Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism 9781350037687, 9781350037717, 9781350037694

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Religious Pluralism and the City

Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place Series editors: Paul-François Tremlett, John Eade, and Katy Soar Religions, spiritualities and mysticisms are deeply implicated in processes of place-­making. These include political and geopolitical spaces, local and national spaces, urban spaces, global and virtual spaces, contested spaces, spaces of performance, spaces of memory and spaces of confinement. At the leading edge of theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary innovation in the study of religion, Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place brings together and gives shape to the study of such processes. These places are not defined simply by the material or the physical but also by the sensual and the psychological, by the ways in which spaces are gendered, classified, stratified, moved through, seen, touched, heard, interpreted and occupied. Places are constituted through embodied practices that direct critical and analytical attention to the production of insides, outsides, bodies, landscapes, cities, sovereignties, publics and interiorities. Religion and the Global City, edited by David Garbin and Anna Strhan

Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism Edited by Helmuth Berking, Silke Steets, and Jochen Schwenk

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Helmuth Berking, Silke Steets, Jochen Schwenk and Contributors 2018 Helmuth Berking, Silke Steets and Jochen Schwenk have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Thomas M. Scheer / EyeEm / gettyimages.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3768-7 PB: 978-1-3501-3665-6 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3769-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-3770-0 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Peter L. Berger, who was not just a mentor but a friend.

Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgments

Introduction: Filling the Void? – Religious Pluralism and the City  Helmuth Berking, Jochen Schwenk, Silke Steets

ix x xi xiii

1

Part One   From Secularization to Pluralization

1

Urbanity as a Vortex of Pluralism: A Personal Reflection about City and Religion  Peter L. Berger

27

Part Two   Between Fundamentalism and Postsecularism: Conceptualizing the Relations between City and Religion

2 3 4

The Death and Life of the Fundamentalist City: A Prelude to a Medieval Modernity  Nezar AlSayyad

39

Postsecularity and a New Urban Politics – Spaces, Places, and Imaginaries  Christopher Baker

51

Religion of the City: Urban-Religious Configurations on a Global Scale  Stephan Lanz

65

Part Three   Religious Pluralism: Conflicts and Negotiations in the City

5 6 7

Religious Superdiversity and Urban Visibility in Barcelona and Turin  Marian Burchardt, Irene Becci, Mariachiara Giorda

83

Capturing Carnival: Religious Diversity and Spatial Contestation in Rio de Janeiro  Martijn Oosterbaan

105

Migration and Morality: Secular and Religious Considerations among Romanian and Bulgarian Migrants in and around London  John Eade

121

Contents

viii

8

Marketplace, Fallow Ground, and Special Pastoral Care: What Christian Churches in Germany know about the City – an Interdenominational Comparison  Veronika Eufinger

137

Part Four   Changing Urban Imaginaries

9

Worlds within Worlds: Vernacular Pluralism, Publics of Belonging, and the Making of Modern Bangalore  Tulasi Srinivas

157

10 Jerusalem’s Imaginaries in the Neo-Liberal City: Re-Visiting Visual Representations in the “Holy City”  Tovi Fenster

175

11 “The Sumerian Tempelstadt”: The Modern Making of an Ancient Urban Concept  Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum

185

Notes References Index

199 205 231

List of Figures 8.1 8.2 9.1a/b 9.2a/b 9.3 9.4 10.1a/b 10.2a/b

10.3a/b 10.4a/b 10.5a/b 11.1 11.2

Front of the Ökumenisches Forum HafenCity (Photo courtesy Veronika Eufinger) Vista of the chapel’s anteroom at night (Photo courtesy Veronika Eufinger) Russell Market (left) and St. Mary’s Basilica (right) (Photos courtesy Tulasi Srinivas) Hawkers in the Square (Photos courtesy Tulasi Srinivas) Temple in the street leading to the Square (Photo courtesy Tulasi Srinivas) Businesses that front the Square (Photo courtesy Tulasi Srinivas) Before 2008 election graffiti (left 2008; right 2016) (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster) Modesty signs in Mea Shearim neighborhood (left 2002; right 2016) (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster) Graffiti on the café wall (left 2008; right 2016) (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster) New shops and maintenance in Mea Shearim main road (2016) (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster) Neo-­liberal housing in ultra-Orthodox neighborhood (2016) (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster) Major cities of ancient Mesopotamia (not all contemporaneous) (Graphic courtesy Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum) Developmental stages of the cuneiform script

148 149 157 158 159 162 177

177 179 180 181 186

(Graphic courtesy Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum. Representation based on A. Wolf on the basis of Nissen 1990: Fig. 20)

11.3

187

The sacred precinct in the center of Uruk (Graphic courtesy Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum. Representation

11.4

188 based on A. Wolf on the basis of Yoffee 2005/9: 84) Book cover of Anna Schneider’s The Sumerian Temple City (1920) (Source: https://archive.org) 190

List of Tables 7.1. NINo registrations by gender, 2002–2014 7.2. NINo registrations by region (% in each) in selected years

135 136

List of Contributors Nezar AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture, Planning, Urban Design and Urban History at the University of Berkeley. Christopher Baker is William Temple Professor of Religion and Public Life at Goldsmiths, University of London and Director of Research, William Temple Foundation. Irene Becci is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Lausanne. Peter L. Berger was Professor Emeritus for Sociology and Theology at Boston University. Helmuth Berking is Permanent Fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin. Marian Burchardt is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities—Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities,” Leipzig University. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Philology and History at the Freie Universität Berlin. John Eade is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Roehampton and former Director of CRONEM (Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism). Veronika Eufinger is Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Tovi Fenster is Professor in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University and Head of the Planning for the Environment with Communities (PEC) Lab.

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List of Contributors

Mariachiara Giorda is Researcher at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Turin. Stephan Lanz is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). Martijn Oosterbaan is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University. Jochen Schwenk is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Sociology, Technische Universität Darmstadt. Tulasi Srinivas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emerson College, Boston. Silke Steets is Heisenberg Fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Leipzig University.

