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Elaborating Bourdieu's Field Analysis in Urban Studies: Cultural Dynamics in Brussels

Taylor & Francis
Urban Geography
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Abstract

This study explores how elements of Pierre Bourdieu's field analysis can be deployed to revitalize urban analysis though an empirical study of cultural engagement in Brussels. The point of departure is the need to resist the view that Bourdieu, in quintessentially sociological terms, completely abstracts social from physical space. It is shown that although he acknowledges that the clustering of cultural taste in social space cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto urban location, he nonetheless recognizes a link between them. Using a detailed study of cultural orientations in Brussels, a fluid and spatially sensitive approach to cultural relations within cities is developed, one that shows how those evincing cultural privilege are more spatially localized than those who are culturally disengaged. This offers an important demonstration of the way that privilege remains relatively rooted in place, even amidst turbulent, globalized, urban conditions.

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... Slater, 2013). The links between class and geography have been investigated in multiple other studies (Cunningham, 2019;Cunningham & Savage, 2015;Cunningham & Savage, 2017;Hanquinet et al., 2012;Ljunggren & Andersen, 2015;Préteceille, 2007;Savage et al., 2015a;Savage et al., 2018). These studies used different conceptions and operationalisations of class (e.g. ...
... Although related, research on the geography of class demonstrates how patterns of class residence do not necessarily follow established patterns of socioeconomic dispersion (e.g. based on income) (e.g. Hanquinet et al., 2012;van Gent et al., 2019). This literature mainly focuses on the different spatial orientations of middle-class fractions, whereby occupation is the most widely used indicator of social class. ...
... In general, we find that middle classes with more cultural capital tend to live closer to the city centre (e.g. Boterman et al., 2018;Cunningham & Savage, 2017;Hanquinet, et al., 2012). ...
Thesis
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This dissertation includes the following research goals: 1) To understand the nature of urban socioeconomic change from a multidimensional social class perspective; 2) To investigate possible consequences of socio-spatial inequality; 3) To study the influence of macro-level changes on civic participation and; 4) To analyse the role of local organisations in facilitating different forms of participation
... Slater, 2013). The links between class and geography have been investigated in multiple other studies (Cunningham, 2019;Cunningham & Savage, 2015Hanquinet et al., 2012;Ljunggren & Andersen, 2015;Préteceille, 2007;Savage et al., 2015aSavage et al., , 2018. These studies used different conceptions and operationalizations of class (e.g. ...
... Bourdieu's view on social class adds a valuable perspective to the field of urban studies in which quantitative studies generally rely on the notion of "socioeconomic status" (Hanquinet et al., 2012;Ljunggren & Andersen, 2015;Van Gent et al., 2019). Socioeconomic status tends to fuse economic, cultural and social elements, and is frequently used in the form of some hierarchical scale that is insensitive to the multilayered nature of stratification (Flemmen et al., 2019). ...
... Although related, research on the geography of class demonstrates how patterns of class residence do not necessarily follow established patterns of socioeconomic dispersion (e.g. based on income) (e.g. Hanquinet et al., 2012;Van Gent et al., 2019). This literature mainly focuses on the different spatial orientations of middle-class fractions, whereby occupation is the most widely used indicator of social class. ...
Article
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Social class plays a central role in understanding the urban structure , yet its conceptualization and operationalization in urban studies are limited. We have used the Bourdieusian conception of social class, which conceives of class as the possession of economic, social and cultural capital, to establish the class structure of Rotterdam. We make a theoretical contribution to the literature by discussing how this conception provides new insights into the professionalization-polarization debate. Furthermore, we examine the spatial distributions of different class fractions, known as the geography of class. Based on two waves of a comprehensive city survey, we applied latent class analysis to develop an elaborate class typology consisting of seven social classes. We investigate how the class structure developed between 2008 and 2017 and analyze the changes in spatial class divisions. Our findings show that the transformation of the class structure is mainly driven by changes in cultural capital, that is, middle classes with high cultural capital replacing lower and middle classes with low cultural capital. Spatial analyses further reveal that classes are dispersed in specific ways and that these patterns of dispersion change over time. Finally, we reflect on the relevance of Bourdieu's work in studying the urban class structure.
... Daarnaast wordt de relevantie van een multidimensionaal klassenperspectief voor de stedelijke context steeds meer onderkend (Cunningham en Savage 2017;Hanquinet, Savage en Callier 2012;Ljunggren en Andersen 2015;Savage et al. 2018). Steden worden in hun sociale samenstelling steeds complexer (Vertovec 2007;Wessendorf 2014) en daarom zijn naast de 'klassieke' sociaaleconomische indicatoren (bijvoorbeeld inkomen) nieuwe perspectieven nodig om deze complexe gelaagdheid in kaart te brengen. ...
... In het werk van Savage en collega's worden stedelijke omgevingen als sociale velden geanalyseerd waarin sociale groepen zich bepaalde geografische ruimten toe-eigenen of daaruit worden verdreven. Vooral metropolen zijn velden waarin krachts-en machtsverhoudingen tussen groepen met verschillende kapitaalportfolio's hun neerslag krijgen in ruimtelijke geografieën van sociale klasse (Cunningham en Savage 2017;Hanquinet, Savage en Callier 2012;Savage et al. 2018). ...
... Het nut van BLKA toont zich verder wanneer het wordt toegepast in stedelijke contexten. Steden vormen bij een uitstek een omgeving waar sociaaleconomische en culturele scheidslijnen door elkaar heen lopen, terwijl het leven tevens gekenmerkt wordt door een hoge mate van mobiliteit en fluïditeit (Hanquinet, Savage en Callier 2012). Klassieke economische indicatoren zoals inkomen, beroep of werkloosheid vormen in deze zin vaak een beperking voor buurtvergelijkingen omdat ze weinig inzicht bieden in de complexe configuratie van sociale groepen in diverse buurten -zie ook Vertovec (2007) en Wessendorf (2014) over superdiversiteit. ...
Article
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Studies by Savage et al. (2013) and Vrooman, Gijsberts and Boelhouwer (2014) introduce new class typologies that combine Bourdieu’s work with latent class analysis. This paper identifies this new research approach as Bourdieusian latent class analysis . We discuss the role of these studies within the social class debate and we review the merits and limitations of this approach. In addition, we show how the class structure of Rotterdam can be empirically established by studying the distribution of economic, social and cultural capital. We use the Neighbourhood Profile data (N = 14,040; 71 neighbourhoods) to develop a class typology that includes eight social groups. This class typology complements conventional indicators of neighbourhood socioeconomic status and can be used to study ‘social mix’ and gentrification.
... Although these studies better capture the lived dimensions of taste, they say relatively little about the interplay of such dimensions within the overall structures in which they are embedded. By taking into consideration the role of spatial processes in field dynamics, recent studies argue for more nuanced understandings of the interplay between structural and experiential aspects of taste (Benson, 2014;Benson and Jackson, 2013;Hanquinet et al., 2012;Johnston et al., 2012;Savage, 2011). Hanquinet et al. (2012) suggest that using Bourdieu's field analysis in urban studies can provide novel insights into the spatial dimensions of cultural relations. ...
... By taking into consideration the role of spatial processes in field dynamics, recent studies argue for more nuanced understandings of the interplay between structural and experiential aspects of taste (Benson, 2014;Benson and Jackson, 2013;Hanquinet et al., 2012;Johnston et al., 2012;Savage, 2011). Hanquinet et al. (2012) suggest that using Bourdieu's field analysis in urban studies can provide novel insights into the spatial dimensions of cultural relations. They highlight the need for 'a dynamic field theory, one that does not reductively root cultural patterns in spatial locations [by] fixing different types of cultural consumers in distinctive areas without being able to perceive their interactions' (Hanquinet et al., 2012: 526). ...
... This process, which incorporates exploring the taste of place, dwelling in place and creating a sense of place, exemplifies the situatedness of our participants' indie music tastes (Hennion, 2001). Our data illustrate that musical taste is also shaped later in our participants' lives via their place-specific music-oriented experiences (Benson 2014;Hanquinet et al., 2012;Savage, 2011). We contribute to contextualised understandings of taste (Arsel and Thompson, 2011;Friedman, 2011;Thornton, 1996) by showing how indie music fans utilise place to ground and expand their field-specific capital investments. ...
Article
Drawing on qualitative interviews with indie music fans in Manchester, UK, we explore how experiences in the indie music field inform spatial and place-specific understandings of musical taste. Inspired by Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, the concept of place-dependent capital incorporates the interplay of the experiential dimensions of taste, and the overall structures in which they are embedded. We develop our findings into three themes, which allow us to highlight the diversity of ways in which our participants create place-dependent capital: exploring the taste of place; dwelling in place; and creating a sense of place. We propose the usefulness of place-dependent capital as an alternative theoretical tool, which acknowledges both structural and experiential dimensions of musical taste, allowing us to demonstrate the situatedness of indie music fans’ tastes.
... Critical responses to this overblown agenda have therefore tended to see these interests as somehow tainted (see Peck, 2007) and have preferred more orthodox brands of politicaleconomic analysis, or eliminated concerns with the cultural turn from these framings altogether. Elsewhere (see Savage, 2010;Hanquinet et al., 2012), we have remarked on the problematic dualism this creates between a culturally sensitive approach to cities that has little to say about urban inequality on the one hand, and a political-economic perspective that eschews direct interests in cultural processes on the other. However, there is another strategy for reflecting more seriously on how Pierre Bourdieu's critical analysis of cultural capital might be deployed within a more rigorous form of urban analysis. ...
... This does not simply reflect the availability of these sites in cities since cultural enthusiasts are not confined to certain kinds of urban areas. In fact, it is possible to define seven types of cultural consumers in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (using a cluster analysis, based on a multiple correspondence analysis; for more information, see Hanquinet et al., 2012;Callier and Hanquinet, 2012). ...
... If we look at their distribution in different provinces in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (see Table 1), we notice that the culturally voracious groups mainly live in Brussels and the province of Liège. 1 The city of Liège is a rather culturally vibrant place with its university, its cultural institutions and its music festivals (Les Ardentes, Les Transardentes). Hanquinet et al. (2012) show that the culturally voracious are overrepresented in socially mixed and culturally active neighbourhoods close to the city centre of Brussels. ...
Article
This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity.
