Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant's Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory (2023) offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). Clément Rivière interviews Loïc Wacquant on thinking the urban with Bourdieu.
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You conclude Bourdieu in the city by describing Pierre Bourdieu as a "sociologist of the urban in spite of himself". How did you come to "urbanize Bourdieu", when the city and the urban seem at first glance to be absent from his work?

In my own work, I've been using Bourdieu for a very long time, and I had in mind to make explicit the roots of my urban research in his work. It was an Italian colleague who wanted to prepare a small book based on an article (Wacquant 2018) that was at the origin of this book. I collected other articles in Italian and then set about rewriting what became a book in its own right, different from the original project, but which gave me the opportunity to make explicit the principles of a Bourdieusian analysis of the urban while proposing-which was not planned-a new reading of his work through the urban.

That is how this project came about, and it made me realize that much of Bourdieu's research dealt with space and urbanism as transformative forms. This is true of his early work on peasant societies in the Kabylia of colonial Algeria and in his own village of Lasseube in rural Béarn. These two societies, on the two sides of the Mediterranean, were disrupted and even, one might say, brought to their death by the pull of the city and the intrusion of institutions that are urban institutions par excellence, such as school, the labor market and political power. In Le Déracinement (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964), as in what later became Le Bal des célibataires (Bourdieu 2002), there is an analysis of urbanization as a social force that disrupts individual subjectivity, social relations and historical trajectory.

I also observed that in Bourdieu's mature work, in his studies of the academic field, the academic field, the religious field, the political field, the scientific field, the artistic field, all these fields had emerged in the city-and, and this is not by chance. The constitution of fields is the product of social differentiation, spatial differentiation and the cultural differentiation brought about by urbanization, the clustering of large, dense and diverse populations. The city is the vehicle for the accumulation and differentiation of forms of power, or forms of capital in Bourdieu's language, which leads to the creation of separate social worlds, what he calls microcosms (Bourdieu 2022). And, once these different fields emerge, the question arises of how they relate to each other, and the question of their hierarchy. This is where we see the struggle between the proponents of different forms of capital, the accumulation of capital, and the contestation of one kind of capital by another. And where does all this take place? In the city. It's obvious once you state it, but it was not obvious before! It's in the city that the bureaucrat, the lawyer, the artist, the politician, the scientist, the capitalist - I use the masculine because until recently, these fields were the exclusive preserve of men - find themselves physically, that these fields of which they are the incarnation crystallize and materialize. And so Bourdieusian sociology is tacitly backed by a conception of the city: my reading of Bourdieu is that the urban is the place where species of capital accumulate, differentiate and compete.

The first element, then, is the city as a breeding ground for fields. The second element is the agent. The urban environment is the place where people of different backgrounds and social experiences meet, and who therefore bring different habituses to the city. (Habitus is the concept developed by Bourdieu to designate the ways of thinking, feeling and acting that are socially acquired and thus integrate our social experiences). The city is the place where different habituses collide, where they are at odds or out of step with one another. This is clearly seen in comparison with peasant society, where the habitus is very coherent, because social conditioning is homogeneous, but also congruent with the world around. By contrast, the city is the environment in which habituses are formed that can be said to be incoherent and incongruent. This is why the urban environment creates social perplexity, in the sense that we often encounter people in our daily lives who are different from us, who have different habits, and who lead us to question our own way of thinking, feeling and acting. And that, to my mind, is a powerful way of characterizing the city. So there's a double specificity to the urban, on the side of capital and on the side of habitus.

In the wake of Bourdieu, you stress the importance of taking into account the role of symbolic structures in the production of urban inequalities. Could you outline the main features of what you describe as "territorial stigma" in the neoliberal era?