Acknowledgments The idea for this book arose from a conference titled “Filling the Void?—Religious Pluralism and the City,” conducted by the three editors at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in February of 2016. We wish to thank Heike Kollross, Allegra Baumann, and Aaron Szczerba for their support in planning and organizing the event. We are also indebted to the authors of this book for their commitment, their expertise and the highly productive and insightful exchanges. Lalle Pursglove and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury Academic assisted us in the production of the book by providing valuable advice and practical suggestions; Marie Veltmaat prepared the index and was invaluable in the copyediting process; Matthew Harris translated and copyedited parts of the Introduction. We also owe our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism of the book concept, and hope that we have implemented their suggestions the way they intended us to. Our deepest gratitude goes to Peter L. Berger. It was his persistent reflection on pluralism, modernity, and religion which inspired us to make the relationship between the city and religious pluralism the subject of a conference and later the topic for this book. During the planning phase of the conference, Peter was there with constructive and targeted comments as well as a sympathetic ear. Although he was unable to travel to Darmstadt for the conference, he willingly accepted the challenges of digital technology and gave his keynote address via Skype. Unfortunately, he does not see the book completed. He died on June 27, 2017. This volume is dedicated to him.

Introduction: Filling the Void? – Religious Pluralism and the City Helmuth Berking, Jochen Schwenk, Silke Steets

Given the rise of religiously inspired violence and the increasing significance of Charismatic Christianity, Islam, and other spiritual traditions, the master narrative—once taken for granted—that modernizing societies are simultaneously secularizing societies has long since lost its empirical plausibility. As scholars of religion have shown, it is not so much the decline but rather the pluralization of religion, that is, the simultaneity of secular and religious institutions (pluralism 1) and the coexistence of different religious worldviews (pluralism 2) in one space that shape everyday life in today’s world (Berger 2014). The main thesis of this book is that the particular constellation of these “two pluralisms” plays out above all in cities. It is the city where power struggles and conflicts concerning the right to religious practices and representations in the public realm are carried out, where new civilizational arrangements are made or opportunities to are squandered. However, discussion of religious pluralism as a defining feature of the city has long been falling on deaf ears in urban theory, as well as in religious studies (Burchardt and Becci 2013; Garbin and Strhan 2017). In what follows, we will, firstly, reconstruct how this conceptual “void” between city and religion emerged, and then try to “fill” this void conceptually as well as empirically. The overall aim of this volume is to unveil the intimate relationship between city and religion, and to offer an alternative view regarding the quotidian state of the global urban condition. But how can the long-­lasting ignorance of urban theory about religion and the sociology of religion about the city be explained? As is shown in the following, there is a single answer to this twofold question: The theoretical traditions of both disciplines have developed their central concepts within the context of a modernizing society (and a modernization theory-­based narrative), which shapes sociological theory building in general and leads to a situation where,

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for both strands, the modern metropolis remains the secular space per se. But what would ways out of the lost subset between the city and religion look like?

City, religion, and modernity The debate in the sociology of religion over the last twenty years has been shaped by the question of what can follow classical secularization theory. In accordance with this, it was assumed for a long time that, as a result of the global spread of European modernity, that is the ideas of state, democracy, liberal market economy, and rational science, in principle a similar model of social organization would emerge everywhere (Weber 1988), in which religion would play only a subordinate role mainly confined to the private sphere (Luckmann 1967). It was also regarded as proven that, with increasing well-­being and diminishing existential uncertainty, religious vitality would weaken (Norris and Inglehart 2004) and that the emergence of different worldviews resulting from modernization would significantly strengthen the cognitive position of doubt against that of faith (Berger 1967). The seemingly clear direction of development of these processes was summarized in the expectation that religion and religiosity would decline globally in the long term. Although some aspects of these positions based on classical secularization theory have not completely lost their plausibility, we are confronted today with an empirical reality which strongly questions the clarity of the predicted course of events. Consequently, in terms of these lines of argument, for example the difference between modern and relatively secularized Europe and the equally modern but, in terms of religion, extremely vital US, remains unexplained until today (cf. Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008; Davie 2002). A review of the enduring, often even growing significance of religious practices and understandings “beyond the West” provides further critical evidence (cf. Burchardt, WohlrabSahr and Middell 2015; metroZones 2011). The sociology of religion has reacted to these empirical insights through two movements: On the one hand, there are scholars who, after critical revision of some aspects of classical secularization theory, continue to hold fast to its core tenets (Bruce 2002; Pollack 2014). On the other hand, alternative explanatory models for defining the relationship between religion and modernity have emerged in sociology (Stark and Finke 2000), anthropology (Asad 2003), political science (Cady and Hurd 2010), and political philosophy (Habermas 2001), so that today it is perhaps best to speak of an unraveling of the comparatively coherent set of theoretical assumptions which

Introduction: Filling the Void?

