of the world), social space (the fluctuating distribution of
socially effective assets or capitals) and physical space (the built environment resulting
from rival efforts to appropriate material and ideal goods in and through space). This
way of thinking is indispensable because ‘social space tends to retranslate itself, in more
or less deformed fashion, in the guise of a definite arrangement of agents and properties.
It follows that all the divisions and distinctions of social space (high/low, left/right, etc.)
are really and symbolically expressed in appropriated physical space as reified social
space’ (Bourdieu, 1997: 162). This principle stands at the confluence of the geometric
component of Bourdieu’s thought, grounded in his early avid reading of Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (whose analysis situs, developed in reaction to Pascal’s perspective
geometry, exemplifies the monist rationalism Bourdieu wishes to extend) 16 and its
morphological strand, derived from Durkheim and Mauss’s (1901) bold formulation of
the correspondence between the physical substratum and layout of social groups and
the ‘forms of classification’ through which they view themselves and the world.
4––The Cassirer moment: recognize the constitutive efficacy of symbolic structures
and anatomize their twofold imprinting onto the subjective complexes of dispositions
(categories, skills and desires) that make up the habitus on the one hand, and onto
the objective mesh of positions (distributions of efficient resources) that compose
institutions, on the other. Ernst Cassirer’s (1944) genetic ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’
is the main inspiration for Bourdieu’s potent concept of symbolic power that stands
at the epicenter and apex of his work––and yet is often overlooked by conventional
readings and uses of Bourdieu ossified in the incomplete and redundant tryptich of
‘habitus, capital and field’ (Wacquant, 2017). Because the human animal encounters the
physical universe not as brute reality but through the medium of symbols (materialized,
in Cassirer taxonomy, as language, myth, religion, art and science), the most objectivist
science of the city must of necessity make room for the rival classificatory schemata
through which agents give pattern and meaning to the world. And because the social
world can always be experienced and constructed through a plurality of points of view,
these competing symbolic systems constitute many weapons in the ‘struggle to produce
and impose the dominant vision of the world’ (Bourdieu, [1982] 1991: 159). Applied to
urban space, this principle implies paying attention not only to the phenomenology
of urban life as lived reality situated in specific sites but also to the words through
which people, objects, activities and places in the city are named because consequential
categorization is an especially powerful vector of conservation or transformation
of reality, given the concentration of symbolic authorities (religious, political, legal,
journalistic, artistic, academic and scientific) in the metropolis.17

16 Weik (2010) is right to point out the similarities and affinities between Leibniz and Bourdieu: the creative force that
constitutes the world is god for the former and history itself for the latter. But he focuses mostly on habitus when the
stronger linkage between the two thinkers is their shared relational philosophy of space (see de Risi, 2007, on Leibniz’s
view). It bears noting here that Cassirer’s first book (1902) was a dissection of the thought of Leibniz in its scientific context.
17 The material stamping of urban reality through its symbolic casting assumes a paradigmatic and paroxystic form
with territorial stigmatization, whose sites and circuits of production, diffusion and consumption permeate the city
even as it fastens on districts of socio-moral perdition at the edges and bottom of urban space (Wacquant, 2018)
 WACQUANT100

