Rethinking the city with Bourdieu’s trialectic

My forthcoming book Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023) is not intended as an eclectic combination of the structuralist and the phenomenological takes on the city rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s influential critique of the deadly antinomy of objectivism and subjectivism. Nor does it aim just to make room for the author of Distinction in the pantheon of theorists before which students of the city are expected to genuflect. I intend the book, not as an addition, but a challenge to the urban canon and a springboard for a possible reconstruction of urban theory and inquiry around what I christen the Bourdieusian trialectic of symbolic space, social space, and physical space. In this paper, I provide a compact characterization of the trialectic and then draw out its implications for the theory and comparative study of the city.