3

had characterized earlier debates (cf. Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2011: 53). But what paths are available to overcome the bias of modernization theory in the study of religion? A major inspiration for the discourse in the sociology of religion was Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s (2000) concept of “multiple modernities.” It is based on the assumption that every form of modernization displays certain core characteristics (such as functional differentiation, the emergence of the idea that the world can be shaped politically, growing self-­reflection of personal behavior, etc.), but that these core features take culture-­specific forms, which Eisenstadt explained in the following way: Because in their developmental processes, non-Western cultures have to deal with the European ur-­concept of modernity each in their own way, constantly different developmental paths emerge in the interaction and, as a result, “multiple modernities.” This heuristic is of significance for the sociology of religion because it allowed for a change of perspective: shifting away from the search for a general theory of secularization (which attempted to explain differences in developmental pathways in terms of deviation from norms, see Martin 1978) towards the comparative study of “multiple modernities” (Berger 2014: 68–78; Gabriel 2013), “multiple secularities” (Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013; Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012), or even “religious super-­diversities” (Burchardt, Becci and Giorda 2017), which involve fewer presuppositions. Of equal conceptual importance for the debate in the sociology of religion are the distinctions suggested by José Casanova. Casanova (1994) called for, first of all, a division of the classical theory of secularization into three, not necessarily correlated, components. In case studies he showed that, although social modernization processes are always accompanied by functional differentiation (1), these are not universally and necessarily linked with the decline (2), or the privatization (3) of religion. He stated that particular developmental paths are much more culture-­specific, although—and this explains the Eurocentric bias of classical secularization theory—all three aspects converge in Europe. In addition, Casanova (2009) suggested making a conceptual distinction between secularization, secularism, and the secular. Whereas under “secularization” he understands the three-­way differentiation of the social process just mentioned, “secularism” is defined as a normative position, which legitimizes a clear distinction between state and religion. The concept of “the secular” (cf. Asad 2003; Taylor 2007) in turn is more broadly understood and is aimed at focusing on the structures of meaning involved in setting the boundaries between the secular and the religious that are created in everyday life and often operate in the institutional background of a society (cf. Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012).

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Peter L. Berger was also interested in the boundaries between the secular and the religious in his most recent book, The Many Altars of Modernity (2014, see also Berger’s contribution to this volume). In a critical confrontation with classical secularization theory, which he himself once represented (Berger 1967), he suggests replacing it with a theory of pluralization: Modernization does not necessarily lead, according to him, to a loss of significance for religion, but rather it calls for the development of “two pluralisms”: First of all, in modern societies a wide variety of religious worldviews and value systems exist, and secondly, we are systematically confronted today with the coexistence of religious and secular spheres. For this reason, it is important to carry out empirical research on these “two pluralisms”—and to do this at the social level of institutions and politics as well as at the level of individual consciousness. Of central importance, especially in the European debate, is also the concept of a “post-­secular society” introduced by Jürgen Habermas (2001), with which he sought to understand the persistence of religious groups in a supposedly secularized social environment. For him, this is not just an empirical description but also a normative problem. In post-­secular societies, he argues, it is debatable whether secularism, understood as a normative concept that promotes clear differentiation between state and religion, is a good standard for public and political debates. While, according to Habermas (2005: 133), the state has to remain neutral and secular, it cannot be expected that all citizens have to express their political opinions publicly in secular terms. Instead, post-­secular societies have to acknowledge and take seriously that the arguments of religious citizens are presented against the background of their own religious beliefs. Consequently, mechanisms have to be explored through which religious citizens and their arguments can be included in the public political sphere on an equal footing. For Habermas, secular citizens have the duty of translating the religious arguments of their religious contemporaries into statements capable of being debated on neutral ground. The question whether this idea of translation is sustainable for post-­secular societies or not can be left for later discussion at this point. What is interesting here is that the specific experience of living in religiously pluralistic societies is reflected in these arguments. For Habermas, secularization is no longer a universal social fact, but rather a particular self-­description of Western societies or perhaps—as Peter L. Berger argued (1999: 9)—a self-­description of Western European societies. Secularism as its normative companion is then revealed as a central value of European self-­ understanding, and so its ideological character becomes obvious. If secularism is not strictly limited to the state, but extended to include all of the public sphere of a society, it reveals its repressive and exclusionary character.

Introduction: Filling the Void?

5

For a long time, the debates in urban sociology were also characterized by the fundamental conviction based on modernization theory that the continuing development of modernity would necessarily lead to secularization. As a result, cities—as the paradigmatic sites of modernity (Simmel 1903/1971)—were understood as tending toward being religion-­free locations. The French sociologist, Gabriel Le Bras (1956: 480), offered probably the most succinct summary, according to which a French farmer at the end of the nineteenth century ceased going to church the moment he arrived at the Gare de Montparnasse in Paris. A glance at the range of topics within ethnographic studies carried out at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, which even today shape the image of urban sociology, seems to confirm Le Bras’ point: Religion appears as a topic at best implicitly (Casanova 2013: 118). In seeking genuine urban topics and personalities (Park 1925/1967) researchers focused on dance halls, bars, hotels, and ethnic quarters—but not on religious congregations or sects; the world of the transient worker, the gang, confidence tricksters, and prostitutes was depicted—but not that of the priests and the faithful. Only in recent years, with urban religion as an area of focus, has a mainly empirical research field emerged which offers valuable approaches to analysing city and religion. The focus of this line of research, which sees itself as a further development of the lived religion approach (Garbin and Strhan 2017: 4–7), is the social effects of the clash of differing religious worldviews and practices in the city (see also Becci, Burchardt and Casanova 2013; Becker et al. 2013; metroZones 2011). All in all, the research field appears to be extremely varied, certainly, but also to be very fragmented theoretically. It is dominated by the search for urban forms of religion and religiosity, such as the possibility of religion-­induced social cohesion that goes beyond the “community” (Ferdinand Tönnies) and “mechanical solidarity” (Émile Durkheim) and can be typical for cities (see Burchardt and Becci 2013: 3–4). The research studies are—more or less directly— oriented to an early paper by the American religious studies scholar, Robert A. Orsi. According to him, the concept of urban religion “does not refer simply to religious beliefs and practices that happen to take place in cities (and that might as well take place elsewhere). Urban religion is what comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions (. . .) with specific features of the industrial and post-­industrial cityscapes and with the social conditions of city life” (Orsi 1999: 43). Newer empirical studies focus more on the relationship of religious practice and the spatiality or materiality of the city (Karstein and Schmidt-Lux 2017), on the presence and potential for conflict of religion in public spaces (Elisha 2013), on their architectural visibility (Färber, Spielhaus and Binder