... Beauregard (2012) begins with a careful reflection on the different ways of doing urban theory, paying especially close attention to how the various approaches to abstraction, argumentation, and empirical work entail divergent implications for what it means to constitute urban knowledge. Several subsequent essays offer new perspectives on urban social relations, social stratification, and urban form, derived in reference to the work of social theorists who have not traditionally been associated with urban theory (Charles Tilly, Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Bourdieu, respectively, in the articles by Blokland, 2012;Parker, 2012;and Hanquinet et al., 2012), but whose insights have the potential to add considerably to the critical urban repertoire. Other contributions explore how the apparently marginal spaces of major U.S. cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, have been important locales for the invention of new modes of governmentality (Fairbanks, 2012) as well as alternative urban imaginaries (Sites, 2012). ...
... Rather, our contributors offer a range of different strategies for enriching the substance and deepening the reflexivity of urban theory in ways that also offer significant engagement with empirical or interpretive challenges. One such strategy (Hanquinet et al., 2012;Parker, 2012;Sites, 2012) involves extending the repertory of urban theory by holding conversations with the humanities along with underappreciated traditions within the human sciences. Here the fields of archeology, philosophy, history, musicology, and literary and cultural studies-as well as seemingly non-urban approaches in cultural sociology and geography-help to remind us of the central role that imagination (conscious and unconscious), identity (social and urban), space (real and symbolic), and memory (individual and collective) continue to play in the lives of cities, even amid the socially disaggregating impacts of an increasingly aggregated global capitalism. ...
... Parker (2012), for instance, draws attention to the representative city images that (for Ricoeur) are always there as well as those that (for Marx) are only absent presences, finding within the ambiguous ontological status of such urban objects important insights into the shared medium of material discourses. For their part, Hanquinet et al. (2012) highlight the complex distinctions within urban cultural tastes and how these suggest a socially differentiated sense of place, one that is significantly inflected by class boundaries irreducible to space. Sites (2012), meanwhile, views even the infernal city as raw material for the musical imagination, resulting in other cities-created only in sound-that stimulate critical and selfcritical forms of utopian reflection. ...
... The territorial field of art picks up on the idea of the field of art, proposed by Pierre Bourdieu (2016), and reflects how the interrelations, the oppositions and the hierarchies within that field manifest themselves in the form of the central, marginal or peripheral locations within the urban space. This approach is based on previous interpretations of the work of the French sociologist in urban studies (Hanquinet et al., 2012;Lizé, 2010;Mangset, 1998;Picaud, 2015Picaud, , 2017Rius-Ulldemolins, 2016;Wacquant, 2018). It was used specifically to study processes driving the transformation of the spatial structure of private art galleries showing post-war and contemporary art, and in particular the emergence, the development and the decline of their clusters in different part of the inner city of Krakow, Poland, between 1989 and 2019. ...
... Spatial representations of artistic hierarchies within different fields of cultural production are increasingly the topic studied by urban scholars (Hanquinet et al., 2012;Lizé, 2010;Mangset, 1998;Picaud, 2015Picaud, , 2017Rius-Ulldemolins, 2012Wacquant, 2018) as they note that different types of art and artistic relations (cooperation, domination or opposition) are indeed represented, if sometimes in a distorted manner, in the physical space in the form of specific places and of the spatial proximity or distance between them, that can be termed the territorial field of art. According to one of the Bourdieu's collaborators 'all social and mental structures have spatial correlates … social distance and power relations are both expressed in and reinforced by spatial distance; and that propinquity to the centre of accumulation of capital (economic, military or cultural) is a key determinant of the force and velocity of social change' (Wacquant, 2018, p. 96). ...
Article
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Private art galleries, due to their often short-lived nature stemming from the uncertainties inherent in the art world, constitute a good indicator of changes taking place within the urban space. The spatial patterns of their locations are the outcome of an interplay between the spatial choices of individual entities that respond to opportunities and constraints in different parts of the city. Such spatial patterns also reflect artistic hierarchies and oppositions within the field of visual arts, where artist-oriented and market-oriented art galleries represent different artistic communities (local, non-local) and generations (younger and aspiring, older and recognized). As a result, distinct art gallery clusters (market-oriented and artist-oriented) emerge and shape into spatial structures , which might be conceptualised as the territorial field of art. This concept is used here in a broad survey of the art gallery landscape of Krakow, a large city in southern Poland. This offers a unique opportunity to follow the development of an art gallery scene in a city widely associated with art and from the very moment when, in 1989, the newly introduced political and economic freedoms replaced the strict control of the communist regime removing barriers preventing the operation of commercial galleries and non-profit art spaces. The study involved building of a detailed database that enabled tracing the spatial choices (locations and relocations) of art galleries as far back as in the 1980s and then from 1989 to 2019. Along the detailed data review a qualitative analysis of reports in the press and on the internet provided an insight into the spatial contexts and motivations behind spatial decisions during different time periods. Four primary art gallery clusters were identified and their phases of emergence, growth and decline observed over the three decades were found to have been mutually interconnected , as well as linked with the broader functional changes developing in different parts of the inner city and with distinct artistic and spatial preferences of the successive generations of young artists and gallery owners representing them.
... Bajo este argumento, se ha constatado que, particularmente, el gusto cultural tiene una relación directa con los discursos que las personas tienen respecto al apego local o lugar donde viven (Friedman, Savage y Miles, 2015;Savage et al., 2013;Hanquinet et al., 2013;Meuleman y Savage, 2013), o bien, con las expectativas de residencia o fantasías que expresan los individuos respecto a una ubicación futura (Savage, Allen, Atkinson, Burrows, Méndez y Watt, 2010). De esta forma, la dimensión cultural del consumo no debe ser subestimada en la interpretación que se hace de la revitalización del valor en determinados espacios físicos, considerando con ello la importancia que los agentes sociales, organizados en clases, tienen en este proceso. ...
... Este desacople entre las clases, los capitales y los gustos que presentan las personas en las sociedades contemporáneas, es evidenciado en un conjunto de trabajos. Entre estos destacan aquellos que muestran la inexistencia de diferencias significativas en la ciudad entre cultura alta y popular (Hanquinet et al., 2013), la identificación de un tipo de capital cultural el principio del derecho a la vivienda ...
Article
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El artículo explora las expectativas residenciales de los habitantes de Temuco, una de las ciudades intermedias más importantes de Chile. Se analizan los dispositivos simbólicos vinculados a la idea de vivienda, determinando con ello las diferencias discursivas entre clases altas, medias y bajas. Considerando las transformaciones en las formas de producción del capitalismo actual, la creación de nuevas clases sociales y la temprana introducción de la idea de vivienda propia en Chile, se relativiza el supuesto planteado por Bourdieu respecto al grado de correspondencia entre los capitales de una persona y la proyección de un gusto espacial determinado sobre la ciudad. Se reconocen cinco sectores diferentes de Temuco en términos socioespaciales y se utiliza la Teoría Fundamentada como estrategia metodológica para analizar 30 entrevistas realizadas; así, los resultados indican que el principio de propiedad sobre la vivienda opera como el fundamento central de la expectativa residencial, independiente de la clase social de la persona.
... Several urban and housing studies have confirmed that there are demonstrable differences in residential behaviour and attitudes between segments of the middle class. This research emphasizes differences between the 'new' urban middle class and suburban-oriented middle classes, and also documents a variety of attitudes towards urban and suburban neighbourhoods (e.g., Allen, 2008;Boterman, 2012;Bridge, 2006;Butler and Robson, 2003;Hanquinet et al., 2012;Savage, 2011). Allen (2008) theorizes that fractions of the middle class tend to view urban regions as 'space of positions', as spatial hierarchies with neighbourhoods ranked according to respectability and desirability of their housing, amenities and population. ...
... Furthermore, our descriptive data and supplemental analyses indicate that, while dispositions produce distinctive patterns, sociocultural groups also overlap and may live in the same neighbourhoods (cf. Hanquinet et al., 2012). ...
Article
This study aims to advance the spatial conceptualization of ‘social homophily’ by relating the match, or mismatch, between a household’s social and sociocultural characteristics and the characteristics of the neighbourhood of residence to the probability of moving away from that neighbourhood. Three matching dimensions were investigated: economic status, ethnic background and sociocultural disposition. This paper’s focus is on the sociocultural dimension because this has not been included extensively in large-scale research so far. Initially we investigate how level of education at the household level interacts with education composition at the neighbourhood level. To further investigate the sociocultural dimension, we then include the share of each partner’s income in the total household income in our analyses. Based on the spatial literature at the intersections of class, gender and family, we assume that, together with higher education, the intra-household distribution of income reflects a broader set of sociocultural values. We make use of large-N register data to analyse the residential and mobility behaviour of all registered stable couples in the four largest Dutch urban regions between 2008 and 2009. Our analyses indicate that the degree to which a household ‘matches’ its social surroundings negatively affects its probability of leaving. This is the case for all three dimensions, with sociocultural disposition having the largest effect. The conclusion reflects on the importance of these findings for social homophily, sorting and residential segregation, and proposes directions for further research.
... More especially, people with a more postmodernist profile in terms of tastes and cultural activities may develop a certain affinity with the urban space as source of aesthetic experience, while those with a more modernist cultural profile may be less attached to urban places. This is line with research showing that culturally active or 'engaged' people were more selective in regard to the areas in which they live (according their cultural -modern or classical -orientations), compared to those who are less culturally engaged and more spread around across a territory (Hanquinet et al. 2012). In certain areas, especially those which are socially and ethnically mixed, there are then different lifestyles that co-exist, illustrating the fact that people's places of residence reflect complex processes of constraints and choices. ...
... The South and the South-East of Brussels appear to be characterized by high proportions of visitors, especially the communes of Ixelles and Watermael-Boitsfort. Another study on cultural participation in Brussels has indeed shown that these two communes attract cultural amateurs, although the former is associated with more modern forms of culture and the latter with more classical ones (Hanquinet et al. 2012). Visitors are rather underrepresented in other cities such as Charleroi, Bruges, Namur, and Hasselt. ...
