Concepts and Principles for Taking Bourdieu into the City

In writing Bourdieu in the City, the author did not plan to propose an eclectic combination of the structuralist and the phenomenological takes on the city rehearsing Bourdieu's influential critique of the deadly antinomy of objectivism and subjectivism. By social space, the Bourdieu of Distinction means the multidimensional distribution of agents in objective positions defined by the allocation of efficient resources or capital, economic, cultural, social, and symbolic, for the generic species (which can be further specified depending on the field or subfield, e.g., bureaucratic versus intellectual capital in the academic field). For purposes of theoretical parsimony, these multiple dimensions can be collapsed into the two axes of total volume of capital (in its different pertinent forms) and composition of capital (especially the relative weight of economic and cultural capital), with a third axis capturing changes over time in capital volume and composition.