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2012), on strategies of place-­making (Bielo 2013), on forms of inclusion and exclusion of religion (Eade 2011), and on experiences of cohesion in fragmented, super-­diverse spaces (Strhan 2013; 2015). The long-­standing refusal of urban sociology to acknowledge religion is surprising, especially given that cities have long been places of religious innovation (Casanova 2013: 114; Orsi 1999: 43): The spread of Christianity in the cities of the Greek and Roman ancient world, the emergence of Islam in the trade centers of Mecca and Medina, the Protestant Revolution in the medieval cities of Europe, or the origins of Pentecostalism in Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century—all these are urban phenomena. This raises the question how a concept of the city could be conceived which—analogous to the sociology of religion—breaks free of the modernization theory bias of urban research. Post-­colonial geography in particular has yielded fruitful impetus in recent years. For example, Jennifer Robinson (2006) suggested avoiding typological labeling and sorting of cities into categories, and instead to initially view all cities as “ordinary.” Her explicit goal is to dislocate European-North American theory building in urban studies, which is based on the core dichotomy of urban (secular) modernity vs. non-­urban (religious) tradition. She says this should be done through a more cosmopolitan mode of theorizing about cities, which is substantially based on a non-­hierarchical method of making comparisons. For Robinson, cities are initially simply sites of sociability with equal status, although sociability can take on very different forms in different cities. In this way, urban theory also encompasses forms of community life in which—as we would like to emphasize here—religiosity and religions can play a core role. This is the case both in “post-­secular” Europe as well as in the rest of the world. But how can the “urban” be captured conceptually in understandings of urban religious modes of sociability? What distinguishes urban forms of religion and religiosity from non-­urban forms? To answer these questions a concept of city is required that makes it possible to think of religious pluralism as an urban phenomenon.

What is a city? The geographer Doreen Massey (1999a: 102) made an interesting suggestion for a definition of city which—similarly to Robinson—argues on the basis of a post-­ colonial relational theoretical approach and understands a city as “an intense focal point (. . .) of a wider geography, bringing together differences in space.” In

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this understanding, cities are in the first instance not further defined sites of dense and heterogeneous population (Massey 1999b), where local, regional, national, and global influences blend together. The underlying relational heuristic thus aims at a non-­essentialist understanding of the city and resembles the theoretical figure which Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (2000) formulated in his concept of “multiple modernities”: Because local, regional, national, and global influences in every city coincide and become fused in every city in their own particular way, different institutional, symbolic, and spatial orders—multiple urbanities, if you like—emerge, which then in turn become real in that location as conglomerates of immaterial and material “objectivations” (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Steets 2016) and have their own specific effects. Based on this, we propose a purely formal definition of the city that is open for any qualitative ascription and that regards the city simply as a space for the densification of the heterogeneous (Berking 2008: 22–3). Put differently, cities are in our understanding socio-­spatial modes of sociation bringing together a variety of people, goods, narratives, images, materialities, etc. in a confined space. Thus, the diversity of lifestyles and worldviews are as much a part of the core characteristics of the urban as is the potential for conflicts. This formal definition of the city has the advantage that it does not undertake any definition of the content of potential conflicts of worldviews. As a result, it can accommodate the various religiously structured conflict situations involved in the two pluralisms, both confrontations between different religious attitudes and practices and also conflicts between secular and religious positions. However, this must not be allowed to hide the fact that an urban society cannot exist in a state of permanent conflict. Collectively acquired forms of conflict avoidance, conflict management, and conflict resolution are needed.

The post-­secular city vs. the fundamentalist city In recent years two theoretical approaches have emerged—the one diametrically opposed to the other—that try to explain the effects of religious pluralism in the city: the “post-­secular city” approach and the “fundamentalist city” approach. The “post-­secular city” (see also Baker’s contribution to this volume) builds on the thesis formulated by Habermas of an ongoing or re-­discovered coexistence of religious and secular convictions, and concretizes them in terms of the urban space. According to Christopher Baker and Justin Beaumont (2011: 33), post-­ secularity emerges mostly in urban spaces. It is in the city where this new social

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arrangement has to be lived and developed. For both scholars, the “post-­secular city” is not only an empirical description, but also a hope for the future, as the post-­secular reality includes the possibility of improving urban life. Religious groups provide a feeling of belonging, which can be used as a secure starting point for dealing with different identities. “Post-­secular cities” thus offer the chance of developing new identities through interactions with different people, and will ultimately lead to a more inclusive way of living together in cities (Baker and Beaumont 2011: 33ff). But, as desirable as these future prospects are, it cannot be denied that there are also risks involved in the resurgence of religion. The “fundamentalist city” seems to be the downside of the “post-­secular city.” Nezar AlSayyad (2011: 11) describes four attributes which characterize a “fundamentalist city” (see also his contribution to this volume). First, it is a city that “excludes by law, tradition, declared policy, or latent practice individuals who are adherents of another religion or who belong to a different ethnicity than those of the ruling power or majority population.” Second, its majority “expects that its minority groups will conform to all the rituals of public behavior prescribed in the religious code of the majority” (AlSayyad 2011: 11). Third, a “fundamentalist city” is segregated by gender. Fourth, within a “fundamentalist city” a “normalization of control and oppressions in everyday life” (AlSayyad 2011: 11) takes place. Here, the forms of conflict avoidance and solution take on genuinely totalitarian characteristics. Conflict between religious convictions is not defused or made understandable by indifference, but instead suppressed by a religion that has become hegemonial. Its means of action range from forced segregation of social spaces to exclusion and expulsion of followers of unwelcome faiths from the urban space. Thus, the fundamentalist city is basically a religiously homogeneous space, which reduces the idea of the city as a densification of the heterogeneous to an absurdity. In other words: The fundamentalist way of dealing with religious diversity in cities is—accepting our definition of city—opposed to the urban social form as such. This shows that the interaction between religion and city is characterized by striking ambivalence. There seems to be a fine line between the opportunities and the risks that come with the resurgence of religion in public urban spaces. There is no agreement that the post-­secular coexistence of religious and secular worldviews and the great plurality of religions on its own already represent a gain. It has always been the case that specific social forms are necessary for achieving a shared coexistence despite differences in worldview. Only in this way is it possible for a city society to finally emerge from the plurality of urban

Introduction: Filling the Void?

