Epilogue: Spatializing Cities,Exploring Urban Religion,Re-Imagining Urbanity

Abstract

As an epilogue to the essays in this special issue, the article revolves around the question of the specificity of urban religious experiences. In addressing this question, I will first elaborate on the conceptual notion of the city that fruitfully frames the essays, in order to show, by a second step, its strengths but also some blind spots. Finally, ways to illuminate the blind spots are suggested which at the same time may stimulate further research in the field of urban religion.

The contributions to this special issue impressively demonstrate the potential of a study of religion that has abandoned the modernization-theoretical notion that cities are the vanguard of an ongoing global secularization process. Instead, they focus on empirical manifestations of lived religious practices in cities around the world. Theoretically, the contributions are oriented toward a dialectical interplay of agency and structure: With regard to agency, they ask: How do religious actors become “spatial entrepreneurs” and how do their spatial projects shape cities in particular ways? Conversely, in terms of structure, they ask: What are the institutionalized practices and regimes that shape the spatialization of religion? By conceptualizing religious actors as “spatial entrepreneurs who engage in a variety of spatial projects, seeking not just to increase their material and symbolic presence and public visibility, but also to sacralize urban space according to their particular religious aspirations” (introduction to this issue, p. x), religion becomes visible as a natural part of everyday urban life.

On one hand, this conceptual “normalization” of religious practices as “lived” and “everyday” religion is particularly fruitful, as it draws our attention to the multiple entanglements of religion with other areas of urban life. For example, it reveals the surprising dynamics between religious communities, their buildings and spaces, and urban gentrification processes in cities as different as Amsterdam (van de Kamp, in this issue), Lagos (Katsaura, in this issue), and Shanghai (Huang, in this issue). It also shows how the visibility and influence of religious groups in cities are shaped by their respective spatial regimes and planning doctrines. This is particularly evident in the place-making strategies of minority religions in migrant arrival cities (cf. Vásquez & Knott, 2014), but also when traditional religious sites and religious understandings of sacred places stand in the way of modern infrastructure projects and their spatial logics (Vevaina, in this issue), or when a religiously motivated habitus of self-formation is reflected in everyday building practices and notions of citizenship (Oosterbaan, in this issue).

On the other hand, the question arises whether religious practices—even if they are always also spatial, social, cultural, and (in many cases) economic practices—do not differ significantly from these. Religious practices, even if we take a broad definition of religion (Luckmann, 1967), aim at experiences that transcend everyday life, be it in the form of small, mediate, or great transcendences (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989). With regard to the built space of the city, this does not always require iconic buildings (Knott et al., 2016), even if these are particularly predestined to evoke experiences of the transcendent (Karstein, in this issue; Katsaura, in this issue). They may also be wayside shrines (Rao, in this issue), temporarily erected shacks or tents (Burchardt, in this issue), that is, (informal) forms of vernacular architecture that provide a framework for forms of religious sociality or for moments of spirituality that interrupt secular urban routines.

Before turning to the question of the specificity of urban religious experiences, I will first elaborate on the conceptual notion of the city that fruitfully frames the contributions to this special issue, to show, by a second step, its strengths but also some blind spots. Finally, ways to illuminate the blind spots are suggested which at the same time can stimulate further research in the lively field of urban religion.

Spatializing Cities

In their introduction, the editors argue that they seek to further develop a concept of the city that takes into account the fact that cities have always been places of religious innovation. To do so, they draw inspiration from Jennifer Robinson’s (2006) concept of “ordinary cities.” Robinson’s proposal, which builds on Doreen Massey’s understanding of place, is indeed helpful for this, because cities are not hastily seen as mere manifestations of certain city models (such as the “global city” or the “European city” or the “city of the global South”), but by their individual socio-spatial interconnectedness with the world. As early as in the 1990s, Massey had understood the city as “an intense focal point [. . .] of a wider geography, bringing together differences in space” (Massey, 1999, p. 102). For her, cities are initially nothing more than places that can be distinguished from one another and that show a higher degree of density and heterogeneity than other places. What connects urban and non-urban places is their “throwntogetherness” (Massey, 2005, p. 140). Massey writes, “[w]hat is special about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or of the eternity of the hills. Rather, what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and geography of thens and theres)” (Massey, 2005). Significantly, Massey also imagines place not as a fixed “thing” but as “the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes [. . .]. This is place as open and as internally multiple” (Massey, 2005, p. 141). Robinson ties in with this idea when she writes that cities should be seen as the results of global processes of circulation, the world being present in them in each specific ways. This means that in cities various global processes such as the circulation of people, goods, information, capital flows, and cultural phenomena meet and intersect. It is not surprising that this concept of the city provides a fertile framework for the study of urban religion, a research field that is closely linked to postcolonial perspectives as well as to the analysis of migration and transnationalization. However, to the idea of the “throwntogetherness” of the world in places we have to add a second aspect that is important for the conceptual understanding of cities: Inspired by the sociology of knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), one can describe this as the objectivation of cities referring to social processes through which cities become real as and in places. How is this to be understood?

