Abstract
I sometimes think it's strange that there exists an academic genre translating and adapting the work of grand theorists to ‘the city’; I’m reflexively suspicious of urban theory that claims a set of ideas relevant to the enormously diverse societies, economies, cultures and physical forms of cities around the world. In the same way that the ‘urban century’ is exploited by management consultants to sell their superficial insights, the contributions of ‘just add urban’ approaches to theory are often questionable and can tend towards some problematic universalisations.
Happily, Bourdieu Comes to Town provides much more than this. Building on the famous sociologist's well-known and less well-known works, Loïc Wacquant expertly outlines a dynamic interplay of physical, social and symbolic space as a way to approach the study of cities and urban life. Bourdieu's multi-polar theory of capital as the variety of productive economic, social, cultural and symbolic assets is one that I’ve long found appealing, and it is put instructively to work here through Wacquant's analysis of features of contemporary urban inequality including territorial stigmatisation, hyper-incarceration and the punitive turn in social policy.
Yet there are elements of Wacquant's work that grate with what are, in my opinion, key developments in contemporary urban scholarship. Following Wacquant's advice to engage Bourdieu's voluminous work at the level of individual concepts and mid-level theorising, in what follows I offer three short reflections on the resonances and discordances of his Bourdieusian urban theory with urban politics in 21st century Australia.
Bourdieu at the auction
A key contribution of this text is to theorise the city as a dynamic interplay of physical, social and symbolic space, each
“thick” with its specific history, concretized by arrangements of cognitive schemata, distributions of capital, and the city's evolving landscape, as well as with the history of its relationships with the other two. For each space is at once a product, a stake, and a weapon in historical struggles for the appropriation of material and symbolic goods (
Wacquant, 2023
: 8).
Australian cities rank among the highest for house prices and price appreciation, having been a world-leader in first expanding the rate of homeownership in the mid-20th century and later liberalising lending, finance and taxation. Owning a home, Adkins et al. (2020) suggest, is now a vector of class and social status of at least equal standing as waged labour, and a fundamental driver of inequality with intergenerational ramifications (see also Christophers, 2021). And where one's home is located is also pivotal: house prices have not appreciated everywhere equally over the last three decades, but to extreme extents in the gentrified inner-urban areas of the largest cities and more modestly in outer suburban areas, smaller cities and regional locations.
As such, where Wacquant shares Bourdieu's insight that ‘the distribution of a class or class fraction in socially hierarchized geographical space’ is a ‘manifestation of its position in social space’ (Bourdieu, 1979, in Wacquant, 2023: 31), we might add that one's position in physical space and vis-à-vis property ownership also reciprocally situates one in social space. Accordingly, the distribution of the ‘profits of space’ (Bourdieu, 1993a, in Wacquant, 2023: 9) has become, in Australian cities and elsewhere, one of the most contentious political issues, manifest across a spectrum of resurgent interest in public housing and rent control, ‘Yes in My Backyard’ or YIMBY movements targeting regulations seen to prohibit increased urban housing supply, and the re-articulation of anti-immigrant racism in relation to housing costs (e.g. Holleran, 2022; Rogers, 2017; Roy and Mason, 2019; Wacquant, 2023: 105–106).
Bourdieu at the senate inquiry; or, Bourdieu joins TikTok
This political spectrum offers a study of the significance of symbolic power, and the contemporary interplay of economic and symbolic capital. In the midst of the present and widely acknowledged housing crisis, a range of organisations have taken it upon themselves to produce reports about the nature of the problem and its antidotes. They include think tanks, the popular and financial press, government agencies and academic research centres. According to a growing number of these reports, the central problem is that there are just too few homes being built, and the solution is to ease or eradicate planning rules and regulations that purportedly prevent new construction. The housing question is reframed as one of mere quantity, casting aside divergent analyses that foreground questions of who funds, builds, owns, profits and pays for it.