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lifestyles. Whether this is referred to as post-­secular or something else can be left open for the moment.

Urban formulas of peace The minimalist definition of a city as a specific socio-­spatial form of sociation which, with densification and heterogenization, has only two formal characteristics, opens up the possibility of a thought experiment to examine whether in the form of the urban—in the “cityness” of the city—elements for the building of a social order can be identified, which function in the area of tension of the two pluralisms of religious belief systems and the coexistence of secular and religious worldviews. Referring to the political management of the two pluralisms, Peter L. Berger (2014: 80–93) speaks of “formulas of peace.” By this he means institutional arrangements which regulate the relationship of state and religion as well as the relationships among religions themselves in a society. As an example of a legal formula for peace he refers to the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, who proposed that the new discipline of international law should be developed etsi Deus non daretur—“as if God did not exist.” In other words: The law should be religiously neutral. Only in this way would it be possible for all to be equal before the law and for conflicts to be able to be resolved through the application of legal logic. The idea of the formulas of peace can easily be applied at the level of the city. Formulated in the words of Edward Soja (2000: 8): Could the “spatial specificity of urbanism” provide modalities for dealing with pluralism and diversity, cohesion and commonality? Can we discern typical urban formulas of peace built on difference and otherness instead of shared values, mutual lifestyles, and homogeneous worldviews? If common ground exists at all in urban theory it relates to the city as a meeting place and environment inhabited by strangers. City dwellers, according to Richard Sennett (1990: 123), were and are always “people in the presence of otherness.” For Berger (2014: 4–5) too, the extent of plurality in institutional order differs not only between different national state contexts but also between different spatial structural forms: “Cities are most often the places where people from very different backgrounds rub shoulders with each other and cognitive contamination begins its creative or (depending on your point of view) destructive job.” In this sense, the city and the cities represent a specific socio-­ spatial form of organizing social relationships by means of which the precarious interaction of diversity and cohesion, of difference and solidarity, is

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institutionalized and shaped. However, the ways and manners by which cities create density and heterogeneity and organize inclusiveness differ. Every city develops its own unique mode of densification and heterogenization and brings the variety together into a unified whole, a specific context, which expresses itself in perceptions and images of the city as a whole. The spatial logic of the process of inclusion is one of systematic increase in the intensity of contact, with low level of commitment. The city organizes density through an extreme increase in interfaces (Held 2005). But density is deceptive. It is simultaneously the most severe inconvenience—it is the core aspect of the so-­called modern “Großstadtkritik”—and a source of opportunity enabling the most unlikely link-­ ups to become reality. It is important to note that densification is not displacement, but an increase in the intensity of inclusiveness. At this level of socio-­spatial form the city is always inclusive, and its unlikely effects manifest themselves clearly as firstly boosted functional differentiation, which translates into spatial fragmentation and is, secondly, accompanied by a lifestyle and day-­to-day practice which forces individuals to carry out permanent switchings of relevance structures (cf. Steets 2014)—here a customer, there a housewife, here a believer, there an alcoholic, here a speculator, there a politician working for the common good. And thirdly and finally, a dynamic is involved that fluidizes categorical identities. Diversity, or more precisely, organized diversity, is the city’s decisive cultural capital. All motives and problems that are discussed under the heading of “diversity” have their fundamentum in re here. As cultural anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1996) states, “access to diversity and diversity of access” form the essential opportunity structures of urban lifestyles. Class, age, gender, ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical handicap, but also income and education are not of interest mainly as individual differences, but as markers of differences. The cultural identities which develop in connection with these classifications are experienced—not least as they are reflected in the differentiations themselves—as constructed and as a strategic means, a source of strength in the struggle for social advantage. It is not by chance that “politics of identity” mark a form of symbolic consensus mobilization which has been dominant for decades, which consciously and with an emancipatory intention relies on the social acknowledgment of particular patterns of identity, and in this way propels the pluralization of urban ways of life along previously unimagined dimensions. The risk of this mode of identity politics, the “universalization” of the particular, however, is that new “totalizing fictions” (Somers and Gibson 1994: 55) are made capable of achieving a consensus, in which a single category,

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for example “gender,” determines all other identity-­defining attributes. Identity politics which are primarily based on reflective self-­understanding and changed cultural knowledge, represent a mode of being in the world which constantly confronts individuals with the challenge of convincing themselves to be convinced. Reflective self-­understanding includes, of necessity, knowing about and playing with the possibility that everything could always be quite different. It is not only societies, cities, communities in which pluralization, cultural diversity, and exaggerated differences assert themselves. It is also the individuals themselves who internalize these overlaps of perspective (Soeffner 2014: 207) and make practical use of them. When belief in believing has replaced belief, the relevance of these totalizing fictions as a brake on permanent contingency flooding becomes directly observable. The most radical result of such a politics of identity at the level of the city can be conceptualized as what AlSayyad called the “fundamentalist city.” Bearing this in mind, the critical question arising in connection with this perspective, which follows the concept of “reflexive modernity” (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1996), of course is that of the role of religion in this politics of identity. Are internal conditions and the claim to validity of religious communities to be set on the same footing as mobilizations based on the politics of identity, which are organized around nation, ethnicity, gender, etc.? Or do religiously motivated forms of community building display quite different modes of identification, of increasing of intensity and of the associated lifestyle? In a world marked by “super-­diversity” (Vertovec 2007), it is difficult to work out whether religious pluralism, and with it religion itself, can or should be given special status. While those in line with the secularization theorem, declare the problem as becoming less and less relevant, those who are concerned about clearing up “post-­secular constellations” draw attention not only to the conflicts, but also to the potential religion itself has for coming to grips with a diversity of worldviews (see Baker in this volume). For the Christian tradition, for example, the religious historian and theologian Philip Sheldrake (2014) goes back to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The Triune nature of the Christian God has always made it seem different. The experience of differentness thus proves to be genuinely Christian. According to Sheldrake’s argument, through this concept of differentness, which is anchored at the core of Christian life, the Christian religion is prepared in a special way for dealing with religious pluralism in cities. Clearly, it can be assumed that in view of the religious diversity in cities, similar experiences of otherness can be worked out theologically for other religions, too. But what is remarkable is the fact that religions are accepting the religious diversity of modern cities as a (theological)