Based on what has been said so far, we can understand cities as places (in Massey’s sense) that are characterized by greater density and heterogeneity than other places. There (as in other places), local, regional, national, and global processes overlap which—and this is what makes them cities—condense as if under a burning glass. The relational heuristic underlying this concept aims at a non-essentialist understanding of the city: as local, regional, national, and global influences (from different “thens and theres”) are assembled and condensed in each city in a specific way, distinguishable institutional, symbolic, and spatial regimes emerge which then, in turn, become real as “objectivations” (Steets, 2016) in the “here-and-now” of a place, where they each produce their own effects. In other words, the socio-spatial construction of cities is multidimensional and translocal, while their physical and symbolic reality is (first of all) a local one. This emphasizes that even the most dynamic global currents affecting a city leave visible and tangible traces there, that these traces “crystallize” locally and inscribe themselves in the material and symbolic spatiality of the city in the mode of densification. In this way, global dynamics shape both the material “texture” of a city and its immaterial urban “imaginaire” (Lindner, 2008). The focus on the objectivation of cities sensitizes in particular to their historicity, understood as a permanent (and usually contested) sedimentation of ever new symbolic-material layers of meaning. Furthermore, by such an understanding of the city, the city as a whole can be taken into account and made the object of comparative studies. Robinson writes, “Whereas global and world cities approaches focus on small elements of cities that are connected into specific kinds of economic networks, and developmentalist approaches tend to emphasise the poorest, least well-provisioned parts of the city, the ordinary city approach brings the city ‘as a whole’ back in to view” (Robinson, 2006, p. 10).

Exploring Urban Religion

If one understands cities, as suggested here, as material-spatial condensations of social, cultural (and religious) heterogeneity in one place, one obtains a formally precise but in terms of content open concept of the city which offers a heuristic for the (comparative) empirical investigation of “ordinary cities.” Three central aspects of urban religion, which are also expressed in the contributions to this special issue, are in the foreground.

When assuming that multidimensional spatial influences come together and condense in specific ways in each city, leading to distinguishable institutional, symbolic, and spatial regimes, then, first, the institutional arrangements that determine the “political management of pluralism” (Berger, 2014, pp. 79–93) as well as the distinctions and differentiations between religious and non-religious urban spheres, i.e., different urban secularities (cf. Wohlrab-Sahr & Burchardt, 2012), can be targeted. Empirically, these arrangements are articulated not only by (often powerfully enforced) ways of governing religious diversity (Burchardt, 2020; Martínez-Ariño, 2021) but also by negotiating religious interaction rituals in public spaces (Rao, in this issue), by conflicts between religious and secular actors over urban infrastructures (Burchardt, in this issue; Vevaina in this issue), as well as by processes of forming the spatial-symbolic order of a city (Griera et al., in this issue). This aspect particularly emphasizes the interconnectedness of religion in the city with other urban spheres, the conflicts that arise from this interconnectedness, and also the institutions that regulate (a more or less) peaceful coexistence.

Second, such an understanding of the city is particularly sensitive to the role of “material objectivations” (Steets, 2016) that shape a city and provide it with a particular (tangible) accent of reality, as they are multisensorily perceptible and offer physical resistance. This opens the view to a wide spectrum of material objectivations and their social effects, ranging from infrastructures to vernacular and iconic architectural forms. By strategically intervening in the physical reality of a city, religious groups as “spatial entrepreneurs” aim at generating opportunity structures for religious communion (Burchardt, in this issue); through the medium of the built environment they create visibility and social relevance for their religious aspirations (Karstein, in this issue; Oosterbaan, in this issue); through iconic architectures they construct awe-inspiring spaces (Katsaura, in this issue; van de Kamp, in this issue) and inscribe themselves in the imaginaire of a particular city (Becci & Hafner, in this issue).

