ABSTRACT
In the introduction of this book I argued that literatures on housing and class formation have paid too much attention to habitus and not enough to the field. This is evident in the existing scholarship on middle-class formation (especially gentrification studies), which has largely focused on how the forms of capital possessed by middle-class people are mobilised within various fields of consumption. I think it is fair to say that nothing like the equivalent effort has been invested in analyses of the institutional constitution of these various fields of consumption. For example, gentrification studies have overwhelmingly focused on how middle-class gentrifiers have imposed their habitus upon inner-urban neighbourhoods, such as by mobilising their cultural capital to appropriate, valorise and secure parts of the inner-urban landscape for themselves. Insofar as gentrification studies focus on the institutions that structure the inner-urban housing market (e.g. developers, estate agents, regeneration agencies), they tend to appear late on the scene (see Ley 1996). In ‘staged’ processes of gentrification, then, these institutions are represented as agents that follow housing market trends and enter inner-urban housing markets to exploit the profitmaking opportunities that have been created in the inner city as a result of the efforts of ‘urban storm troopers’ who have valorised those areas at an earlier stage of the process of gentrification (e.g. Zukin 1982; Feinstein 1994). Thus we have been told very little about the institutional constitution of the market for houses in which social groups, such as gentrifiers, operate. What is needed, then, is an approach that places housing market institutions at the centre of analysis.