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Religious Pluralism and the City

challenge and developing their own specific answers to it. In this context, the question of translating the theological position into sociological terminology is a fascinating field in its own right in the sociology of knowledge, that requires further research. The sociological perspective casts new light on the relationship between religion and the city. Especially when following Émile Durkheim (1995), for whom religion as an institution of the moral order of a collective is a thoroughly social matter, the question arises whether the institutionalization of the “sacred” can be translated as the formation of the social. Durkheim’s sociology of religion itself can be understood as an answer to conflicts arising from religious pluralization. From a sociological perspective, he emphasizes the functional character of religions. In this way, Durkheim introduces an important shift in the debates in the sociology of religion. He lessens the emphasis on the special claim of religions in order to simultaneously emphasize their universal value in a social theory orientation. Religions, according to this argument, support the practical acquisition of the category system that is fundamental to every society. This is their function and it encompasses their socially integrative potential, which goes beyond all religious particularisms. Such a perspective casts a different light on not only religious pluralism, but also on the specific interaction between religious pluralism and the city. At all events, the possibility that religion(s) for their part can activate a social-­ moral potential that can make a contribution to the peaceful coexistence of the urban diversity of cultural identities cannot be rejected out of hand. In addition, effects possibly connected with the increasing culturalization of religion and above all the relationship of “believing” and “belonging” (Brubaker 2017) are in need of empirical clarification. In any case, the probability that as religious diversity becomes more strongly entrenched in everyday routine the intensity of belief will decrease and the identification with “belonging” increase needs to be analytically formulated and empirically investigated. However, the potential for conflict inherent in religious pluralism seems to be determined to a considerable extent by the form of the particular religious holism and the “totalizing fictions” involved, which cannot be transferred into the secular sphere without friction. For example, at the time of writing, the US Supreme Court will be hearing the case of a pastry cook who for religious reasons refused to supply a wedding cake to a homosexual couple (Liptak 2017). But, returning to the city and cities. It is the city which evokes and at the same time regulates this identity politics-­related level of expectation. This does not prevent conflicts. However, the foundation on which, for example in the modern

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metropolis, the fights around the politics of identity and the struggles to legitimize a particular view of the social as a universal one is an enormous civilizing achievement, which emerges in social life through “cityness.” Not tolerance and recognition of social and cultural differences, but an attitude of reserve and indifference (Simmel 1903/1971)—the cooling of worldview passions to a tolerable level which permits interactions with strangers—mark the socio-­moral core, at least of the way of life in big European cities. In modern European metropolises, indifference is taking the place of overheated and ultimately never completely solvable conflicts over matters of faith, value structures, and lifestyles. Indifference’s practical everyday value is that of its undemanding nature. Unlike tolerance, it requires no hermeneutic effort. Yet, indifference is not apathy but a form of perception which temporarily suspends relevance—an attitude that is not without presuppositions. Instead, indifference has to be learned and endured. It marks both the starting and the end point of a typical big city constellation. What initially seems to be mental self-­preservation against the sensory overload of the metropolis takes on much sharper contours as a habitual way of dealing with difference. Indifference is the result of the routinizing of daily experiences of difference, an aid in the routine reality of the everyday big city world, whose effects are reinforced by the institutional framework of legalized and bureaucratic procedures. It is not necessary to understand “the other” to be able to be indifferent to the expectations of others. It is sufficient to simply not to be bothered by them. Thus, indifference reveals itself to be a social foundation on which conflict-­free coexistence is possible in urban everyday life under conditions of religious diversity. At the same time, the possibility is opened up of being able to advance to tolerant cooperation through mutual understanding and eventually perhaps even to develop a pluralist urban society. From this perspective, indifference can be seen as an urban formula of peace linked to the specific socio-­spatial form of organization of social relationships. When and how this everyday modus operandi will establish itself for faith communities, in the competition among religious worldviews and in the zones where the secular and the religious spheres interact has yet to be empirically clarified (as examples, consider further the contribution by Burchardt, Becci, and Giorda as well as the one by Srinivas in this volume). While the attitude of indifference can be understood as a mode of sociability to handle urban concentrations of (religious) heterogeneity in European metropolises, an examination of the American context offers additional insights. Although not primarily dealing with religious pluralism, Robert Park (1925/1967) analyses the ways migrants, with their quite different cultural and mental