Taken together, these principles inform a scientific outlook on the city sharply
divergent from those fostered by positivism, realism and hermeneutics, the alternative
epistemologies that reign across social science. This stance commands investigations
centered on the wide-awake and active ‘construction of the object’ that eschews both
empty formalism and blind empiricism to enter into the specificities of historical cases
with the benefit of a generalizing analytic (Bourdieu, 2001). Along with these principles
one can distill from Bourdieu’s scientific practice three general warnings that will
benefit students of the city wishing to appropriate his work, whether in letter or in spirit.
First, avoid the fetishization of concepts: Bourdieu is frequently misread as a ‘theorist’
when he was a dogged detractor of ‘conspicuous theorizing’. He construed theory not
as the haughty master but as the humble servant of empirical inquiry, and he never
advanced the one but through developing the other (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:
29–35, and passim). The corrective to this common scholastic distortion, exemplified
by many articles recently published in Progress in Human Geography, is to background
the textual definition of concepts and to pay close attention to how Bourdieu converts
them into concrete research operations to forge his empirical objects.
Secondly, and relatedly, beware of the rhetorical trap: countless authors paint
their inquiries in the color of Bourdieu when in reality the latter’s notions play no
role in their analysis. The words are there, but the concepts are not. Proof is that
their findings and arguments are no different than if they had been derived from any
number of alternative approaches (which they generally were). The concept of field is
perhaps the most abused in this manner, as when it is invoked as a bland synonym for
domain or arena, displaying none of the highly distinctive properties that characterize
a field according to Bourdieu (differentiation, autonomy, monopolization, chiasmatic
organization, prismatic effects, etc.). By ‘speaking Bourdieuse’ out of turn, these authors
not only confuse rhetorics for analytics; they also occlude the theoretical and empirical
profits that an effective deployment of Bourdieu’s tools would deliver. Such sterile
soundings easily degenerate into nonsensical wordplay, as illustrated by the comical
multiplication of urban-inflected habitus in recent scholarship: the ‘metropolitan
habitus’, the ‘suburban habitus’, the ‘gentrification habitus’, the ‘dot.com habitus’, not
to mention the absurdist ‘mini-habitus’ (perhaps paving the way for the imminent
anointment of the nano-habitus), all of which indicate that their inventors do not
understand the basic meaning and makeup of the concept of habitus (Wacquant, 2016).18
Thirdly, it is not only possible but generally desirable to decouple Bourdieu’s
concepts from one another to ensure that there is a real payoff to their individual usage
before they are eventually recombined as needed to frame and resolve the empirical
puzzle at hand. The theological reading of the Bourdieusian scriptures stipulating
that one implement his core notions omni et simul is in direct contradiction with the
pragmatics of any research project and clashes with the way Bourdieu himself employed
them. For instance, the French sociologist mines habitus and symbolic power without
any mention of field throughout his Algerian work (Bourdieu, 1972; 1977; 1980; 2008),
for the simple reason that no field exists in the agrarian communities of the Kabyle
countryside. This cautious strategy is especially apposite for those investigators who
are still groping to get beyond an elemental grasp of Bourdieu’s way of thinking: it is
better to apply one concept well within its proper analytic purview than to invoke five
at cross-purposes or for mere declamatory effect.
For illustration, Nathan Marom’s (2014) recapitulation of ‘One hundred years
of spatial distinction in Tel Aviv’ offers a case model of an economical, efficient and

18 It is constitutive of the metropolis that it contains a diversity of populations and categories, a wide span of social
conditions, and a plurality of bounded social microcosms, each fostering rival schemata of perception and
appreciation. It follows logically that it spawns a great diversity of competing sets of dispositions (corresponding to
broad classes of positions and trajectories), and not a singular unified habitus characteristic of the city as such. Talk
of a ‘metropolitan (suburban, etc.) habitus’ is sonorous but empty Bourdieubabble.
 BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN 101

fruitful use of Bourdieu that validates these three recommendations. To make sense
of the trajectory of socio-spatial oppositions over the full lifecourse of this disputed
city, Marom focuses on a single operation, ‘the translation of social space into physical
space’. He draws elegantly on two concepts only––social space and symbolic power
(a duo that happens to be the pivot of Bourdieu’s thought); he engages them to break
with the naturalizing problematic of segregation inherited from urban ecology as well
as to overcome the blindness of political economic approaches to the performative
potency of symbolic classifications and classification struggles. Bourdieu goads Marom
to formulate a new question, to historicize its terms, to dig up data enabling him to
document novel empirical facets of the phenomenon and, ultimately, to produce an
original interpretation of the changing principles of spatial vision and division of
Tel Aviv across multiple scales that other theoretical perspectives could not have
spawned. His article further confirms that, while every one of the seven major
concepts organizing Bourdieu’s work (habitus, capital, social space, field, symbolic
power, doxa and epistemic reflexivity) can be fruitfully mobilized by investigators of
urban constellations, the most potent and generative of the lot is indisputably social
space. Not only because it is anchored by a geographic metaphor but because it is the
‘mother-category’ from which flow the more restricted concepts of field, corps (body)
and apparatus, as specific types of settings in which social action takes root and flows
(Wacquant, 2018) and because it is a ‘natural fit’ for the city as a milieu fostering the
incubation, differentiation, proliferation and accumulation of competing forms of
capital.19