A short case study: the 2022 Inquiry into housing affordability and supply in Australia received numerous well-meaning submissions stressing the need for greater state spending on non-market housing and tighter restrictions on private property investment, yet these were dismissed by the Inquiry chair, former Liberal Party MP Jason Falinski and now New South Wales party president, as ‘special interests’ clouding the real issue of over-regulation.
Wacquant stresses that symbolic power, of the type wielded through such reports and from the position of Inquiry chair, is dominated by material forms of power, ‘such as military force and economic suasion,” which “disguise themselves in symbolic clothing’ to ‘economize the amount of social energy needed to maintain their dominion’ (67–68). It's clear that much of the problematisation of ‘barriers to housing supply’ is intended to anticipate, counteract and absorb growing discontent as well as interest in alternatives. Yet the extent to which it has gained traction is difficult to discern. It certainly dominates traditional media; however, the authority of these institutions has waned significantly, particularly among younger generations, in the fragmented landscape of digital and social media. While some are sharing memes about NIMBYs, others are sharing Mao, and a diverse range of movements are circulating counter-analyses and organising housing campaigns online. Just what symbolic power looks like in this contemporary context is something Wacquant leaves to future investigations.
Bourdieu on stolen land
Wacquant's conceptualisation of neoliberalism as a project of ‘centaur’ statecraft, with a liberal disposition towards society's privileged and a punitive one towards its poor, captured my interest as an undergraduate and later postgraduate researcher. In Australia, this is most starkly apparent vis-à-vis Indigenous people. First Nations people make up approximately 3% of the population but nearly a third of those incarcerated and nearly half of all children in out-of-home care. Over the last two decades, Indigenous communities have been the first and most viciously targeted with workfare and welfare quarantine or ‘income management’ policies. They have also experienced the most severe abandonment of social service provision; they are more likely to be social housing tenants than homeowners and far more likely to live in housing that fails to meet acceptable standards. But while this is not a non-urban dynamic, it is probably most sharply expressed in rural and remote areas, with the Northern Territory National Emergency Response or ‘Intervention’ into Aboriginal communities being the sharpest (e.g. Watson, 2009). For any antipodean account of Centaur state neoliberalism, it's necessary to look beyond the city.
Furthermore, this is not simply a ‘newly’ neoliberal dynamic, but rather an evolution and rearticulation of settler colonial state power. As Strakosch (2015: 7) argues, while neoliberalism has reframed political relationships between Indigenous and settler people between poles of autonomy and control, it continues the ‘selective coercion, racial pathologisation and exclusion of Indigenous subjects in order to maintain settler privileges’. Its emphasis on ‘economic necessity and individual welfare […] depoliticises and technicalises colonial hierarchies, framing them as the result of natural economic processes and individual capacity failures’ (Strakosch, 2015).
Wacquant's brief and rather trite account of settler colonial urbanization (2023: 57–58) seems a world away from these dynamics. Bourdieu in the City makes glaring omission of an expanding body of literature on racial capitalism and the settler colonial city, with its crucial insights into the dynamic but durable role of racial hierarchies within the urban process, including the ongoing significance of racialized dispossession, and the (often coterminous) denial of sovereignty of Indigenous lands (e.g. Blatman-Thomas & Porter, 2019; Coulthard, 2014; Dantzler, 2021; Dorries et al., 2022; Simpson & Hugill, 2022). There is nowhere to locate such literature in the urban studies overview offered in its prologue, and the book's shallow dismissal of intersectional analyses – again, without substantive engagement with such work – only serves to make this more apparent.
As well as neglecting this important strand of contemporary scholarship, Bourdieu and the City passes the opportunity to speak directly to contemporary political mobilisations against the issues it expounds. While there is a hint towards the political possibilities of the city, there is no mention of movements for racial justice, prison and police abolition, and resurgent labour and tenant activism. This is a common frustration I feel when reading academic texts, so I don’t mean to single Wacquant out. However, Bourdieusian theories of capital and space offer useful ways of strategically thinking through the resources that social movements possess and require, and how they can be put to work to build power and appropriate space. While Bourdieu has been taken to the city, perhaps there's more work to do in taking him to the street.
