Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu’s topological sociology gives us the tools both to energize and also to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape.

Wacquant proposes to rethink “the urban” as the domain of the accumulation, diversification, and contestation of capitals (in the plural) and the ground for the commingling and collision of variegated habitus, which makes the city a central site and stake of historical struggles. He shows that the city is a paradoxical absent presence at the heart of Bourdieu’s sociology and that “urbanizing” his thought strengthens his theory of fields but unsettles his account of habitus.

At every step in the formulation of his neo-Bourdieusian program for the social study of the city, which foregrounds the role of symbolic power and the state, Wacquant confronts the objections and responds to the criticisms that his arguments have evoked across disciplinary and national boundaries. This gives unusual force and special clarity to a book that will change the way readers understand Bourdieu and view the metropolis.

Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory, as well as to anyone in the social sciences and humanities interested in the work of Bourdieu and its relevance to their own concerns.

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research associate at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris. His books are translated in twenty languages and include Urban Outcasts (2008) and The Invention of the “Underclass” (2022), both also published by Polity.

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Taking Bourdieu to Town

Prologue

1 Bourdieu in the Urban Crucible

2 The Bitter Taste of Territorial Taint

3 Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality in the Neoliberal Metropolis

Epilogue Bourdieu in the City, the City in Bourdieu

References