Applications: myriad paths into the Bourdieusian city

Having established the pertinence of Bourdieu for urban scholarship and having
clarified the principles that propel his work, we now come to concrete applications.
Urban scholars have consistently overlooked districts of wealth, power and privilege
for the simple reason that they pose few ‘social problems’ to city managers and because
sociologists have long harbored a romantic infatuation for subordinate social categories
and territories.20 No one has done more to plug that gap than ‘the Pinçons’ (as they
are known to their French colleagues as well as to the wider public which devours
their best-selling books) across two decades devoted to probing the mechanisms of
production and perpetuation of urban inequality at the top (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot,
1989; 1992; 1996; 2010).
Their essay on ‘Social power and power over space’ (Pinçon-Charlot and Pinçon,
2018, this issue) synthesizes several of their books to ground the supremacy of France’s
higher bourgeoisie (and remaining aristocracy) in its control of space and its capacity to
shape place. By extending Bourdieu’s (1979) model of social space, class formation and
cultural practice in Distinction to encompass physical space, they reveal that the elective
seclusion of the dominant class in reserved upscale quarters is a decisive basis for its
power. This segregative isolation is strengthened by group-specific institutions, such as

19 Indeed, social space is the one category that most decisively sets Bourdieu apart from and fills a gaping void at the
center of all extant strands of urban theory: Chicago-style ecology and ethnography, political economy, postcolonial
urbanism, assemblage theory, planetary urbanism and the urban land nexus approach (Storper and Scott, 2016).
20 This topical myopia fed by populist exoticism is exemplified by the elephantesque Urban Ethnography Reader
recently published by Oxford University Press (Duneier et al., 2014): its nearly 900 pages contain not a single
analysis of upper-class spaces, institutions and practices. The terms ‘city hall’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ appear not once in
the book; ‘upper class’ is mentioned incidentally less than a half dozen times; 39 of 52 chapters focus squarely on
subordinate classes and ethnicities in dispossessed districts; and an astounding 27 chapters, over half of the entire
volume, are devoted to poor blacks in the American ‘inner city’. The metropolis emerging through this lens is one
teeming with derelicts, deviants and problematic black men (and even pigeon feeders), but curiously devoid of
corporations, professions, politicians, prosecutors, patrician dynasties, realtors, bureaucrats, bishops, journalists
and scientists. As is typical of the genre, this massive compendium also contains a single solitary chapter and
author located outside the United States and only two anthropologists, in blissful ignorance of the rich traditions of
urban fieldwork developed in foreign countries and by other disciplines.
 WACQUANT102

