  Urban economists have put forward the idea that cities that are culturally
interesting tend to attract "the creative class" and, as a result, end up being
economically successful. Yet it is still unclear how economic and cultural
dynamics mutually influence each other. By contrast, that has been extensively
studied in the case of individuals. Over decades, the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu showed that people's success and their positions in society mainly
depend on how much they can spend (their economic capital) and what their
interests are (their cultural capital). For the first time, we adapt Bourdieu's
framework to the city context. We operationalize a neighborhood's cultural
capital in terms of the cultural interests that pictures geo-referenced in the
neighborhood tend to express. This is made possible by the mining of what users
of the photo-sharing site of Flickr have posted in the cities of London and New
York over 5 years. In so doing, we are able to show that economic capital alone
does not explain urban development. The combination of cultural capital and
economic capital, instead, is more indicative of neighborhood growth in terms
of house prices and improvements of socio-economic conditions. Culture pays,
but only up to a point as it comes with one of the most vexing urban
challenges: that of gentrification.
