Cultural consumption, cultural inequality and urban factors: cultural participation in the districts of Valencia (2024)

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu's field theory, together with the statistical methods associated with it (above all multiple correspondence analysis), has long guided research on cultural inequality. The urban dimension of this inequality, however, remains little studied. This article extends field theory to the urban scale. It argues that a district's position within the city forms a distinct social space that shapes cultural participation, and that studying it requires a multidimensional approach that takes into account popular and traditional cultural forms, local networks and social capital. Using the 2024 Valencia Municipal Public Opinion Barometer, the study combines multiple correspondence analysis and regression at the individual level with principal component analysis and cluster analysis at the district level. The result is a typology of Valencia's districts. Combining these multivariate techniques is also a methodological contribution: it reconstructs urban hierarchies of cultural participation and goes beyond the descriptive use usually made of cultural barometers. The findings show that cultural capital does not fully explain participation: several districts have unexpectedly high levels of cultural participation, which we attribute to long-established sociability, local identity and community networks. The article therefore proposes the concept of an “urban factor”: districts are positions in the cultural field that are tied to a territory, and they shape access to culture, symbolic identification and patterns of participation.