Capital geographies : mapping the spaces of urban cultural capital

Cultural institutions are built manifestations of the aesthetic distinctions at the heart of Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of cultural capital. They are also often regarded as spatial and symbolic counterpoints to everyday urban life. But as the hierarchies of cultural taste shift, the spatial hierarchies of cultural consumption are also reconfigured and the significance of high-profile, often inner city, cultural infrastructure is challenged. Indeed, some argue that new forms of cultural capital are emerging which are not embedded in the separation of ‘art and life’ but in everyday urbanism. With reference to the Australian Cultural Fields survey data for metropolitan Sydney, this chapter probes the urban dimensions of contemporary cultural capital and the consumption of culture. It shows that rather than pulling cultural capital towards the city centre, patterns of participation in some fields indicate more diffuse spatial distributions. Less dependent upon monumental cultural and civic infrastructure, capital circulates and accumulates through communication and media networks, as well as the suburban spaces of intimacy: the home, the car and the personal space created by headphones and smart devices. Indeed, urban cultural capital is revealed to be variable, contested and multi-spatial.