 There are many ways to read Bourdieu. He is often summed up in the "habitus-capital-field" triad. In fact, I think this summary is inadequate because it omits the category that, in my view, lies at the heart of his work, which is the notion of symbolic power. Symbolic power is, to put it briefly, the ability to transform reality by controlling and transforming its representations. This symbolic power is embodied in the categories of perception, i.e., the lenses through which we view the world. These are collective, historical lenses that we have learned from state institutions, schools, families and the media. What makes society possible is that, to a very large extent, we share the same categories of thought and perception. But, at the same time, these categories of perception are differentiated according to the position occupied in the social space, and so there is a battle to read society with different types of glasses. We can perceive society through class glasses, and say that society is divided into social classes, that urban conflicts are class conflicts, and we can try to mobilize politically on the basis of class as a "principle of vision and division", as Bourdieu puts it. But we can also put on ethnic or ethno-racial glasses and say that we have to read society through the prism of race, that we have to try to mobilize people along this divide, and so we have a different way of perceiving and trying to modify the social world, by building social mobilizations, by demanding measures for this or that group constructed in this or that way. And so we see that symbolic power helps to construct the objective reality of the city.

I wanted to show that we need to see the city as a concrete, material, objective entity, but also the city as it is perceived and experienced by the people who live there, whose representations are the product of a symbolic struggle. These representations of the city apply to urban space and to the stratification of places. In particular, we have a hierarchical vision of neighborhoods, which exist materially as a distribution of resources, money, credentials and infrastructures, but which also exist in people's heads. We all have a map of the city in our minds, with neighborhoods at the top or bottom, bourgeois or working-class, commercial or residential, and so on. Over the last half-century, we've seen the crystallization of negative, even infamous, representations of what used to be called popular or working-class neighborhoods, which are the former neighborhoods or towns of the industrial periphery, which lost their economic foothold with deindustrialization and which, at the same time, became "ports of entry" for the new post-colonial immigration.

These neighborhoods are despised; their degrading image has spread throughout society; their names provoke fear and moral condemnation; their inhabitants are stigmatized simply by living there. With the transformation of the political and media sphere, the very notion of a working-class neighborhood (quartier) has disappeared; we'll just say "les quartiers", without qualifiers-as if middle-class neighborhoods were suddenly no longer neighborhoods in the ordinary sense of the word! This is where I combine Bourdieu's notion of symbolic power with the concept of stigma developed by Erving Goffman ([1962] 1975). Goffman speaks of "the management of spoiled identities". He defines stigma as a disqualifying property, and catalogs the strategies by which stigmatized people respond to their symbolic depreciation.

On this point, my contribution to urban sociology has been to demonstrate the influence of symbolic power, and the fact that there is now a stigma that cannot be reduced to the stigma of poverty, class or ethnicity, but which is a stigma of place that has its own dynamic, its own force, making these places infamous and tainting their inhabitants. When we invoke the need for law and order, for « restoring security », what we are aiming at are these impoverished and stigmatized working-class neighborhoods, which are perceived as breeding grounds for incivility, vice and violence. This territorial stigma will have a whole series of impacts, firstly on the sense of self-worth of their residents, who feel diminished and will therefore identify less with their place of living, or even withdraw into the private and family sphere; or who will take up the stigma themselves to disparage their neighbors - what I call "lateral denigration". All these effects converge to weaken social bonds and thus transform day-to-day social relations within the neighborhood. One group, however, has made attachment to the neighborhood the basis of its identity: idle young people who are also deprived of any access to meaningful places. They will defend this territory, which becomes "their" territory, against intrusions by youths from other neighborhoods or the police. But they remain determined by the tainted vision of where they live: what Goffman calls the " stigma inversiono".

What is important to emphasize - as Goffman shows - is that no property is stigmatizing in itself; it is always the way we look at property that creates the stigma. So it is the gaze of others, particularly those who control the instruments of symbolic power, that will have an impact, for example on public policies, with the scattering of resources in the Priority Urban Neighborhoods (Quartiers Prioritaires de la Ville, the target of « urban renewal » by the central state). It will also have an impact on employers, who will scrutinize the addresses of job applicants, but will also be reluctant to open a store in these neighborhoods because they are perceived as insecure, their residents as lacking the work ethic, because the public space is supposedly under the control of drug dealers. This will exacerbate unemployment, and thus validate the image of housing estates as places where the jobless are unable or unwilling to enter the job market, where parents are resigned, families are broken up, and young people are all involved in trafficking. The representation of reality helps to shape its materiality, which in turn validates the representation. We have come full circle.