society balls and social clubs that work alongside exclusive schools to effect rigid class
closure. But in this case the spatial foundation of class rule extends beyond the city: in
addition to their Paris homes, upper-class dynasties possess family properties (a castle
or a large manor house) in the provincial hinterland that anchor paternalistic forms of
sociability and link them to the local lower class via such ritualized practices as riding
to hounds––in which the Pinçons participated by riding mountain bikes during their
fieldwork (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot, 1993; 2005). Spaces reserved by and for the high
bourgeoisie are major vectors of social reproduction in that they mold subjectivity and
train heirs suited to safeguarding and valorizing their inherited assets. Here Pinçon-
Charlot and Pinçon suggest that the ‘neighborhood effects’ that have obsessed students
of urban poverty are vastly more potent and consequential at the top than at the bottom
of the urban order, and in so doing they indicate how Bourdieu incites a wholesale
reorientation of the study of space, place and inequality.
That analytic triad is at the center of ‘Urban distinctions: class, culture and
sociability in Porto’ (Pereira, 2018, this issue), in which Virgílio Borges Pereira builds
on his path-breaking book, Classes e culturas de classe das famílias portuenses (2005),
which extends Bourdieu’s model of social space and symbolic power in Distinction to
probe social relations and cultural practices across the full gamut of neighborhoods
in the Portuguese city. Pereira combines field observation with Bourdieu’s distinctive
methodology of Multiple Correspondence Analysis to project a multi-layered cartog-
raphy of the city’s social space onto its physical layout. He finds that differences in the
volume and composition of capital among city residents undergird the patterned rela-
tions between social position, disposition and position-takings in various domains of
cultural consumption, ranging from books and television to vacationing and outdoor
leisure to artistic and religious activities. The threefold vertical clustering of ‘lifestyle
modalities’ established by Bourdieu in the France of the 1970s, encapsulated by the
triad of ‘distinction, pretention, and necessity’, obtains in the Portuguese city three
decades later. More remarkably still, the horizontal opposition rooted in the chiasmatic
distribution of economic and cultural capital emerges among both the Portuguese
bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, while the spirit of resistance of the city’s working
class is eroded by social atomization and negative individualism. With this Porto case
study, Pereira delivers both a lucid analytic exemplification of the mutual mapping of
social, symbolic and physical space in one metropolis and a ringing empirical refuta-
tion of the common critique that Bourdieu’s models reflect the peculiarities of French
society.21
Like the Pinçons, Mike Savage, Laurie Hanquinet, Niall Cunningham and
Johs Hjellbrekke adopt a view from above to draw a comparative profile of London
and Brussels illustrating the rise of ‘Emerging cultural capital in the city’ (Savage
et al., 2018, this issue). This is a story of ‘big-city effects’ highlighting the crystallization
and accumulation of what, after Ghassan Hage (1998), they call ‘cosmopolitan cultural
capital’, in opposition to national forms of cultural authority. Drawing on large
quantitative surveys conducted in Belgium and the United Kingdom, Savage et al.
portray the rise of this new species of cultural predilection and competency as
challenging the traditional dominance of highbrow culture founded on a contemplative
Kantian aesthetic detached from any physical substrate insofar as it erodes the
separation of art and life to ‘valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of
contemporary cultural activity’ (this issue: 148). They stress that this cultural shift does
not signal the erosion of social divisions but their reworking around new axes embedded
in large urban centers where elite universities, sporting complexes and gentrified
neighborhoods attract young professionals and foster novel patterns of consumption
and entertainment. By linking the urban substrate to changing cultural forms,

21 Bourdieu’s own response to this concern was his ‘Introduction to a Japanese reading of Distinction’ (1991).
 BOURDIEU COMES TO TOWN 103

