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作者

David Bassens;Bas van Heur;Maëlys Waiengnier

来源

URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.40,Issue5,P.719-746

语言

英文

关键字

Urban elites,super-rich,elite theory,cultural patronage,Brussels

作者单位

Department of Geography, Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

摘要

Cultural patronage has since long been a domain where urban elites can showcase a sense of philanthropy. The paper develops a heuristic that starts from cultural patronage activities in order to trace urban elite households and their professional and residential characteristics. The heuristic is deployed in Brussels, Belgium, where we use cultural patronage listings from five key high-culture institutions as an empirical entry-point into urban elite geographies. Contrary to the common claim that current urban elites are global elites, our analysis shows a clear national reproduction of Brussels elites. Specific for Brussels is a remarkable level of nobility resilience, based on its more-or-less successful entanglements with haute finance as well as art market intermediary functions. Furthermore, the residential analysis suggests that elite reproduction also predominantly depends on socio-spatial segregation in inner-city neighborhoods, yet lacks morphological segregation strategies typical of enclave urbanism or super-gentrification generally found across global cities.KEYWORDS: Urban elites, super-rich, elite theory, cultural patronage, BrusselsAdditional informationAcknowledgementWe would like to thank three anonymous referees for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. We also thank the Urban Geography editors and the special issue manager Susan Moore for their guidance throughout the revision process. The authors share equal responsibility for all remaining errors.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.