In the stigmatizing perception of impoverished working-class neighborhoods, there is the idea that they are "ghettos", vectors of racial separatism, that they are no longer territories of the Republic, and people point to the growing percentage of families of foreign origin living there as proof. These neighborhoods, whose names everyone knows, are what I call "hypnotic points" of public debate. They are hypnotic because they focus attention and prevent us from seeing that, in parallel with the rise in ethnic density in these areas, which is real, the foreign population or population of post-colonial origin is fanning throughout urban space and its segregation indices are slowly decreasing over the past few decades, as shown by the work of Jean-Louis Pan Ké Shon and Gregory Verdugo (2014). There is at the same time spatial fixation and spatial dispersion according to ethnicity. If there is spatial separatism, it is occur at the top of the hierarchy of places, in exclusively bourgeois neigborhoods, which have become more and more secluded in the 21st century.

The second blind spot is the assumption that this population has been "put away" for eternity, that it is locked away in these zones for good. The reality, however, is that their residents are more mobile than the average household, and this mobility enables them to move up the neighbourhood ladder. This is another phenomenon that the public and scientific debate completely overlooks.

You describe the cross-involvement of three fields in the production of territorial stigma: the political field, the journalistic field and the academic field. How can we act within these different fields in order to combat it?

Let us start with the academic field. Firstly, we need to maintain good conceptual hygiene and avoid falling into a prefabricated discourse that obscures reality. This means being reflexive, questioning the very notions with which we organize our research. The perfect example of this is the confused and confusing discourse on the "ghetto", a term that is used in its ordinary sense, without realizing that far from being a space of disintegration, the ghetto is a device that enables the integration of stigmatized group at the structural level while keeping it at a distance at the social level. In my book The Two Faces of the Ghetto (Wacquant forthcoming), based on two canonical cases - the Jewish ghetto of the European Renaissance and the black ghetto of Fordist America - I show that ghettoization is a two-sided process, one that incorporates and the other that separates, and that these two dimensions must be grasp together to understand the phenomenon - something I did not do in my book Urban Pariahs (Wacquant 2008). The ghetto is a "cage" but also a "cocoon" that protects, nurtures solidarity and expands life chances. So when a journalist asks a question that is problematic, we have to say "let’s stop, take a step back", and we start by examining the categories and presuppositions that underlie the question. Question the question rather than answer it naively.

In the same way, journalists need to practise good lexicological hygiene and ask themselves which side of the story they are hiding by covering it. Get informed, read sociological studies, and realize that you can be unwittingly contributing to the stigmatization of a neighborhood by focusing exclusively on its negative aspects, and getting caught up in the cycle of denigration. So always keep an open mind, and ask yourself why you are so concerned about this or that property that you would not be if you were in another neighborhood, such as a petty-bourgeois residential tract. It is also important to remember that the determinants of neighbourhood destiny are not to be found in the neighbourhood itself (Hansen 2021, Larsen and Delica 2024): they are the prevailing trends in the job market and real estate economy, the school system, spatial planning, the police and the justice system. In short, the state in all its components.

Secondly, in the political arena, I would distinguish between the local and national levels, insofar as a number of local elected representatives are involved in the fight against spatial stigmatization. In the 2010s, the city of La Courneuve set up a network that organized a general assembly of stigmatized towns, and whose mayors collectively pleaded "Stop, we have had enough". They lobbied the HALDE (Haute Autorité de Lutte contre les Discriminations et pour l'Égalité), at the time, to include residence among the criteria of the anti-discrimination law. Today, residence is one of these criteria. Finally, on the bureaucratic front, it's time for the state administrators who implement urban policy to focus on publicizing the positive effects of this policy in order to break the stigmatization dynamic, while recognizing the crying need for additional resources to amplify these positive effects. This can only be achieved by working on the medium and long term, over a decade or more, and by refusing to upend the system with every change of government, which is quite simply ubuesque.

