Decision-Making as Symbolic Space

Understanding Urban Practice with Bourdieu

Abstract

Although the crucial role of both aspects in the process of spatial transformation is widely acknowledged, their mutual correspondence often receives relatively scant attention from planning scholars due to the tacit nature of the psychological and its challenging analytical accessibility for those researching urban planning and design processes.

By shifting the focus of enquiry from the operational to the causal level, the Bourdieusian trialectic of symbolic space, social space, and physical space is used to relationally access professionals as an influential acting group and decision-making as a pivotal 'crossroads', where non-material phenomena are moulded to effect changes in physical space.

The article argues that the enigmatic layer of decision-making requires analytical tools to relate the intangible—motivations, values, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of individuals and groups—with their social manifestations in urban planning and design practice and their footprint in physical space.

Spatial trialectic is an innovative interpretation within the sociological discourse, which has recently emerged, of Bourdieu's conceptual toolkit of habitus, field, and capital. It offers a more relational approach, integrating symbolic space as a psychological dimension into the analysis of socio-spatial processes.