Article
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In the establishment of people’s lifestyles, places, and especially cities, have become central arenas for display and consumption, and have become part of the aesthetic experience itself. These changes have affected the composition of cultural capital, which may have then taken an urban dimension. Art museum visitors, often associated with highbrow culture, constitute an excellent case study to explore the links between cultural capital and place. Based on a survey of 1900 visitors of the six main museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, this article will focus on the distribution of the audience characterized by their cultural tastes and activities across the Belgian territory (through their postcodes). It shows that visitors mainly come from areas with high and moderate density and that the socio-demographic but also urban characteristics of their place of residence can be related to the way visitors’ cultural capital is composed. Yet, it also suggests that places like cities (just like museums) form meeting places, in which co-exist and interact different stories, different trajectories and, as this article shows, a multiplicity of lifestyles. Keywords: Museum visitors; Pierre Bourdieu; cultural capital; audiences; Belgium.
... However, most analyses of the socially constructed concept of belonging use data representing only middle-and high-income groups, or focus on cultural consumption patterns that shift away from spatial analyses (Butler & Robson, 2003;Hanquinet, Savage, & Callier, 2012;Savage et al., 2010). There is a need to incorporate different social groups in such analyses in order to better understand border-making processes between different groups, and to explore the overlap between social space and physical location -"power and fixedness." ...
... Notes 1. A very recent example of this innovative approach is Hanquinet et al. (2012). Here, the authors use Bourdieu's field analyses to map patterns of cultural engagement in Brussels and rightly point out that multiple correspondence analysis can be "a vital tool" for interdisciplinary urban studies to help develop a fluid understanding of social divisions in the context of urban space. ...
Article
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Mainstream gentrification research predominantly examines experiences and motivations of the middle-class gentrifier groups, while overlooking experiences of non-gentrifying groups including the impact of in situ local processes on gentrification itself. In this paper, I discuss gentrification, neighbourhood belonging and spatial distribution of class in Istanbul by examining patterns of belonging both of gentrifiers and non-gentrifying groups in historic neighbourhoods of the Golden Horn/Halic. I use multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a methodology rarely used in gentrification research, to explore social and symbolic borders between these two groups. I show how gentrification leads to spatial clustering by creating exclusionary practices and eroding social cohesion, and illuminate divisions that are inscribed into the physical space of the neighbourhood. For full paper: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Vfx6W3B84McRJbefiG5d/full
... One important effect of this rendering of field lies in its enhanced appreciation of physical space. Whereas his earlier structuralist rendition of field analysis leads him to differentiate social from physical space, his more phenomenological rendering leads him to recognize more fully the role of 'site effects' and the necessary role of spatial processes in field dynamics (see the further discussion in Savage, 2010;Hanquinet et al., 2013). ...
... This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. (2010) and Hanquinet et al. (2013). ...
Article
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The idea of field analysis has been championed as an alternative to ‘variable based’ accounts of social life, and offers the potential for cross-fertilization with complexity theory and forms of ‘descriptive’ research. Yet, the Bourdieusian roots of field analysis pose challenges as well as advantages, given the widespread critique of reductionist elements in Bourdieu’s thinking. This introduction to the special issue lays out how Bourdieu conceives of field analysis and some of the ambivalences this might give rise to. The papers in this special issue explore through worked examples how field analysis might be radicalized and made more dynamic. We focus on three main issues: (1) understanding emerging field dynamics which challenge the influential model that Bourdieu uses in Distinction, (2) showing the potential for comparative analysis and (3) recognizing the role of materiality in cultural relations. The papers collected here allow for varied engagements with the theoretical underpinnings of the classical formulations of field theory, via empirical analyses of both ‘established’ and ‘new’ fields to explore the trajectories of possible developments in field analysis.
... Dergelijke repertoires zijn niet deterministisch: voorkeuren en oordelen van mensen kunnen variëren naar gelang plek, tijd, gezelschap en doel (Hanquinet 2013). Maar ze zijn wel verbonden met groepsidentiteiten en sociale positie, en hangen in België bijvoorbeeld sterk samen met opleiding, inkomen, klasse, leeftijd en etnische achtergrond (Hanquinet, Savage & Callier 2012). ...
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W hy are superdiverse cities such as Brussels a pat- chwork rather than a melting pot? This research investigates how people within the superdiverse, yet se- gregated Brussels sort themselves based on culture and aesthetics. Taking the diverse neighborhoods of Molen- beek and Matonge as case-studies, we combine insights from urban sociology – the scenes approach of Silver and Clarke – and cultural sociology with Lamont’s concept of cultural repertoires. To do so, we use walkabouts, which allows us to capture the lived experience and meaning making process of urban residents, while, at the same time, both the researcher and respondent can experien- ce the neighborhoods in a sensory way. A geographical overview illustrates that certain amenities are clustered while the interviews show that different groups use dif- ferent cultural repertoires, and thus attain different me- anings to geographical characteristics. In line with previ- ous research, we find a scene of Brussels-Flemish urban diversity-lovers in both neighborhoods. Besides, we can also speak of ethnic minority scenes in Molenbeek and Matonge, respectively a North-African or little-Morocco scene and African-Matonge scene. Hence, cultural and aesthetic elements also influence the presence of ethnic minority groups.
... A challenge in using concepts from cultural sociology and cultural economics in studying cultural tourism is their high level of abstraction. For example, a criticism of Bourdieu is that he abstracts the social from other realms, including space (Hanquinet, Savage & Callier, 2012). Such approaches are limiting, because the boundaries between culture and economy have become increasingly vague, to the point where many now refer to a 'cultural economy' in which value is determined by symbolic worth (Lash and Urry, 1994). ...
Chapter
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The evolution of cultural tourism from an elite to a mass phenomenon can largely be explained by the shift in culture from the ‘Culture 1.0’ of patronage to the ‘Culture 2.0’, stemming from the expansion of the cultural industries and ‘Culture 3.0’, linked to the co-creation of postmodern culture. The decline of high culture as the arbiter of meaning under Culture 1.0 necessitated a progressive shift in the location and quantity of cultural tourism experiences. The cultural tourist left the museum to enjoy heritage centres, cultural festivals and events, street art and everyday life. The growth of the experience economy and the cultural and creative industries saw the development of a range of new cultural tourism experiences, and the global branding and McGuggenheimization of culture. The declining power of the narratives of high culture, the nation state and the cultural producer created room for the cultural tourist to co-create their own tourism experiences. The role of the new cultural intermediaries also shifted from staging experiences and guiding the tourist to facilitating and enabling experience co-creation. The curator has moved out of the museum, as everyday life becomes a form of ‘art’ that needs curation. The tactical tourist and the creative tourist became the trend-setting vanguard of cultural tourism development, colonizing the new spaces of urban and rural cultural tourism. Small cities emerged to challenge the Culture 2.0 hegemony of the metropolitan centres, with new museums and events aimed at a global audience. The fragmented cultural landscape began to be reinterpreted through events, which became the connecting hubs and nodes for the global cultural audience. These new articulations challenged long-established hierarchies of culture and geography and led to a range of novel outcomes of the cultural tourism practice.
... Although Bourdieu employs the spatialised metaphor of the field, he originally had a more abstract idea of social space (Rocamora and Entwistle, 2006;Savage, 2011). In Bourdieu's (1996Bourdieu's ( , 2018 later work, he further recognised overlaps between social and physical spaces, as power struggles in the former can manifest in the latter (Hanquinet et al., 2012;Savage, 2011). Accordingly, Bourdieu (2018: 107) observes how, 'social space tends to retranslate itself, in a more or less direct manner, into physical space'. ...
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Bourdieu's interrelated concepts of habitus and field have been deployed to theorise the unreflexive consumption practices characterising much of consumers' everyday lives. Less is known, however, about the disruptive experience when habitus and field suddenly misalign-which Bourdieu terms 'hysteresis'. We address this lacuna by studying smalahove (sheep's head) consumption involving participant observation at a Norwegian smalahove farm-an unsettling space within the food consumption field that may challenge many consumers' habitual ways of seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting meat. Our core contribution lies in introducing a dynamic conceptualisation of hysteresis, demonstrating how it fluctuates in consumption environments; intensifying and diminishing in intensity as the gaps between habitus and field open and close.
... The original articles focused on the intersectionality of gender and class stratification in relation to cultural voraciousness, but since that time, wide-ranging research in both consumer studies and consumer culture research have identified voracious cultural consumption as an important marker of status among different social groups. For example, studies have shown that a pattern of voracious cultural consumption is seen by consumers as a vehicle to shape a trajectory of upward mobility (Erel 2012), to transfer legitimate cultural capital to immigrant children (Tatum and Browne 2019), or to shape a distinctive urban identity (Hanquinet et al. 2012;Cutts and Widdop 2017). ...
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This paper adds to the literature on cultural stratification by revisiting cultural voraciousness, nearly two decades after it was first introduced as a measure of cultural participation designed to capture inequalities in the pace and variety of cultural activities. Specifically, using the UK 2014–15 Time Use Survey, we compare measures of cultural voraciousness in the UK in 1998 and 2015, focussing in particular on the way cultural voraciousness is associated with both gender and class. We find continuity over time in the patterns of relationship between cultural voraciousness, gender and class, which are not explained by income or hours worked. While women at the bottom of the class scale are still the most disadvantaged in terms of unequal access to cultural participation, high level managerial women now equal equivalent men in their voracious cultural participation. We conclude that not only is cultural voraciousness still useful in depicting cultural inequalities delineated by gender and class, and not only do gender and class gaps in cultural voraciousness persist over time, but also that there is evidence for accentuated class inequality over time in cultural voraciousness among men and among women.
... Bourdieu's notion of social fields is aspatial as fields are considered in terms of relations, positions, logics, rules and regularities, rather than the physical space in which these interactions take place. However, all interaction takes place somewhere -an aspect to which Bourdieu granted a little more attention in his later work (Bourdieu, 1999;Hanquinet et al., 2012). Thus, as suggested by Painter (2000, p. 257), the idea of field may be "recast without much difficulty around a more complex spatiality, involving multiple and overlapping spaces, network approaches as well as theories of space that emphasise discontinuity, fragmentation and contradiction." ...
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The need for green industrial restructuring is increasingly being recognised, also within the tourism industries. This paper investigates the green restructuring of the tourism industry in the village Flåm, where actors and social fields at different geographical scales are involved. A multi‐scalar perspective on social fields, with their different institutional logics, provides a framework for approaching the roles of overlapping logics and actors’ institutional work in driving and giving direction to green restructuring. The investigation finds that institutional change in different fields is interconnected through scalar overlaps and through actors’ institutional work across fields.