As for the city professionals - social workers, street educators, administrators and local councillors - who implement this policy, we can count on them to "destigmatize" these neighborhoods by countering the denigrating discourse that targets them, and by showing the biases of what I call the "deficit model", which consists in seeing the urban periphery only through the prism of its shortcomings. But, above all, we need to put impoverished working-class neighborhoods back into the full hierarchy of urban areas and places to see that the real public policy of "positive discrimination" based on space is not the so-called urban policy, but the taken-for-granted political organization that allocates disproportionate fiscal, budgetary and human resources to bourgeois neighborhoods and cities, starting with public services - schools, housing, health, roads and transport - that are supposed to be distributed equally across the national territory.

You highlight your realization that the jail is an urban institution, and more broadly invite us to place the police, justice and prison at the heart of urban research and policy. Why then, and for what purpose?

This phenomenon had been staring me in the face for the past thirty years and I just could not see it! In Les Prisons de la misère (Prisons of Poverty), I showed that in the neoliberal era, the penal state was deployed to manage the misery produced by economic deregulation and the shrinking of social protection (Wacquant 2015). But I had not grasped the specifically urban dimension of this deployment. We need to make a distinction here between jails, which are located inside cities and hold people arrested by the police while awaiting trial, and prisons, which house convicts and are located in rural areas, for practical reasons - land is cheaper there - and for social and symbolic reasons - city dwellers do not want populations seen as dangerous and deviant in their midst. Jails almost exclusively house inmates who come from neighborhoods of relegation and return there upon release.

These neighborhoods are subjected to intense targeting by the police and the justice system, notably through « stop and frisk » based on phenotypical apperance (called contrôles au faciès », literally "facial checks", a "just-in-time" assembly-line type of judicial processing to which no resident of a bourgeois neighborhood would agree to submit (I recommend reading the ethnographies by Angèle Christin, Comparutions immédiates [2009], and Didier Fassin, La Force de l'ordre [2011]). This targeting explains why people who come out of prison are quickly recaptured by the criminal justice system, not least because of their involvement in the street economy, so that a virtually closed-circuit circulation begins between the neighborhood of relegation and the prison institution. In the United States, this phenomenon of mutual penetration between the black hyperghetto and the prison is exacerbated. In France, it is more limited but very real, and the mechanisms are the same: geographically-targeted penalization, intensified circulation between the neighborhood and the prison, symbiosis between street culture and prison culture. In big-city prisons, inmates reconstitute the sociability of the housing estates and organize themselves according to networks of mutual support and protection based on spatial hierarchy. The neighborhood is in the prison and the prison in the neighborhood.

Which are the populations trapped by what I call the structural osmosis between these two institutions of confinement: poor young men from North African or African immigration in France, poor young blacks in the United States, but also Surinamese in Holland, Moroccans in Belgium, Turks and Roma in Germany, non-European immigrants in Scandinavian countries. For me, it was a discovery to realize the central role played by the carceral institution in the management of marginality in the city. And that includes prisons, which, although they are located far away in rural areas, are satellites of the city, managing the spatial overflow of urban problems.

This means that we cannot understand inequality and marginality in the city without understanding the differential mobilization of the police and penal apparatus, which serve as a kind of lid placed on the bubbling cauldron of relegated neighborhoods. To understand the city, you need to understand the penal state, and vice versa. Now, in terms of research, this is a virtually empty intersection: sociologists of the city do not read criminology and the sociology of the penal system, and criminologists and sociologists of punishment do not read urban sociology. The same goes for public policy: the percentage of residents arrested by the police or with a criminal record is not included among the criteria for determining a QPV neighborhood!

At ground level, on the other hand, practitioners have often already grasped this intersection, and they are well aware that police officers, judges and probation agents are key players in determining the social and spatial trajectories of young men doubly marginalized by class and ethnicity, that the claws of the penal apparatus hold these neighborhoods. That the police, the justice system and prison play a key role in the life trajectories of these young men by destabilizing the most precarious families. Practitioners know this, but researchers are unaware of it, or at least lagging far behind. I therefore call on my fellow sociologists to make this junction between urban sociology and penal sociology. We will then have a much better understanding of both the city and criminal justice. As for politicians, it is high time they opened their eyes to the iatrogenic effects of the policy of penalization of poverty.