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backgrounds, manage to survive and live their lives in a rapidly growing and constantly changing metropolis. They tend, he argues, to form homogeneous groups and neighborhoods within the city, and as a result the city—“a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate” (Park 1925/1967: 40)— becomes a highly segregated space, which—and this is remarkable— simultaneously accounts for a specific mode of sociability that enables both individuality and solidarity. For this (North American) conceptualization of the modern metropolis, spatial segregation serves as the main urban formula of peace and the dependent mode of sociability. Put briefly, the individuality-­ solidarity nexus presents the basic precondition through which pluralism is managed in the confined urban space of the early American city. However, the Chicago of the 1920s does not represent the urban world of the twenty-­first century and the breadth and applicability of explanatory approaches are culture-­specific and geographically restricted. Yet, this should not obscure the fact that spatial segregation is and will remain a substantial structural characteristic of urban ways of life. Modalities and intensities vary both historically and geographically. But both an inflated “politics of space” and the varied strategies for place-­making, the struggle for territorial presence, follow the logic of segregation. Gentrification, gated communities, and the demands for sacred places in secular spaces are for their part spatial politics-­based responses to the opportunities and hardships of global pluralization dynamics (see also Oosterbaan’s contribution to this volume). Symbolic boundaries always tend to become territorialized. This can settle conflicts and/or fuel them. But how are symbolic boundaries constructed and stabilized? The dominant underlying assumption that ethnic, religious, and worldview-­ related or, stated briefly, every form of cultural pluralization, derives from the previous competition and coexistence of isolated groups, which took pains to preserve their mutual otherness, of necessity fails to take account of the dynamics and effects, the logics of production, and the negotiating processes, which precede the symbolic articulation of cultural difference. This is where concepts connected with “interculture” or “intercultural communication” come into play (see Soeffner and Zifonun 2008; Zifonun 2014). In this approach, analytic attention is no longer focused on differences between coexisting groups but on the space, on the leeway and room for maneuver that are initially created in the process of intercultural communication. Interculture is understood as a contact zone and area of action for dealing with cultural ambivalence, and it is interactions in these contact zones which “provide the impetus leading to setting boundaries, constructing identities, negotiating systems of order, and carrying out social

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closures” (Zifonun 2014: 189–90). Cities are these contact zones—or are forced to provide these contact zones—for dealing with cultural ambivalence, and still more: by bringing about specific densification and heterogenization they keep alive the experience of being different, the permanent existence of the others as “others” in daily life. Indifference as an urban formula of peace may not be an option in intercultural interactions, but in those places where people are forced to interact independently of class and social status, of ethnicity and religious faith, its effects can scarcely be overestimated.

Toward a comparative study of urban religions On the basis of the discussion up to this point, a methodological link between the study of religion and urban theory can be sketched out, which could inspire theory building in both traditions. Here and there in recent years strong conceptual suggestions have been formulated for comparative research perspectives, which can be readily linked: In the field of religious studies, this involves, above all, the approach of “multiple secularities” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012); in the field of urban theory it is the re-­imagination of the city through “comparative urbanism” (Robinson 2006: 41–64; Abu-Lughod 2007; Ward 2010). In addition to Eisenstadt’s (2000) concept of “multiple modernities,” the main reference point of the “multiple secularities” approach is Casanova’s (2009) conceptual distinction between secularization, secularism, and the secular, with in particular the idea of “the secular” being further developed (cf. WohlrabSahr and Burchardt 2012; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013; Burchardt, Wohlrab-Sahr and Middell 2015). According to Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr (2013: 606), “secularities” serve to explore “how shared but also contested forms and practices of distinguishing religious and secular spheres of society shape and define the meaning of religious identities, membership, practices and modes of incorporation”. “Secularities” work on the level of institutionally constituted everyday reality and “provide answers” for social problems (e.g., the problem of individual freedom or the problem of religious heterogeneity) for which they offer culture-­specific “solutions.” However, these “solutions” are often contested (Schuh, Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2012) and unimaginable without (conflicting) encounters or mutual entanglements between the religious and the secular. According to Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt (2011: 63), sociological analyses “always anticipate wide-­ranging links among religion, state politics, and the demands religious groups and movements make in the public sphere” (our

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Religious Pluralism and the City

translation). We assume that the advantage of this approach lies in the further conceptualization of the comparative cultural perspective which—without the assumption-­laden premises of classical secularization theory—simply asks about the “how” of secularities in different cultural contexts. The “multiple secularities” approach can be applied to the city with the help of some ideas which have emerged in the context of the debate on “comparative urbanism”. For example, building on Jennifer Robinson, Kevin Ward (2010: 471) proposes “a relational comparative approach to the study of cities.” Ward understands the city “as open and constituted in and through relations that stretch across space and that are territorialized in place” (Ward 2010: 481). He thus follows a non-­essentialist understanding of the city as a place where the world (heterogeneity) becomes concentrated in its own specific way (densification), opening up relational comparative perspectives. With the relational form of comparison it is not a matter of sorting cities according to pre-­specified criteria mostly developed in the Western discourse on cities, for example with regard to the level of modernization, economic prosperity, global connectedness or “creativity.” Instead this approach suggests to look at cities in the light of other cities. In this way, for example London could be seen through the lens of Bangalore, or Berlin through that of Rio de Janeiro, through which new insights can be systematically achieved. Admittedly, it is true that every comparison produces visibilities (and therefore also invisibilities) which must be taken into consideration (Abu-Lughod 2007: 403). The minimal definition we have suggested of the city as a specific socio-­ spatial form of sociation can be easily integrated into the perspective of urban theory critical of modernization. It takes the concept of “ordinary cities” literally without assigning typological categorizations too hastily. Admittedly, cultural comparisons are a rather mean, but at the same time self-­evident, practice used by us as everyday individuals. However, the decisive hurdle for all cultural studies and social science-­oriented comparisons is the fundamental epistemological problem of constructing a tertium comparationis, which is the first prerequisite for a systematic setting in relationships. The conceptual position of understanding what is special about a city as the result of its particular modes of densification and heterogenization offers a promising starting point. When contents and modalities of densification and heterogenization differ, according to this thesis, this city, in comparison with that one must acquire distinct characteristics, and, in connection with the “city” as the unit of analysis, different, distinguishable structures of meaning of the boundaries drawn between the secular and the religious—“multiple urbanities” if you will—must emerge. This is not only true

