Habitus: A Sense of Place

Habitus: A Sense of Place, Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (eds), Alders/ml, Ashgale Publishing, 2002,392 pp., £55.00 (h/b only) This book is a collection of 17 papers originally presented at a conference in Perth, Western Australia in 2000. Its title refers to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' which is defined, in Bourdieu's own brief contribution to the book, as a system of dispositions, that is of permanent manners of being, seeing and thinking, or a system of long-lasting (rather than permanent) schemes or schemata or structures of perception, conception and action, (p. 27, original emphasis) He uses the word 'disposition' to take away the mystical 'exotic' meanings attached to the notion of habitus. The book's subtitle refers to the 'sense of place'. Exploring, identifying and analysing the link between the two, i.e. between the physical and the social space, are intended to be the binding thread between the various contributions to this edited volume. Habitus: A Sense of Place is divided into three parts, each 'guided' by questions relating to conception, operation and challenges of habitus. The first part, 'Politics of space and place', includes contributions from Laclau, Hirst, Thompson, Mouffe, Hindess and Painter. The second part, 'Processes of place-making', consists of chapters by Hillier, Healey, Sandercock, Pile, Kitchen and Schneider, Dovey and Leach. The final part, 'Decolonising spatial habitus', is addressed by Friedmann, Waterson, Gale and Plumwood. The authors come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds such as sociology, philosophy, politics, architecture, urban planning, geography and anthropology. Each provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of the social and spatial processes which shape our habitat and habitus, covering subjects ranging from Aboriginal women in Australia to the place of ghosts in the city. As a result, they make the book highly relevant to the education and practice of spatial planning. However, most of the contributions remain as free-standing individual texts which, fascinating and insightful as some of them are, do not address the topic of their sectional location or the concept of habitus, at least not explicitly. The absence of editorial introductions to the three parts makes it difficult for the reader to understand the contextual background to each section, the link between the sections and the key theme of the book, and the rationale for grouping the papers into these sections. Eleven out of the 17 chapters do not make any reference to the notion of habitus or to the work of Bourdieu. Joe Painter is the only one who explains why he has not done so, stating that, . '[his] chapter draws its immediate inspiration not from Pierre Bourdieu and the concept of habitus, but from the notion of "governmentality" proposed originally by Michel Foucault . ' (p. 15). Therefore, the extent to which the authors have been influenced by or even aware of 'the key constructs of habitus' (p. 4) remains unclear, if not questionable. The exceptions are the papers by Hillier, Waterson, Dovey and Friedmann and to some extent Leach and Sandercock. Most notably, Friedmann and Dovey provide an excellent and enlightening introduction to Bourdieu's key concepts of 'habitus', 'field' and 'game'. They aim to apply these to the study of built forms or as Friedmann suggests to 'that elusive but related notion of place' (p. …