How has your empirical and personal back-and-forth between France and the United States influenced your approach to the contemporary dynamics of the production of urban marginality?

A comparative gaze is essential to get out of the taken-for-granted in one society and which, precisely, does not go without saying in the other. Shuttling back and forth across the two sides of the Atlantic, has force me to be reflexive, to question the conceptual categories, data sources and theoretical tools I am using, the problems that are articulated in different ways, or not formulated at all in one country, whereas they are central in the other. For example, Americans take it for granted that « urban marginality equals race ». And all public data, administrative as well as from surveys in the U.S., make race a central variable - and totally obfuscate class inequalities. And, in a self-evident manner, race is taken as the dichotomous division between blacks and whites defined by ancestry. But, if we approach this question with European lenses, we are tempted to reformulate this cleavage according to a gradational logic based on physical appearance, determining blurred continua rather than clear-cut categories.

Now, a wave of recent research shows that ethno-racial inequalities in the United States actually obey a gradational, rather than a dichotomous, logic according to skin color. Thus economic, social, educational, medical, judicial and other disparities between light- and dark-skinned African Americans are more pronounced than the corresponding disparities between blacks and whites (one of my former doctoral students, Ellis Monk, now a Harvard professor, is at the forefront of this research). On the European side, ethno-racial categorization, which operates in variable ways according to group and institutional sector - employment, housing, school, family, police, public space - has long been absent and even taboo in research on the city, and continues to be illegal in the recollection of administrative data in many countries. This should not stop sociologists from taking it into account in their surveys, as Patrick Simon and his collaborators have done brilliantly (Beauchemin et al. 2016). But to do so, we need to calibrate it according to the specific history of urban structures in the country concerned, rather than importing it from the United States. Above all, we need to hold class, race and space together and understand the specificity of their articulation in the metropolis.

References

Beauchemin, Cris, Christelle Hamel and Patrick Simon. 2016. Trajectoires et origines. Survey on the diversity of populations in France. Paris: INED éditions.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002. Le Bal des célibataires. Crise de la société paysanne en Béarn, Paris: Seuil, coll. "Points Essais".

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2021. Microcosmes. Théorie des champs, Paris: Seuil and Raisons d'agir éditions.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Sayad, Abdelmalek. 1964. Le Déracinement. La crise de l'agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie, Paris: Minuit, coll. "Documents".

Christin, Angèle. 2008. Comparutions immédiates. Enquête sur une pratique judiciaire, Paris: La Découverte.

Fassin, Didier. 2011. La Force de l'ordre. Une anthropologie de la police des quartiers, Paris: Seuil. 

Goffman, Erving. 1974 [1963]. Stigmate. Les usages sociaux des handicaps, Paris: Minuit, coll. "Le sens commun".

Hansen, Christian Sandbjerg. 2021. The Making of Place and People in the Danish Metropolis: A Sociohistory of Copenhagen North West. London: Routledge.

Larsen, Troels Schutz and Kristian N. Delica. 2024. Fragmenting Cities. London : Elgar Publishing.

Pan Ké Shon, Jean-Louis and Gregory Verdugo. 2014. "Segregation and incorporation of immigrants in France. Magnitude and intensity between 1968 and 2007." Revue française de sociologie, Vol. 55, no. 2: 245-283.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2006. Parias urbains. Banlieue, ghetto, État. Paris: La Découverte.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2015. Les Prisons de la misère. Paris: Raisons d'agir éditions, expanded edition.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2018. "Bourdieu comes to town: pertinence, principles, applications," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 90105‑.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2023. Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Wacquant, Loïc. Forthcoming. The Two Faces of the Ghetto, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Clément Rivière is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Lille, a researcher at CeRIES (Research Center for “Individuals, Trials, Societies”) and co-editor-in-chief of Métropolitics. He is notably the author of Their Children in the City. A Survey of Parents in Paris and Milan (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2021).

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP - UMR 8209).

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