... Así, y a partir de lo anterior, es posible observar en la actualidad cambios en la estructura de clases, donde destaca la existencia de diferencias entre trabajadores de cuello y corbata y aquellos de la aristocracia laboral, el surgimiento de la clase media o de servicios como la más numerosa e indeterminada (Savage, Dickens y Fielding, 1988), y el retroceso de la clase obrera 1 Ham- nett y Butler, 2013). Además, y sumado a lo anterior, aparece un tipo de capital cultural alternativo, propio del actual capitalismo global, donde no se consume cultura bajo los parámetros bourdianos, sino más bien se utiliza como una forma de legitimidad dentro del sistema social (Friedman, Savage y Miles, 2015;Hanquinet, Savage y Callier, 2013). Como consecuencia de este nuevo escenario global, el sistema de producción social del espacio, al estar organizado en torno a la estructura de clases sociales, también experimenta cambios importantes. ...
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Los cambios en las ciudades están relacionados con la reestructuración del mercado de trabajo y la consiguiente aparición de nuevas clases sociales. Estos grupos, motivados por un gusto espacial, transforman los espacios urbanos. Este trabajo explora las transformaciones espaciales de clases en Temuco (Chile) entre 1992 y 2002. Obviando los indicadores de segregación residencial, y superando la desterritorialización en los modelos de estratificación social, se observan cambios importantes en la ciudad. Entre ellos, un periurbano de encuentro entre clases muy distintas entre sí, antiguas zonas obreras que suben en la escala socioespacial, y diversificación espacial de la clase media.
... These incumbents' perceptions regarding their electorate's social class, and the significance of that class stratification for municipal politics has until now been largely neglected in the literature (Stren & Friendly, 2019). Secondly, this article contributes to the literature that integrates place in the study of class formation (Hanquinet, Savage, & Callier, 2012;Shani, 2019) by emphasizing the fundamental role of a place's polity in shaping not just social reality, but political outcomes that relate, for example, to school attainments. The study advances these two contributions by fostering a perspective of a place's polity that reflects a communal habitus. ...
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This study explores differences in the politics of urban and suburban communities. It specifically concentrates on decisionmakers' perspectives regarding their constituents' agency in formalizing local education policy. Drawing upon the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and related work on (place) habitus and local politics of education, the study hypothesizes that the more divided the class structure of a place, the greater disparity between the demands of the elite and a given municipal education policy. By means of an Israeli regional case study that includes a medium-size city and its suburbs, the research demonstrates how a local political milieu is formed, and how its formation shapes local educational policy. The findings raise significant doubt regarding efforts to diversify cities, as a policy goal that strives for fairness in a metropolitan area.
... Uznanie regeneratywnej i pobudzającej roli kultury miejskiej może stwarzać wrażenie, iż jej dobroczynny wpływ obejmuje wszystkich jego mieszkańców, co jest sprzeczne z obrazem miasta podzielonego i nierów-nego. Dający się zaobserwować dualizm w badaniach nad miastemrozbieżność między ujęciem uwrażliwionym kulturowo, które jednak nie pozwala wiele powiedzieć na temat nierówności społecznych, a ujęciem polityczno-ekonomicznym, które nie obejmuje bezpośrednim zainteresowaniem spraw kultury -każe zadać pytanie o perspektywy pogodzenia tych podejść (Hanquinet, Savage, Callier 2012;Savage i in. 2018). ...
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One of the key issues in contemporary urban studies is to consider the city from the perspective of culture and consumption, which are treated as new drivers of urban development and economic prosperity, the essence of urban ways of life, and arenas for the implementation of urban policies. In a consumer society, cities become important nodes where collective and individual consumption takes place on a massive scale. The urban system organizes capabilities and provides the resources for consumption, thus facilitating various kinds of lifestyles. As a result, the urban space operates as an arena of competition, where different consumer orientations and social categories strive physically and symbolically to occupy ground, produce meanings, and create belonging in the spaces and places that constitute the city. In applying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a “social field,” the aim of the article is to show how the space of social positions corresponds to the space of cultural practices. Drawing on the study of cultural and leisure activities in Wrocław, four general categories of urban residents are revealed and characterized by their distinct positions in different dimensions of the social space. The analysis also points to social capital (social networks) as an efficient new principle of cultural differentiation. The paper closes with the author’s concluding remarks and guidelines for further research.
... A process in which social actors find their socially designated place in specific urban settings and develop the tastes and dispositions associated with living in these places. This novel incorporation of place into the study of taste formation allows us to better account for two contemporary patternsthe growing alignment of class segments along spatial lines (Hanquinet et al., 2012;Savage et al., 2005), and the appearance of a locality effect on consumption patterns within class categories (Cutts and Widdop, 2016;Widdop and Cutts, 2012). ...
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This article studies the preferences of middle-class residents for old or new neighborhoods in two Israeli cities, and describes the ways local social space mediates the translation of the habitus into generative preferences. Most sociological studies either ignore questions of place or explicitly reject the role of place in shaping class tastes. While a number of recent studies have demonstrated the role of place in shaping class tastes, the mechanisms underlying the role of place have yet to be investigated and conceptualized. This study addresses this lacuna. Based on a mixed-methods comparative design, the article first presents the relationship between spatial and class processes underlying the particular social space of each of the two cities – that is, the local association between old/new neighborhoods and different populations, symbolic boundaries, and expectations regarding the future of different neighborhoods. It then shows how local social space is reflected in local narratives and patterns of distinction, which are interwoven with residents' accounts of their choices and preferences. The study argues that middle-class tastes are formed locally by a process of “emplacement,” in which social actors find their socially designated place in specific urban settings and develop the tastes and dispositions associated with these areas.
... Deze gemeente beslaat het historische centrum van Brussel en is onderdeel van de negentien gemeenten waaruit het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest bestaat. Naast de bekende scheiding tussen Frans-en Nederlandstalige burgers wordt de stad gekarakteriseerd door diepgewortelde ruimtelijke en socioeconomische segregatie, die grofweg kan worden gegeneraliseerd in een scheiding tussen oostelijke en westelijke wijken (Hanquinet, Savage & Callier, 2012). De westelijke kanaalgemeenten, waar het asielzoekerscentrum direct tegenover gelegen is, kennen de hoogste werkloosheidcijfers en percentages van inwoners met een niet-westerse immigratieachtergrond. ...
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The asylum centre as community home? About voluntary work in asylum centres in Amsterdam and Brussels Citizens are being activated to organize activities in asylum centres in both the Netherlands and Belgium. That way, asylum centres are expected to become better integrated in the local context of a municipality or neighbourhood. This ideal of citizenship does not stand on its own. The policy object to integrate asylum centres in the local context has parallels with broader societal and academic discussions about citizen participation and active citizenship. The object, however, is now the asylum seeker. In this article we research how voluntary work in two asylum centres takes shape and how policy could support voluntary activities better. A comparative interpretive policy analysis of two asylum centres in Amsterdam and Brussel shows how voluntary work is stimulated by policy, how these policies are implemented locally, and how they are experienced in daily practices of volunteers and professionals. The cases reveal stark differences, but exactly those contrasts lead to important lessons. We show that because of this policy, the asylum centre is often functioning as a community centre, that integration can be strengthened by volunteers, but we are also critical when voluntary activities are driven by an ideal picture of the ‘good asylum seeker’. There is a risk that the societal responsibility for integrating and engaging asylum seekers in the local context is pushed on the shoulders of unpaid volunteers and that activities are exclusively for one group. That is why we conclude that professional support and financial resources are crucial to implement the policy ideal of active citizenship in asylum centers.
... In terms of mobility, it would be interesting to understand the mobility strategies of young women with respect to those of young men. Recent current events have highlighted the verbal violence towards women in the public space as well as avoidance strategies [Gilow, 2015]. 85. ...
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Presented in a thematic manner, the aim of this synopsis is to paint a picture of French- and Dutch-speaking Brussels youth between the ages of 12 and 25, based on a great diversity of data and academic research published since 2005. The institutional and linguistic complexity which characterises the situation in Brussels and the production of research makes this type of exercise absolutely necessary. This inventory of knowledge regarding youth in Brussels sheds light on their extraordinary diversity and their vulnerability, as well as on the work to be carried out in order to fill the gaps and improve the information available for the stakeholders in the field. This synopsis therefore also constitutes a proposed research agenda.
... Here we see transnational fields as relational social spaces that transcend the dichotomous 'scalar fix' between the national and global (Brenner 1998;Jackson 2008;Savage 2011). Some works explicitly recognize Bourdieu's role as an early theorist of relational spaces (Hanquinet et al. 2012;Mezzadra and Neilson 2012). Yet, in this context, despite Bourdieu (1985: 723) describing field theory broadly as a relational exploration into 'social topology', his thinking has received surprisingly little attention. ...
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In this article, we develop conceptual tools for analysing the practices of children's rights organizations and professionals as transnational citizenship. To this end, we set out to trace a continuum of citizenship practices in which global and local influences and forces enmesh in ways that are difficult to grasp when treated as two separate realms. To theorize the social dynamism and spatial constitution of transnational citizenship as a local-global continuum, we turn to Bourdieu's field theory. By analysing the Committee on the Rights of the Child's handling of the Finnish Periodic Report on children's rights, and how Finnish children's rights advocates mobilize its recommendations, we show that transnational citizenship in the field of children's rights is practised not merely 'out there' but also 'right here'. We conclude by discussing what novel insights field theory has to offer to the study of advocacy practices as transnational citizenship.
... Such efforts based on late Bourdieuian work started to recognize the corporeal nature of physical and social space and how it influences fields and the distribution of capital. Yet, we argue that even Bourdieu's late field-specific writings provide a largely aspatial sociological analysis (Hanquinet et al. 2012). As Crossley (2001) notes, both field theory and the habitus concept fail to take into full consideration the reproductive role of human agency, which is grounded in individuals' actions and interactions and ultimately shapes and/or transforms their habitus. ...
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The aim of this paper is to argue for the development of a spatial theory of taste. We posit that taste might be better understood as being spatially formed and performed via consumers’ aesthetic experiences at various consumption places. We illustrate the usefulness of a spatial conception of taste for contemporary consumer research.
