The symbols, ideas, tastes, and preferences that can be strategically used as resources in social action, and serve as markers of collective identity and social difference. Cultural capital includes cultural goods: pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, and so on. See Hubbard (2002) Env. & Plan. A 34. The commodification of cultural capital is carried out by the cultural industries which convert cultural capital to economic capital. R. Florida (2002) argues that urban fortunes increasingly turn on the capacity to ‘attract, retain and even pamper a mobile and finicky class of “creatives” ’.

It’s possible to be high in cultural capital, but low in economic capital: S. Fernandes (2006), for example, notes that Cuban arts and popular culture have been commercialized to entice foreign investment. Ottaviano and Peri (2006) J. Econ. Geog. 6, 1 find that US-born citizens living in cities of increasing cultural diversity earned significantly higher wages. Khawaja and Mowafi (2007) Scandi. J. Pub. Health 35, 5 find that cultural capital has significant associations with general and mental health status in Lebanese women.