ABSTRACT
As urban resources are limited, residents struggle for access to housing, work and schools, even when they may not always experience this as such or reflect on it. This struggle is both individual, as when individuals try hard to organize resources for their kids, and structural, as boundary work of inclusion and exclusion makes it a struggle between social groups. Following Bourdieu (1992), we argue that different social classes create lifestyles that enable them to exchange resources and get them to function in a valuable way. They meanwhile segregate from other social classes in the city, to ensure the reproduction of their social positions. Here, we look in particular at how and why parents decide to settle in certain places, a practice that, although not intentionally so, creates an inward orientation of inclusion of people with similar positions at the expense of marginalizing others. Scholars who studied middle class urban or metropolitan habitus concluded that the middle classes intentionally segregated from lower situated ‘useless’ others in the city (Butler 2003) or were so inwardly orientated that there was little room for reflection (Watt 2009).