... However, the field and habitus concepts have frequently been accused of failing to take into full consideration the reproductive role of human agency, which is grounded in individuals' actions and interactions and ultimately shapes and/or transforms their habitus (Crossley, 2001). Such arguments are based on phenomenological interpretations of Bourdieu's work and postulate, amongst others, that his sociological analysis is largely aspatial (Hanquinet et al., 2012). As a result, we were also informed by philosophical theories of space and place to shape our understanding of the concept of experience in these marketplace contexts. ...
... Although the ability to fold a cityscape in half may be the cutting edge of cinematic effects, as a way to talk about the social space of the city topology is not new to urban studies or geography, where topological analyses have been explored for several decades. 2 In the 1960s and 70s, especially, urbanists turned to topology in their search for a mathematical language that would capture the spatial, social, and cultural structures of urban life (Atkin et al., 1971;Yeates, 2001;cf. Glasze et al., 2012;Hanquinet et al., 2012;Sun and Manson, 2012). More recently in urban studies, the term "topological city" has been used to describe a city in which class confrontation is diffused through urban fragmentation and segregation (Kesteloot, 2005). ...
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The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of the topological city, both by sharing some observations about the use of topology in critical human geography today and also by demonstrating how different modes of topological analyses of the city may work. This paper suggests that while topology is not new to the social sciences in general or geography in particular, an uptick in interest in topology in the past decade is likely due to its role in the work of Deleuze and Agamben. Topology, I suggest, can help geographers think in creative ways about spatial ontology, thereby offering some insights into the relationship between the subject and the city. I build this argument by discussing the topological workings of three cinematic cities: The Adjustment Bureau (2011), Midnight in Paris (2011), and Inception (2010). [Key words: topology, film, Lacan, subject, spatial theory.]
... Evolutionary theory suggests that in such a non-competitive setting, niche activities can flourish or coexist with other social settings (Park & Feiock, 2006). In contrast to that, if a district has a fixed and competitive social configuration, like a very residential or commercial district, it would become highly unlikely that artists could carry on their experimental activities there, because they would be overpowered by that urban configuration (Hanquinet, Savage & Callier, 2012). Rather, they require a social configuration in which no one cares about what the artists are doing. ...
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This paper will develop a general framework for the cultural evolution of art districts based on empirical research from different global city-regions. It will go beyond gentrifying approaches, which tend to focus on the decline of an art district or area but do not relate this transformation to the overall evolution of a city. The framework is based on the evolutionary concept of morphogenesis as the formation of increased social complexity. This build-up of complexity will be illustrated through stages through which art districts develop and the inherent logic which contributes to their decline, discussing each stage’s morphogenetic features, shedding light on the embedding of districts into urban centres and on urban change.This paper will compare the development of Williamsburg, New York City, and 798, Beijing. These cases were analysed through a Grounded Theory approach, with the aim to advance our understanding of urban cultural evolution with regard to developing an approach beyond gentrification.
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Bu çalışma 21. yüzyılda Türkiye’nin kentlerinde belirginlik kazanan mekânsal ayrışmanın nasıl derinleştiğini sorgulamaktadır. Sınıfsal farklılaşmalara nesnel görünümler kazandıran bir olgu olarak mekânın ayrışma biçimi, kent araştırmalarında ya nesnel ya da öznel süreçler ele alınarak değerlendirilmiş, ilişkisel bir yaklaşım geliştirilmemiştir. Son dönemde kent çalışmaları arasında öne çıkan neo-Bourdieuyen kent yaklaşımı ise, Fransız sosyolog Pierre Bourdieu’nün ilişkisel sosyolojik tasavvurunun kentsel eşitsizliklerin çözümlenmesinde etkili bir yaklaşım olduğunu ileri sürmektedir. Buradan hareketle Bursa kent alanında mekânın ayrışma biçimini neo-Bourdieuyen yaklaşımdan yola çıkarak ele alan bu çalışma, kentsel ayrışma deseninin oluşumunda, toplumsal sınıflar arasında ayrım üreten iktidar pratiklerinin etkili olduğunu iddia etmektedir. Bursa’da 19. yüzyılın son döneminden bugüne mekânsal statünün değişen coğrafi yönü, farklı dönemlerde kente hakîm olan ilke ve mekanizmalar ele alınarak değerlendirilmektedir. Bu mekanizmalar arasında işgücü ve konut piyasaları arasındaki eşbiçimliliğin, toplumsal sınıfların mekânı paylaşma biçiminde belirleyici olduğu öne sürülmektedir. Özellikle 2000’li yıllarda endüstriyel üretim yelpazesindeki çeşitlilik ve bu çeşitliliğin işgücü ve konut piyasalarında ortaya çıkardığı tabakalaşmış yapı, mekansal ayrışmanın derinleşmesinde etkili olmuştur. Çalışmanın sonucu, toplumsal sınıfların mekânsal pratikleri, planlama politikaları ve konut üretim sektörleri arasındaki etkileşimin kentsel ayrışma deseninin oluşumunda etkili olduğunu göstermektedir.
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Counterurbanization tends to be associated with the mid-upper and upper classes moving from cities to rural areas. However, the persistent desire for housing, the permeation of the neoliberal model throughout all society based on the principle of universal consumption, and the exhaustion many people feel with urban life, have ended up relativizing the traditional correspondence between social class, capital, and habitus. This paper describes the narratives of projective spatial preferences in rural areas among different social classes in Temuco, one of the most important cities in Chile. After analyzing 30 interviews, the results point to a spatial preference for the rural areas of the city in all social classes, which in turn is sustained in the value placed on the social isolation that suburban areas offered, a feature that is appreciated even more than the natural amenities provided by these places.
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After 1981, with Greece’s accession into the European Economic Community (EEC), as today’s European Union (EU) was called at the time, the Greek diasporic phenomenon was transformed and the Greek theatrical mobility was mainly related to the recruitment of Greek officials to the EU institutions and organizations. For the next 40 years, the Greek Diasporic Community Theater (DCT) of Brussels has become a participatory field of integration and Greek troupes have begun to proliferate, influenced by the demographic, ideological, and socio-structural changes that have taken place both in Greece and Belgium in recent decades. The present paper studies and presents the causes of the artistic resilience of the Greek Diasporic Community Theater (DCT) in Brussels. The case of the Greek DCT in Brussels is such a unique case of DCT, which operates continuously and systematically from the early 1980s until today, flourishing and presenting unprecedented signs of resilience.
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W książce zaproponowano i rozwinięto koncepcję geografii sztuki jako subdyscypliny geografii społeczno-ekonomicznej. Ukazano w sposób syntetyczny terytorialny wymiar życia artystycznego w różnych skalach przestrzennych ‒ miejsc i ośrodków artystycznych. W tym celu uwzględniono dorobek nauk społecznych i humanistycznych. Sformułowane ramy koncepcyjne i pojęciowe terytorialnego pola sztuki wykorzystano do zobrazowania zmieniającej się organizacji przestrzennej prywatnych galerii sztuki współczesnej i ich skupisk w Krakowie w latach 1989–2019. http://denali.geo.uj.edu.pl/publikacje,000255
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A recent turn in geographical scholarship and the neighbouring disciplines emphasises spatial relationality. Reaching beyond methodological nationalism and topographical space, as part of this broad discussion, topological theorisation has been introduced as one potential way of rethinking spatial relations. Instead of identifying new territorial frameworks or scalar dimensions, topologies can be attained by tracing the social ties that people and collective actors adopt, create, maintain, transform, challenge and refuse as part of their everyday activities. Drawing from and developing further this theoretical perspective, my recent research with children and young people in Southern Finland and Northern England has established a methodological approach to studying people’s experiential worlds and, especially, their political dimensions. Topological mapping is about tracing people’s lived realities through spatial narratives and analysing these experienced realities in relational terms. The still-developing approach builds on a threefold conceptual baseline: subjectivity as a human capacity, topological polis as a relational context of living, and the political referring to subjectively experienced and socially shared, contextually forming matters of importance. This conceptual ground provides for exploring existing worlds from the experiential perspectives of children and young people. The chapter introduces topological mapping as a narrative methodology that, first, brings topological theorisation to inform childhood and youth research, second, opens opportunities to approaching spatiality from children’s experiential and interpretive perspectives, third, develops analytical tools to studying contextual lived realities with children and, fourth, makes space for children’s subjective yet intersubjectively established knowledges to emerge in scholarly enquiry, human rights contexts, policy-making and practical settings of childhood.
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This study explores the ramifications of local economic differences on entering adulthood in the context of globalization. The effect of globalization on patterns of entering adulthood is usually perceived as filtered by particularities at the national level and as differentiated mainly by class. However, economic differentiation within the same country at the regional and municipal level is mostly overlooked. To address this gap, the authors compare the achievement of first homeownership among middle-class households in two Israeli cities differing in the concentration of economic sectors and in housing prices. Utilizing in-depth interviews ( n = 60 [cases]; n = 106 [interviewees]), the study shows how unstable forms of employment and exponentially rising housing prices in one city, and stable employment accompanied by still affordable housing costs in the other, support non-traditional and traditional patterns of entering adulthood respectively. The authors then analyse the Israeli census to confirm different patterns of entering adulthood among educated residents of the two cities. Thus, the study demonstrates how local economies shape different patterns of entering adulthood within the same country and among members of a similar class, suggesting that the relationship between globalization, class and the life course is also mediated by place.
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Maps and map-making have been used in a range of research about musical phenomena in cities. Yet, most of these studies focus on musicians; few have attempted to understand how people take part in a city’s musical life in terms of event attendance. Likewise, little has been said about the attendance habits of immigrants, despite the quick transformation of urban populations due to the expansion of human migration. Approaching a subject that has received so little attention as the dynamics of participation of immigrants in a city’s musical life therefore requires an inventive research design. Building from a methodology combining semi-structured interviews and observation, I used maps and map-making to deepen the analysis of North African immigrants’ cultural practices in Montreal. Trying to give a spatial legibility to their musical activities in the city generated many technical and theoretical concerns, but was also helpful for reflecting on the project differently and highlighting some characteristics of the data that were not obvious from the initial fieldwork. In brief, maps and map-making proved to be efficient complementary tools to ethnography, bringing new insights and raising new queries about the practices being considered.
