Reexamining the Cultural Significance of Aranya City Space- A Critical Analysis Based on Bourdieu's Capital Theory

The spatial and cultural significance of a city can be re-created and re-constructed in the current context of commercialization. The so-called spiritual and cultural values, when examined critically, may even be the result of the commodification of capital. In this paper, we focus on Aranya, a newly developed tourism and art city in China, and adopt Bourdieu's theory of capital as the basis for our critique. Firstly, the background of Aranya's construction - the developer's branding of the architectural space - is described. It then takes the developer's pre-construction perspective to analyze how Aranya is constructed as a class-symbolizing commodity in the pre-construction period. The remaining two subjects, the owners and the tourists, continue to use the symbolic meaning of capital implicitly after the formation of the Aranya community, which reconsolidates and constructs the cultural meaning of capital behind Aranya. Ultimately, the conclusion is reached that Aranya's cultural value is nothing more than essentially the sale and purchase of economic, cultural, and social capital by developers and consumers.