Thinking the Urban With Bourdieu: An Interview With Loïc Wacquant

Written in the form of a dialogue with the urban sociologist Clément Rivière, this article spotlights some key ideas and draws out some analytic implications of Loïc Wacquant’s book Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory . The book proposes that we can build, based on Bourdieu “trialectic of symbolic, social and physical space,” a distinctive conception of the urban as the site for the accumulation, differentiation and contestation of varied species of capital and for the commingling and collision of variegated habitus. The city then emerges as a breeding ground for fields and an engine of social perplexity. Territorial stigmatization results from the symbolic marking of spoiled space. The jail is a core urban institution that needs to be brought to the forefront of the sociology of the production and regulation of class and ethnic marginality. To understand the city, you need to understand the penal state, and vice versa.