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Highlighting the fluid nature of habitus/capital, this paper critiques a ‘rucksack approach’ (Erel, 2010) in the Bourdieusian studies of Chinese migrants’ cultural reproduction and social inclusion, which takes a determinism and fatalism standpoint and neglects the re-structuring of the migrant habitus and cultural capital over generations. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Beijing and Shanghai with 62 teachers, rural migrants and local parents and students. This paper conceptualises an urban field of cultural reproduction, which is marked by the reproduction and validation of urban-specific cultural configurations, including knowledge, skill, language, aesthetic/taste, value and lifestyle. In this field, migrant children have experienced re-structuring of habitus and accumulation of new forms of cultural capital. This is illustrated by their manner of speaking, ways of behaving, self-presentation, and their appreciation of extra-curricular hobbies. A well-integrated relationship between migrant and local children can be identified, which contributes to the production of a generation of ‘new urban citizens’, yet in the meantime reproduces the migrant families’ class status as low-skilled labourers.
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Bourdieu’s theory of capital can contribute to geographies of elites and the super-rich, as a lens through which spaces of consumption, such as the residential neighbourhood, can also be understood as spaces where capital is accumulated in its varied economic, social and cultural guises. In this paper, I examine how residents of highly affluent neighbourhoods produce and sustain the prestige or distinction of their neighbourhood, and how they appropriate it as their own cultural capital. Addressing this question empirically, I analyse qualitative data from interviews with 46 residents of three of Australia’s most affluent neighbourhoods: Mosman (Sydney), Toorak (Melbourne) and Cottesloe (Perth). The analysis uncovers the practices – from consumption of luxury houses and cars to ‘everyday conservatism’ – through which distinction becomes spatially fixed in elite neighbourhoods, and appropriated by residents, however unevenly across lines of gender, age and other social differences. I argue that distinguishing between different phases of the cultural capital circuit – the performance, appropriation and operationalisation of distinction – can help address geographers’ unease with matters of agency, social difference and spatiality in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital.
Chapter
In this chapter we discuss our chosen geographies, revisiting both the super-diversity and gentrification debates. The chapter develops a nuanced account of different formations of gentrification and addresses the ways in which middle class-settlement in urban neighbourhoods converge—in a range of different ways—with super-diversity. We argue for the contradictory possibilities of encounters of difference; namely, what Les Back identified as the ‘metropolitan paradox’ and others have identified as the ways in which conflict and tension are integral to the unpredictable dynamics of conviviality as a social process and the lived experience of intense formations of difference in urban environments. We also discuss how Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and possible disruptions to the habitus could help us to understand perceptions of and reactions to diversity.
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Toorak (Melbourne) and Mosman (Sydney) are two of the most affluent suburbs in Australia. The high costs of living and housing in these suburbs preserve their high status. Yet, in recent years, the growing presence of wealthy Chinese residents and investors has challenged longstanding Anglo-Australian residents' perceptions of these suburbs as “European villages”. At the same time as new shared identities are being produced, feelings of resentment and anxiety are also increasingly being expressed through local urban planning conflicts related to density and heritage in residential development. Drawing on theories of “elite integration”, and interviews with 35 residents of the two suburbs the paper exposes a range of spatial, material, and discursive practices through which the Australian elite manages ethnic diversity within its suburban strongholds.
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The fall and rise of class analysis in British sociology, 1945-2016 This paper explains the reasons for the revival of class analysis in British sociology over the past 20 years, placing this in a longer term context of the development of sociology in the UK since 1945. I show how the issue of class was made central to the growth of sociology after the Second World War, but in a form which placed white male manual workers as the central of the “working class”. This focus posed problems for class analysis from the 1970s because de-industrialization, immigration, and changing gender relations appeared to this vision of the working class less relevant. I show how the influential “class structural” approach to class associated with John Goldthorpe and his associates succeeded in championing a model of class which had considerable comparative appeal, but which limited the scope of class analysis. The final part of my paper shows how over the past two decades, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology has proved very significant in elaborating a rich, multi-dimensional approach to class analysis. I show how the success of the Great British Class Survey, in developing public debates on class, is inspired by these currents.
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This paper looks at the places of art and art galleries from a spatial point of view and in relation to contemporary urban dynamics. Presenting prospective reflections about the spatialities of places where transactions are financial and symbolic, as well as the data and methods used for empirical research, this paper introduces an ongoing project dealing with the Parisian gallery landscape since the contemporary art boom, in relation to the production of urban space. I argue that ‘visibility’ is a useful notion to interrogate the geography and dynamics associated with art galleries. It can either describe their presence and environment within the city and from the street, or the ‘visibilisation’ of portions of the city in relation to the dynamics of urban renewal. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, the project will offer insights into the causes and impacts of the spatial structuration of the Parisian art market on different scales. Therefore, the project enhances existing research concerning the influence of art-related activities upon the transformations of urban space, but also anchors the analysis of the geography of art galleries and its recent history in a wider socio-economical perspective. © 2017, Articulo - Journal of Urban Research. All rights reserved.
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Presented in a thematic manner, the aim of this synopsis is to paint a picture of French- and Dutch-speaking Brussels youth between the ages of 12 and 25, based on a great diversity of data and academic research published since 2005. The institutional and linguistic complexity which characterises the situation in Brussels and the production of research makes this type of exercise absolutely necessary. This inventory of knowledge regarding youth in Brussels sheds light on their extraordinary diversity and their vulnerability, as well as on the work to be carried out in order to fill the gaps and improve the information available for the stakeholders in the field. This synopsis therefore also constitutes a proposed research agenda.
Article
Full-text available
Presented in a thematic manner, the aim of this synopsis is to paint a picture of French- and Dutch-speaking Brussels youth between the ages of 12 and 25, based on a great diversity of data and academic research published since 2005. The institutional and linguistic complexity which characterises the situation in Brussels and the production of research makes this type of exercise absolutely necessary. This inventory of knowledge regarding youth in Brussels sheds light on their extraordinary diversity and their vulnerability, as well as on the work to be carried out in order to fill the gaps and improve the information available for the stakeholders in the field. This synopsis therefore also constitutes a proposed research agenda.
Chapter
As we discussed in Chap. 4, in highlighting the interdependencies between discourse and materiality, Hardy and Thomas (2014) point to the significance of bodies and space as well as objects and practices in understanding relations of power. The body is the site of ‘local, intimate and intricate power relations’, enacted and contested through the intersection of the material and the discursive—a source and agent of experience, composed of immediate perceptions, feelings, and reactions. An embodied being is thus necessarily actively involved with and inseparable from its surrounding world. Practices, as structures of action, shape how bodies are involved, how objects are used, and how subjects act and are acted upon. Here the body ceaselessly performs the activities of centring, appropriating, and projecting—in effect building the world of experience that transpires through practices.
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Order and stability are tenuous and fragile. People have to work to create and sustain a semblance of stability and order in their lives and in their organizations and larger communities. Order on the Edge of Chaos compares different ideas about how we coordinate and cooperate. The ideas come from 'micro-sociology', and they offer new answers to the classic question of Thomas Hobbes: 'how is social order possible?' The most common answers in sociology, political science, and economics assume a fundamental tension between individual and group interests. This volume reveals that social orders are problematic even without such tension, because when people interact with each other, they verify their identities, feel and respond to emotions, combine different goal frames, and develop shared responsibility. The ties of people to groups result from many aspects of their social interactions, and these cannot be explained by individual self-interest.
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Moving beyond the traditional dichotomies of social theory, Understanding Social Inequality brings the study of social stratification and inequality into the 21st century. Starting with the widely agreed "fact" that the world is becoming more unequal, this book pulls together the "identity of displacement" in sociology and the "spaces of flow" of geography to show how place has become an increasingly important focus for understanding new trends in social inequality. The book charts a path through current debates and issues that studies of social inequality cannot afford to ignore. Accessible and engagingly written, this book stimulates the "sociological imagination", prompting readers to link personal experiences and public issues.
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The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
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Michel Guérin présente les principaux résultats d’une enquête générale sur les pratiques et la consommation culturelles en Communauté française. Cette enquête permet des comparaisons avec une étude du même type datant de 1985. Il est donc possible de dresser un portrait transversal, homogène et évolutif du consommateur culturel francophone. En 20 ans, la société a changé : la globalisation a transformé en profondeur les comportements et la culture a elle aussi évolué dans ses contenus et dans ses formes. Ses langages se sont diversifiés. Des pratiques amateurs se sont également étendues à de nombreuses disciplines artistiques. Les nouvelles technologies sont à l’origine de nouveaux comportements culturels. L’enquête fait le point sur la démocratisation de la culture, l’un des objectifs majeurs des politiques culturelles. Mais les loisirs intègrent une multitude d’activités qui débordent l’offre publique et la culture « cultivée ». C’est pourquoi l’enquête prend aussi en compte l’ensemble des autres activités du temps choisi telles que la pratique d’un sport, les sorties entre amis, les promenades en famille ou encore la pratique de la messagerie instantanée sur internet.
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Geometric Data Analysis (GDA) is the name suggested by P. Suppes (Stanford University) to designate the approach to Multivariate Statistics initiated by Benzécri as Correspondence Analysis, an approach that has become more and more used and appreciated over the years. This book presents the full formalization of GDA in terms of linear algebra-the most original and far-reaching consequential feature of the approach-and shows also how to integrate the standard statistical tools such as Analysis of Variance, including Bayesian methods. Chapter 9, Research Case Studies, is nearly a book in itself; it presents the methodology in action on three extensive applications, one for medicine, one from political science, and one from education (data borrowed from the Stanford computer-based Educational Program for Gifted Youth ). Thus the readership of the book concerns both mathematicians interested in the applications of mathematics, and researchers willing to master an exceptionally powerful approach of statistical data analysis.
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The classification of 40 years of neighborhood data for the Cleveland, OH, region reveals five types of neighborhoods—Struggling, Struggling African American, Stability, New Starts, and Suburbia. The way in which these neighborhoods appear, disappear, and reappear in different locations throughout the region and throughout the study period gives rise to the term neighborhood déjà vu. It aptly describes how a changing neighborhood may seem to transition to something entirely different, but in reality is simply becoming another established type of neighborhood. Cluster analysis acts upon demographic, economic, and housing data for census tracts from 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 to identify these neighborhood types. What makes this analysis unique is that the clustering procedure operates on each tract in each of the census years. Thus, each neighborhood is treated as four individual observations: one for each of the census years. By defining each variable relative to its census year mean, the data are comparable across census years, allowing for neighborhoods of one time period to cluster with neighborhoods from another time period. Thus, the five neighborhood types are spread not only throughout the region, but also throughout the study period. This yields the ability to trace through time and space the rise (or fall) or concentration (or diffusion) of any of the resulting neighborhoods. Of particular concern is that spatially, traditional Suburbia neighborhoods are migrating farther and farther from the urban core, and that numerically, they are disappearing from the region altogether—as of 2000, only 55% of 1970's Suburbia neighborhoods remained.
