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Abstract: This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on London’s social class structure at the start of the 21st century. That debate has focused on the use of census metrics to argue the case for whether or not the capital has become more or less middle class in composition between 2001 and 2011. We contend that the definition of the middle class has become confused in the course of this debate and is of less critical importance for an understanding of the city’s contemporary class structure than is a focus on London’s elite. We make use of data from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS) to shed light on the social, cultural and economic resources of this group, in addition to their spatial location. We then return to the census data for 2001 and 2011 and posit that belying the image of stability in London’s class structure these data suggest clear and localised patterns of intensification in class geographies across the capital, an intensification characterised by a growing cleavage between Inner and Outer London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1920 and 1922, the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland was the location of intense violence between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists arising out of the broader political conflict engulfing the island. Approximately 500 people died within the city as a result of these tensions. There existed marked spatial concentration in patterns of fatality during these original 'Troubles' which accompanied the creation of the Northern Ireland state. This paper will present findings from research into this period which makes use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to analyse the spatial distribution and impact of political and sectarian deaths in the early years of the 1920s. It finds that fatalities were heavily concentrated in districts immediately surrounding the city centre and argues that these patterns were profoundly influenced by the nature of the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conflicts that have deeply affected the island of Ireland in the twentieth century have been political, rather than religious, in basis. However, the powerful coalescence of Catholicism and nationalism on one hand, and Protestantism and unionism on the other, has meant that religious affiliation in Ireland has come to embody a wider range of cultural, political and social values. Furthermore, the successive waves of organised colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have left the island with the legacy of a distinctive religious geography, which became the explicit template for the political division of the island in 1921 as well as having profound implications for its development since the European Reformation of the early modern period. Yet, despite its centrality to Irish history and geography, it has been difficult to assess detailed change in that religious geography due to the inconsistency of territorial units over time. This article presents findings from a major research project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council which used Geographical Information Systems technology to standardise administrative boundaries across the island in the twentieth century. In doing so, it is able to shed new light on the radically divergent religio-spatial trajectories of different parts of the island in relation to political, social and economic developments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]