Talking of urban imaginaire points to the third aspect: By using the here proposed understanding of the city, we can examine not only religion in the city but also what we might call the religion of the city. The unique symbolic-spatial order of a city refers to its singularity, its “Eigenlogik” (inherent logic) (Berking & Löw, 2008), which is evident both from the material texture and from the imaginaire of a city. Urban imaginaire denotes a collective imaginative space that creates meaning and community. It remains basically unavailable but finds symbolic expression by images and songs, by myths and narratives, by literature and iconic buildings, as well as by local forms of acting, experiencing, and feeling. It provides answers to the question “Who are we and where do we stand in our relationship to others and the world?” In this special issue, the urban imaginaire shines through in two papers in particular, first in Becci and Haffner’s analysis of Potsdam and, second, in Griera, Müller, and Martínez-Ariño’s comparison of urban religious maps. While Becci and Haffner show that it does make a difference whether a church, a synagogue, or a mosque is to be integrated into the symbolic space of a historically Protestant and now highly secularized city (albeit in a different way than one might suspect), Griera, Müller, and Martínez-Ariño reconstruct in detail what image of the city is produced in Barcelona, Hamburg, and Amsterdam when the city’s religious diversity is condensed into one key narrative of a map. Of course, the strategic images of city marketing (or other stakeholders) are not identical with the urban imaginaire, but to develop plausibility, they must relate to it.

While these three aspects outline the particular strengths of the here proposed concept of the city for the study of urban religion, there remains a blank space that can be formulated as a question: How do urban forms of religion differ from non-urban forms? To answer this question, we need to reflect on the concept of urbanity which aims to describe the difference between urban and non-urban.

Re-Imagining Urbanity Through Religion: On Not Being Blasé

Classical notions of urbanity are heavily influenced by European and North American perspectives on cities. Modern metropolises such as Berlin, Paris, London, or Chicago were described in the early 20th century as places of political as well as economic emancipation from feudal structures (Weber, 1958/1921), as places where physical proximity and social distance coincide (Wirth, 1938), as places of social exchange becoming increasingly anonymous, producing both positive and negative effects (Simmel, 1971/1903), and as places where people were permanently confronted with the other, the foreign, and the experience of cultural diversity, which at the same time was a driving force of innovating new social forms and subjectivities (Park, 1928). These new social forms in European cities (such as Berlin) included a form of interaction that was characterized not by full tolerance and recognition of the other but rather by restraint, indifference, and a blasé attitude (Simmel, 1971/1903). In the culturally much more diverse city of Chicago, which grew rapidly in the 19th century due to the massive influx of immigrants, the situation was somewhat different. To live as conflict-free as possible in this diverse metropolis, immigrants tended to form homogeneous groups and neighborhoods within the city and thus a highly segregated urban space. At the same time, however, this spatial structure (a “mosaic of little worlds”) was the breeding ground for cultural innovations and new urban social figures such as the bartender, the reporter, and the pawnbroker, because the other worlds were often literally only a street crossing away and zones of encounter inevitably emerged. Even then, it was this diversity of origins, practices and values, their contradictory juxtaposition, coexistence, and opposition that formed the raw material for individual self-fashioning, highly self-reflexive subjectivities, and the yeast of new social visions.

These Western notions of urbanity have long been assumed to determine cities globally and were only “provincialized” with the insights of postcolonial urban studies (cf. Robinson, 2006, pp. 41–64). Still, the question arises whether we should stop thinking about urbanity and the “cityness” of cities in the wake of these debates. I don’t think so. Even more so, I suspect that the empirical exploration of religious practices in cities could be especially fruitful for re-imagining urbanity, as it sheds light on urban social forms that have remained in the dark for a long time. This also brings me back to the specificity of religious practices. Religion cannot be lived with a blasé attitude; religious practices usually refer to subjective and, very often, collective matters of concern; for many they represent non-negotiable aspects of individual self-fashioning. Furthermore, religion creates experiences of transcendence beyond the ordinary world of everyday life. Questions that arise are: What demands do cities (as places of condensed heterogeneity) place on religious subjects in different corners of the world? If the permanent confrontation with the other increases self-reflexivity but not necessarily doubt about one’s own faith, what else can it lead to? What characterizes the zones of encounter in religiously heterogeneous cities? What social forms of interaction develop there (beyond being blasé)? Can we describe new religious urban subjectivities and social figures? Who are they?

The suggestions formulated here are intended as a supplement to, not a revision of, the very fruitful perspective on urban religion developed in this special issue. Nevertheless, I think that this supplement is useful for understanding what is religious about urban religious practices on one hand and what is urban about them on the other hand.