Savage et al. mobilize Bourdieu to disclose the shifting geography of cultural authority
in and across cities.22
Sylvie Tissot’s contribution mines two previous research projects (Tissot, 2007
and 2011) to demonstrate the value of Bourdieu’s emphasis on struggles over efficient
nomination for analyzing the rapidly transforming landscape of contemporary cities.
Her essay, ‘Categorizing neighborhoods’ (Tissot, 2018, this issue), stretches across the
Atlantic to sketch the invention, diffusion and effects of spatial labels at the bottom and
top of the metropolitan hierarchy. On the French side, the bureaucratic category of
quartier sensible (‘sensitive’ or ‘at-risk’ district) coined by state officials in Paris served
to frame and target city policy after the late 1980s, effectively reshaping the urban
periphery by reformulating the social question of concentrated unemployment and
job precarity into a spatial question of housing design and civic access. On the side of
the United States, the marketing notion of ‘historic’ or ‘heritage’ neighborhood touted
by local associations of incoming white residents allied with realtors and city hall was
rolled out to facilitate and legitimize the gentrification of Boston’s South End under
the banner of ‘diversity’. The political irony is that urban change detrimental to lower-
class residents was fostered by a novel urban rhetoric promoted by progressive state
professionals and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. So much to remind us that
the vocabulary used to cut up and represent the city and its geographic constituents
is neither neutral nor idle,23 and that elucidating the ‘social conditions of production
and reception’ of those ‘words that can make things’ (Bourdieu, [1982] 1991: 328) is an
indispensable component of a rigorous sociology of urban inequality.
Finally, in ‘Heavy is the house’, Matthew Desmond (2018, this issue) connects
Bourdieu’s early work on Algerian subproletarians migrating to the city with his late
investigation into the political production of the single-home market in France to tackle
the soaring rent burden put on the poor in the United States as their income fell while
government support for low-income housing vanished. Desmond spotlights the glaring
disconnect between the centrality of shelter to the life strategies of the poor and the
persistent failure of American urban sociology to address housing and to acknowledge
the prevalence of eviction and its role in the reproduction of acute poverty (Desmond,
2012). To remedy these lacunas requires replacing housing within the broader stream of
struggles over space, jobs, money and power that mold the metropolis. Desmond astutely
advocates ‘bringing landlords back in’ to chart their upward transactions with lenders,
brokers and real-estate associations as well as the shifting material and moral standards
guiding their downward relations with tenants (as displayed in a related ethnography
of eviction in Milwaukee––see Desmond, 2016). He also recommends tracking the
connections between the differentiated world of landlords and the bureaucratic field
at the local, regional and national levels and how these impact on the production,
allocation and stability of housing at the bottom of the metropolitan order. In short,
elevating the status of housing as an empirical object requires revamping our theoretical
model of the city as a product, site and target of classification and stratification.
Each of the essays gathered in this Interventions section, ‘Bourdieu Comes
to Town’, stands alone as a rich and stimulating investigation into the elements and

22 An analytic caveat is in order here: one must beware of the uncontrolled proliferation of forms of capital stemming
from a substantialist misreading of Bourdieu’s theory that equates cultural capital with ‘highbrow’ culture or ‘high-
status cultural goods’ and thence conflates empirical variation with conceptual variance. A given cultural capacity,
object or title is never cultural capital by itself: it becomes such only in relation to a particular arena of action
wherein it elicits collective belief, receives value and generates profits. For instance, the love of classical music
and mastery of art history are cultural capital in the school system and in middle- and upper-class circles but not in
the everyday sphere of working-class families; the ability to deliver and withstand physical violence is embodied
cultural capital in the criminal world of the street but not in a firm or on a university campus. Read Neveu’s (2013)
caution against the rhetorical ‘accumulation of capitals’ resulting in a runaway ‘sociological inventory à la Prévert’.
23 For effective critiques of the urban rhetoric of ‘creative cities’, ‘slums’, ‘village’ and ‘renaissance’, ‘heritage’ and
‘diversity’, and (anti-)‘ghetto’ and kindred labels for dispossessed and disparaged districts, see, respectively, Peck
(2005), Gilbert (2007), Barnes et al. (2006), Modan (2007), Boyd (2008), and Wacquant et al. (2014).
 WACQUANT104

determinants of a slice of urban life. Together, they demonstrate the plasticity and pro-
ductivity of Bourdieu’s key concepts, methodological moves and empirical pointers, as
well as the rough analytic division of labor obtaining between them. They suggest how
Bourdieu can excite, enrich and reorient urban inquiry, and even dissolve it in a broader
topological social science capable of encompassing the city into a broader analytic of the
dynamic relationships between symbolic division, social space and the built environment.
Bourdieu does not merely add a new set of powerful and flexible notions (habitus, capital,
social space, field, doxa, symbolic power and reflexivity) to the panoply of established
theoretical perspectives: he paves a pathway for reconceptualizing the urban as the
domain of accumulation, differentiation and contestation of manifold forms of capital,
which effectively makes the city a central ground and prize of historical struggles.

Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA

94720-1980, USA, loic@berkeley.edu

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