Abstract
Housing consumption practices belong to everyday distinctive ways of expressing status position (Bourdieu, 1984, 2005; Silva and Wright 2009). Approaching from the consumption practices perspective, this paper aims to reconstruct relationship between social space and housing in the Czech society during late socialism.
Large scale representative surveys conducted in 1977 and 1984 are employed to answer following questions: (1) to what extent was field of housing structured by dimensions of social space, especially by political, cultural, and economic capitals; (2) to what extent were housing preferences structured by this social space; (3) find position of cottage practices in the field of housing consumption. Results show crucial importance of cultural capital, which is profoundly connected with rural-to-urban migration, its bearers often lived in flats of higher quality and cottage usage was more widespread among them.
Discussion focuses on the applicability of habitus and cultural capital as concepts for study of urban-rural differences and emphasizes pitfalls of employing housing preferences analysis without taking into consideration the existing housing structure.