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Based on Danish survey data subjected to correspondence analysis, this article aims at carrying out a critical assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social differentiation in advanced societies as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. As his theory goes, capital volume (economic + cultural capital) and capital composition (the relative weight of the two) are the main dimensions of social differentiation, which structure the space of social positions as well as the space of lifestyles. The central discussion of the article concerns the character of cultural capital, and the role it plays in the formation of social divisions. This leads to a discussion of four core questions: first, are there signs of a strong individualism and, correspondingly, a weak social structuring of lifestyles? The study does not find support for this view. Second, does classical highbrow culture play a central role as a marker of distinction? Cultural capital in a contemporary Danish context appears to be less related to traditional highbrow cultural consumption than in Bourdieu's studies in France some decades ago. Third, is there a rise in the omnivorousness and tolerant taste within the cultural elite? This study answers negatively, as those adhering to the preferences that are most typical for the cultural elite tend to simultaneously avoid or mark distance to popular expressions of taste. Fourth, are there traces of new forms of cultural capital? The study uncovers a cleavage between a global orientation or a form of cosmopolitanism or “connectedness”, on the one hand, and a local and traditional orientation on the other. The conceptualisation of such differences are questioned, however, as current sociology appears to conceptualise social divisions rather systematically in ways that automatically euphemise the orientation of intellectuals towards the world.
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Field theory is a more or less coherent approach in the social sciences whose essence is the explanation of regularities in individual action by recourse to position vis-h-vis others. Position in the field indicates the potential for a force exerted on the person, but a force that impinges "from the inside" as opposed to external compulsion. Motivation is accordingly considered to be the paramount example of social structure in action, as opposed to a residue of chance or freedom. While field theory is often castigated for its necessarily tautological definition, this may be far more of an advantage than a defect. Field theory offers social scientists a combination of analytical insight and attention to the concrete; further, the implicit definition of "explanation" that it brings is one that, unlike conventional sociological definitions, is internally consistent and in accord with everyday usage.
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Residential segregation has often been seen as a significant and intractable urban problem. Empirical analyses have focused on the clustering and social impacts of concentrated deprivation and ethnicity, while explanations of segregation have generally looked at the role of income, housing markets, and wider social and institutional discrimination. This paper attempts to build on such preoccupations by considering current urban transformations to theorise the recent middle-class colonisation of cities in the UK. Segregation is seen here not just as the concentration of an urban poor or particular ethnic groups, but also as representing an extended spatial bifurcation between the choices of the affluent to withdraw into increasingly insulated enclaves, while places of poverty contain populations away from this increasingly fearful, yet tendentiously urbanising, middle class. Using a series of case studies, a typology is developed of increasing disaffiliation as a prelude to a further debate on the feasibility of encouraging social diversity in the city.
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Gentrification involves the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment. This paper reconsiders the role of artists as agents, and aestheticisation as a process, in contributing to gentrification, an argument illustrated with empirical data from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Because some poverty neighbourhoods may be candidates for occupation by artists, who value their afford ability and mundane, off-centre status, the study also considers the movement of districts from a position of high cultural capital and low economic capital to a position of steadily rising economic capital. The paper makes extensive use of Bourdieu's conceptualisation of the field of cultural production, including his discussion of the uneasy relations of economic and cultural capitals, the power of the aesthetic disposition to valorise the mundane and the appropriation of cultural capital by market forces. Bourdieu's thinking is extended to the field of gentrification in an account that interprets the enhanced valuation of cultural capital since the 1960s, encouraging spatial proximity by other professionals to the inner-city habitus of the artist. This approach offers some reconciliation to theoretical debates in the gentrification literature about the roles of structure and agency and economic and cultural explanations. It also casts a more critical historical perspective on current writing lauding the rise of the cultural economy and the creative city.
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This paper has been prompted by a journal debate at the start of the new millennium on the future of urban sociology in light of the proliferation of urban studies in many disciplines at a time of increasingly blurred boundaries between cities and the world at large. It was a debate that, inter alia, asked urban sociology to engage seriously with globalization (and contemporary modernity in general) as well as to return to its original concerns with urban social inequality in a new division of inter-disciplinary labour. This paper steers clear of defining a role for urban sociology, principally because it believes urban studies to have become a field of such intense inter-disciplinarity that it makes little sense to demarcate the urban sociology from urban geography, urban planning and politics, and urban anthropology. Instead the debate is used to raise a more basic question of urban ontology relating, firstly, to how cities should be imagined as places, so that due recognition can be given to the radical exteriority that characterizes them and, secondly, to how the urban social should be imagined, so that trans-local influences and non-human associations can be counted as part of the urban social. It is argued that these two ontological inflections imply a different understanding of the geography and sociology of the city to that assumed in the original debate.
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The following text is taken from the publisher's website: "Splintering Urbanism offers a path-breaking analysis of the nature of the urban condition at the start of the new millennium. Adopting a global and interdisciplinary perspective, it reveals how new technologies and increasingly privatised systems of infrastructure provision - telecommunications, highways, urban streets, energy, and water - are supporting the splintering of metropolitan areas across the world. The result is a new 'socio-technical' way of understanding contemporary urban change, which brings together discussions about: * globalisation and the city * the urban and social effects of new technology * urban, architectural and social theory * social polarisation, marginalisation and democratisation * infrastructure, architecture and the built environment * developed, developing and post-communist cities."
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The recent cultural turn in American sociology has inspired a number of more scientifically oriented scholars to study the meanings that are embedded within institutions, practices, and cultural artifacts. I focus here on research that (a) emphasizes institutional (rather than individual) meanings, (b) uses a structural approach to interpretation, and (c) employs formal algorithms or quantitative procedures for reducing the complexity of meanings to simpler structural principles. I discuss two core methodological issues—the assessment of similarities and differences between items in a cultural system and the process by which structure-preserving simplifications are found in the data. I also highlight the importance of two-mode analytic procedures and I review some of the perceived benefits and criticisms of this style of research.
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Examines the kinds of units employed in socioecological macro-analyses; types of empirical factorial studies; the demand for technical invariance; the results from factorial studies; and the future of factorial social ecology. -R.House
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This paper proposes gentrification as an example of class habitus adjusting to a new field via a time-space strategy that involves conscious rational coordination of class agents on a new aesthetic ‘focal point’. This approach suggests: (1) a much greater role for conscious rational processes in both the intentional and intuitive processes of class reproduction; (2) an understanding via gentrification of the symbolic significance of time-space in class processes; (3) the significance of individual class agents in the process of gentrification; (4) a view of gentrification that gives greater prominence to working-class taste and habitus.
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From the Publisher: This ambitious book is an account of the economic and social dynamics of the new age of information. Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, it aims to formulate a systematic theory of the information society which takes account of the fundamental effects of information technology on the contemporary world. The global economy is now characterized by the almost instantaneous flow and exchange of information, capital and cultural communication. These flows order and condition both consumption and production. The networks themselves reflect and create distinctive cultures. Both they and the traffic they carry are largely outside national regulation. Our dependence on the new modes of informational flow gives enormous power to those in a position to control them to control us. The main political arena is now the media, and the media are not politically answerable. Manuel Castells describes the accelerating pace of innovation and application. He examines the processes of globalization that have marginalized and now threaten to make redundant whole countries and peoples excluded from informational networks. He investigates the culture, institutions and organizations of the network enterprise and the concomitant transformation of work and employment. He points out that in the advanced economies production is now concentrated on an educated section of the population aged between 25 and 40: many economies can do without a third or more of their people. He suggests that the effect of this accelerating trend may be less mass unemployment than the extreme flexibilization of work and individualization of labor, and, in consequence, a highly segmented socialstructure. The author concludes by examining the effects and implications of technological change on mass media culture ("the culture of real virtuality"), on urban life, global politics, and the nature of time and history. Written by one of the worlds leading social thinkers and researchers The Rise of the Network Society is the first of three linked investigations of contemporary global, economic, political and social change. It is a work of outstanding penetration, originality, and importance.
Book
Culture, Class, Distinction is major contribution to international debates regarding the role of cultural capital in relation to modern forms of inequality. Drawing on a national study of the organisation of cultural practices in contemporary Britain, the authors review Bourdieu’s classic study of the relationships between culture and class in the light of subsequent debates. In doing so they re-appraise the relationships between class, gender and ethnicity, music, film, television, literary, and arts consumption, the organisation of sporting and culinary practices, and practices of bodily and self maintenance. As the most comprehensive account to date of the varied interpretations of cultural capital that have been developed in the wake of Bourdieu’s work, Culture, Class, Distinction offers the first systematic assessment of the relationships between cultural practice and the social divisions of class, gender and ethnicity in contemporary Britain.
Article
This essay is a response to Tom Slater's article ‘The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research’. My essay addresses two issues. First, I consider the issue of why gentrification research appears to be losing its critical edge. I argue that social position infects understanding and, inevitably therefore, academic knowledge production. Thus the social proximity of the academic nobility to gentrifiers (and social distance between the academic nobility and the displaced) has epistemological consequences, notably, the lack of critical perspectives in gentrification research. Second, Slater's paper appears to be an appeal for more ‘critical’ research from the academic nobility. Perhaps we should go even further. We should actually question the epistemic authority of the academic nobility, which claims its legitimacy to speak about gentrification on the grounds that it undertakes ‘research’ into the phenomenon. There are strong and sound epistemological reasons for also listening to the marginalized voices of people that have ‘first hand’ (albeit not ‘research’) experience of the negative effects of gentrification. Résumé Ce texte est une réponse à l'article de Tom Slater sur ‘l’éviction' des perspectives critiques des études sur la ‘gentrification’. Il aborde deux points. En premier lieu, il traite des raisons pour lesquelles ces études semblent perdre leur acuité critique. La position sociale entache la compréhension et, donc inévitablement, la production de savoir académique. Ainsi, la proximité sociale entre la noblesse académique et les nouveaux propriétaires aisés (et la distance sociale entre la noblesse académique et les déplacés) a des conséquences au plan épistémologique, notamment l'absence de points de vue critiques dans la recherche sur la ‘gentrification’. En second lieu, le texte de Slater apparaît comme un appel à des études plus critiques de la part de la noblesse académique. Peut‐être faudrait‐il aller plus loin, jusqu'à une réelle remise en cause de l'autoritéépistémique de la noblesse académique, laquelle revendique sa légitimité pour parler de la ‘gentrification’ en arguant qu'elle mène des ‘recherches’ sur un phénomène. Il existe des raisons épistémologiques solides et sensées pour écouter les voix marginalisées des gens qui ont une expérience de ‘l’intérieur' (pas de ‘recherche’) sur les effets néfastes de la ‘gentrification’.
