ABSTRACT
We experience places primarily in states of distraction; we live in the world first
and look at it second. Our contemplative gaze falls upon buildings and cities
within a spatial world we have already silently imbibed and embodied. How to
reconcile this unreflexive embodiment of place in everyday life with the ways in
which our critical gaze turns place into discourse? For this task I want to use the
work of Pierre Bourdieu. The ‘habitus’ and the ‘field’ are two key concepts that
form threads through Bourdieu’s sociology. The habitus is a set of embodied dis-
positions towards everyday social practice; divisions of space and time, of objects
and actions, of gender and status. The habitus conflates ‘habit’ and ‘habitat’ to
construct both a sense of place and the sense of one’s place in a social hierarchy
(Bourdieu 1977). The habitus is taken for granted: ‘The most successful ideo-
logical effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous
silence’ (Bourdieu 1977: 188). While the use of the term ‘ideology’ now seems
dated, the role of place as a taken-for-granted construction of everyday life
remains a key to the ways power is mediated in built form. Bourdieu’s later work
on ‘fields’ of cultural production examines overlapping fields of discourse (art,
architecture, urbanism) which are like game boards with certain forces prevailing
and resources at stake (Bourdieu 1993). The resources are forms of capital that
flow between the economic (material) and the cultural (social, symbolic). For
Bourdieu, fields of cultural production, such as architecture, are structured in a
manner which sustains the authority of those who already possess it, those with
the ‘cultural capital’ and the ‘feel for the game’ embodied in the habitus.