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Housing market renewal is one of the most controversial urban policy programmes of recent years. Housing Market Renewal and Social Class critically examines the rationale for housing market renewal: to develop 'high value' housing markets in place of the so-called 'failing markets' of low-cost housing. Whose interests are served by such a programme and who loses out? Drawing on empirical evidence from Liverpool, the author argues that housing market renewal plays to the interests of the middle classes in viewing the market for houses as a field of social and economic 'opportunities', a stark contrast to a working class who are more concerned with the practicalities of 'dwelling'. Against this background of these differing attitudes to the housing market, Housing Market Renewal and Social Class explores the difficult question of whether institutions are now using the housing market renewal programme to make profits at the expense of ordinary working-class people. Reflecting on how this situation has come about, the book critically examines the purpose of current housing market renewal policies, and suggests directions for interested social scientists wishing to understand the implications of the programme.
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Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Lévi-Strauss—a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Sketch for a Self-Analysis is the ultimate outcome of Bourdieu’s lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not an autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu’s theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time—including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir—as well as Bourdieu’s own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria.
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This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life. They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics.
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‘Globalization and Belonging’s headline message - that place matters, that locality remains vital to people, is arresting’ - Frank Webster, Professor of Sociology, City University, London Drawing on long-term empirical research into cultural practices, lifestyles and identities, Globalization and Belonging explores how far-reaching global changes are articulated locally. The authors address key sociological issues of stratification as analysis alongside ‘cultural’ issues of identity, difference, choice and lifestyle. Their original argument: " Shows how globalisation theory conceives of the ‘local’" Reveals that people have a sense of elective belonging based on where they choose to put down roots " Suggests that the feel of a place is much more strongly influenced by the values and lifestyles of those migrating to it" reinvigorates debates in urban and community studies by recovering the ‘local’ as an intrinsic aspect of globalisationTheoretically rigorous, the book is brought to life with direct quotations from the authors’ research, and appeals to students in urban sociology, urban geography, media studies and cultural studies.
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French Cultural Participation in the Digital Age First published in 1970s, The Ministry of Culture and Communication’s Cultural Participation survey has been the main barometer of French behaviour in the area of media and culture. Over a decade on from the 1997 results, those published in 2008 shows the impact of ten years of change wrought by the booming digital and internet-based culture : the increasing power of screen culture, the declining popularity of television and radio among the younger generations, declining daily newspaper and book readership and developments in content production.
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This paper explores the potential of Bourdieu's approach to capital as a way of understanding class dynamics in contemporary capitalism. Recent rethinking of class analysis has sought to move beyond what Rosemary Crompton (1998) calls the 'employment aggregate approach', one which involves categorizing people into class groups according to whether they have certain attributes (e.g. occupations). Instead, recent contributions by Pierre Bourdieu, Erik Wright, Aage Sorensen, and Charles Tilly have concentrated on understanding the mechanisms that produce class inequalities. Concepts such as assets, capitals and resources (CARs) are often used to explain how class inequalities are produced, but there remain ambiguities and differences in how such terms are understood. This paper identifies problems faced both by game theoretical Marxism and by the rational choice approach of Goldthorpe in developing an adequate approach to CARs. It then turns to critically consider how elements of Bourdieu's approach, where his concept of capital is related to those of habitus and field, might overcome these weaknesses. Our rendering of his arguments leads us to conclude that our understanding of CARs might be enriched by considering how capital is distinctive not in terms of distinct relations of exploitation, but through its potential to accumulate and to be converted to other resources. This focus, we suggest, sidesteps otherwise intractable problems in CAR based approaches.
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This article amplifies Tom Slater's diagnosis of the causes of the gentrification of recent gentrification research. It argues that the shift from the denunciation to the celebration of gentrification, the elision of the displacement of the established residents, and the euphemistic focus on ‘social mixing’ partake of a broader pattern of invisibility of the working class in the public sphere and social inquiry. This effacing of the proletariat in the city is reinforced by the growing heteronomy of urban research , as the latter becomes more tightly tethered to the concerns of city rulers. Both tendencies, in turn, reveal and abet the shifting role of the state from provider of social support for lower‐income populations to supplier of business services and amenities for middle‐ and upper‐class urbanites — among them the cleansing of the built environment and the streets from the physical and human detritus wrought by economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment. To build better models of the changing nexus of class and space in the neoliberal city, we need to relocate gentrification in a broader and sturdier analytic framework by revising class analysis to capture the (de)formation of the postindustrial proletariat, resisting the seductions of the prefabricated problematics of policy, and giving pride of place to the state as producer of sociospatial inequality. Résumé Cet article amplifie le diagnostic de Tom Slater sur les causes de la ‘gentrification’ des études récentes sur la ‘gentrification’ urbaine. Le glissement de la dénonciation à l'éloge de la gentrification, l'élision du déplacement forcé des habitants établis et la focalisation euphémistique sur la ‘mixité sociale’ s'inscrivent dans un schéma plus large d' invisibilisation de la classe ouvrière dans la sphère publique et les investigations sociologiques. Cet effacement du prolétariat des métropoles est renforcé par l'hétéronomie croissante de la recherche urbaine, plus étroitement liée que jamais aux préoccupations des dirigeants de la ville. Ces deux tendances révèlent et facilitent la mutation du rôle de l'État, de fournisseur de soutiens sociaux aux populations démunies en agence de services et d'équipements marchands pour citadins des classes moyennes et supérieures — au premier rang desquels figure le nettoyage de l'environnement bâti et des rues des détritus humains et matériels engendrés par la dérégulation de l'économie et le recul de la protection sociale. Pour construire de meilleurs modèles des rapports changeants entre classe et espace dans la ville néolibérale, il faut replacer la gentrification des quartiers populaires dans un cadre analytique élargi et renforcé en réélaborant l'analyse de classe pour saisir la (dé)formation du prolétariat post‐industriel, en résistant aux séductions des problématiques préfabriquées de politique publique, et en accordant une place centrale à l'État en tant que producteur d'inégalités sociospatiales.
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This essay argues that Tom Slater's article makes several important points regarding what he rightly suggests is the disappearance of a critical edge from much of the recent gentrification literature. It explores one of these points in greater depth, i.e. the notion that the working class occupy a ‘backstage’ role vis-à-vis the analysis of gentrification. This is done via a discussion of gentrification and London's class structure in relation to the work of Tim Butler and Chris Hamnett. The essay makes a plea for more ‘bottom up’ accounts of gentrification which focus upon the urban working class, especially in relation to contemporary processes of policy-driven state-led gentrification. Dans son article, Tom Slater présente plusieurs points importants sur ce qu'il suggère, à juste titre, être la disparition d'une ‘acuité’ critique dans la plupart des publications récentes sur la ‘gentrification’. Cet essai approfondit l'un de ces points, à savoir l'idée que la classe ouvrière occupe une place ‘en coulisses’ dans les études sur la ‘gentrification’. Pour ce faire, la ‘gentrification’ et la structure de classe à Londres sont analysés par rapport au travail de Tim Butler et Chris Hamnett. La conclusion appelle à davantage de récits du processus qui viennent ‘d'en bas’ en s'intéressant à la classe ouvrière urbaine, en particulier par rapport aux processus contemporains la ‘gentrification’ mené par l'État et orienté par la politique publique.
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Attention to global and world cities has directed the field of urban studies to the significance of international and transnational processes in shaping city economies. This article evaluates these approaches, from a position off their maps. I argue that the circulation of these approaches in academic and policy realms adversely impacts on cities which do not fall into these categories by setting up the idea of the global city as a 'regulating fiction', a standard towards which they aspire. It establishes a small sector of the global economy as most desirable in planning the future of cities. By contrast, mega-cities function as the dramatic 'other' of world and global cities, and highlight the developmentalist discourse through which most cities in poor countries are assessed as fundamentally lacking in qualities of city-ness. I argue that the long-standing categories of western/third-world cities have been translated into the apparently transnational accounts of global and world cities. Western cities continue to be the primary site of production of apparently unlocated urban theory; so-called third-world cities (and other cities off the map of the world cities cartography) are interpreted through a developmentalist lens and, where they are referred to at all, are framed in terms of 'difference' or irrelevance. This article draws attention to the emergence of an alternative set of theoretical approaches, which are more inclusive in their geographical reach and which are concerned with the diverse dynamics of ordinary cities. These approaches have not yet realized that they have the potential to broaden the base for theorizing about cities and, with this in mind, the article explores the potential for a more cosmopolitan urban theory. The policy stakes in this are high, and the article notes that there are important political reasons to promote the analysis of ordinary cities in the face of the persistence of ambitions in many cities to become 'world cities'. Copy
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Recent years have seen an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the process of gentrification, accompanied by a surge of articles published on the topic. This article looks at some recent literature - both scholarly and popular - and considers the reasons why the often highly critical perspectives on gentrification that we saw in earlier decades have dwindled. Whilst a number of reasons could be put forward, three in particular are discussed. First, the resilience of theoretical and ideological squabbles over the causes of gentrification, at the expense of examining its effects; second, the demise of displacement as a defining feature of the process and as a research question; and third, the pervasive influence of neoliberal urban policies of 'social mix' in central city neighbourhoods. It is argued that the 'eviction' of critical perspectives from a field in which they were once plentiful has serious implications for those at risk from gentrification, and that reclaiming the term from those who have sugarcoated what was not so long ago a 'dirty word' (Smith, 1996) is essential if political challenges to the process can be effective. Copyright (c) 2006 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..