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for the field of religious pluralism, but also for the routinization and institutionalization of a pluralistically structured urban order in general or, stated succinctly: for urban formulas of peace. Both powerful as well as deceptive, the image of the city as “a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate” (Park 1925/1967: 40) was and (almost) always is confronted by a fragile, pluralistically structured urban society which achieved its “unity” through the organization of difference. Robert Park (1928) himself made a substantial contribution to this way of looking at the problem with the model of the “marginal man.” Segregation of social space which reduces conflict and may even promote peace does not exclude the stranger, for the others are always there. And it is cultural contact, interaction with the others, which—as Peter L. Berger (2014: 2) put it—sets off the process of mutual “cognitive contamination” and makes both into others. It is this which Park is known to have referred to as the creative and innovative moment in urban practice. The “marginal man” is the emblematic figure of the social suffering of and the productive coping with pluralization. If formulating a tentative hypothetical framework concerning the relationship of city and religion while simultaneously keeping in mind the links between urban theory and religious studies is not completely daunting, three problems can be identified, which require clarification from both conceptual and empirical standpoints. First, it is unavoidable that the epistemological status of city and religion must be clarified. Religion and city serve two very different fields. To state that the city and cities are purely the address, the site where the spectacle of religious pluralism unfolds would scarcely be satisfactory. A formal definition of city makes it possible, at least at the structural and theoretical level, to find arguments for the view that the “the city,” as a specific socio-­spatial form of sociation, offers preconditions for the possibility of urban peace formulas. However, what still needs to be clarified is how structural and theoretical frameworks are translated into social behavior. In the field of religion this question does not arise in this form. The differing levels of social-­moral demandingness of different religions are already located at the behavioral theory level. Second, the status of “religion” in the concert of urban pluralism must be established. The concept of “secularity” provides a promising building block for the analysis of the post-­secular constellation. However, the complex mixture of religious pluralism, the internal communication of faith communities, the logics of boundary setting, and the forms of cooperation and of “cognitive contamination” require conceptual sharpening. The “interculture” model offers an interesting framework for answering these questions, precisely because it

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rejects the current notion that “established” groups and cultural identities oppose each other in favor of the hypothesis of the formation of groups and identity in the process of encounters in a space. The concrete mediation and constitutive processes involved require further empirical clarification. Finally, consideration should also be given to the fact that urban formulas of peace vary according to the local context. The different hard-­won arrangements that are developed for overcoming heterogeneous religious conflicts are concretized in varying institutional forms. Modes of concentrating the heterogeneous can thus be empirically described as varying from city to city, in other words divergent modes of dealing with religious pluralism can be cited. At the same time, these modes of pluralization are themselves not only the result of particular specific mediation, negotiation and control processes, but also actively affect the shaping of their city (Berking and Schwenk 2011). The modes become components of a local culture and become part of the city’s imaginary (Schwenk 2016). Eventually, the religious pluralism which varies in each city thus shapes the image of a city.

Outline of the volume These three problem areas for understanding the relationship between city and religion also served as a template for the structure of the present volume. After the conceptual contributions in Part One “From Secularization to Pluralization” and Part Two “Between Fundamentalism and Postsecularism: Conceptualizing the Relations between City and Religion” elaborate on the nature of the relationship among the city, religion, and modernity, Part Three “Religious Pluralism: Conflicts and Negotiations in the City” is dedicated to the lived urban pluralism in cities in different parts of the world. A strong empirical orientation sheds light on the negotiating, mediating, and controlling processes which govern relationships among the various forms of religion and between religious and secular worldviews. In closing, Part Four “Changing Urban Imaginaries” focuses on religiously imbued urban concepts, urban imagery, and scholarly conceptualizations of city and religion.

From Secularization to Pluralization The volume opens with a contribution by sociologist and modernity theorist Peter L. Berger (Boston University). In his most recent book, The Many Altars of

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Modernity (2014), Berger develops a theory of pluralism, which is supposed to replace the theory of secularization, and which he applies in his chapter to the modern metropolis and particular urban spaces (such as, for example, hospitals). Berger assumes that modernity is shaped by “two pluralisms”: a plurality of religions and moral systems coexisting in the same society and the coexistence of religion and a powerful secular discourse, without which a modern society would not function. He asks, first, how the two pluralisms at the political level of a society are managed institutionally and, secondly, how human beings handle the diversity of differing worldviews at the subjective level of the mind. The modern metropolis—and he demonstrates this with examples—provides ideal conditions for this research perspective, as differences in space merge in it.

Between Fundamentalism and Postsecularism: Conceptualizing the Relations between City and Religion Whereas Berger emphasizes the positive and fascinating aspects of modern pluralist metropolises, urban theorist and planner Nezar AlSayyad (UC Berkeley) focuses on the conflicted relationship of city and religion. Under the impression of diminishing state power and the triumph of the neoliberal economic paradigm, he sees cities as the predestined sites where the struggle of social participation, political visibility, and collective (religious) identity constructions is—in part violently—carried out. AlSayyad understands “fundamentalism” as a specifically modern reaction by religious people to the challenges of modernity and through which the role of religion in the public sphere has been seriously challenged. Consequently, the “fundamentalist city” is a city where local or global forces shape highly exclusionary patterns of space. The central principle at work here is the religious, ethnic, and gender-­related homogenization of the city by the majority population. As a result, AlSayyad perceives a “medieval ordering of space” characterized by the fact that a violently enforced homogeneity becomes the norm. Much like in AlSayyad, the theologian and social scientist Christopher Baker (Goldsmiths, University of London) focuses on the effects of diminishing state power and the triumph of neoliberal capitalism, although he draws contrasting conclusions. While current forms of urbanity in many countries are characterized by what he calls “the great separation,” that is, a splintered spatiality and commonality, Baker also observes examples of “the great re-­connection.” What is meant is above all modes of civil engagement and ethical subjectivities that help to generate urban sustainability and humanization. The prerequisite for these,

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however, is a cosmopolitan religious imagination, in other words, a form of religion and religiosity that is conscious of its own standpoint (and the standpoint of other religions and thus of its own limitedness). Against the background of Habermas’s concept of post-­secularity, Baker argues that a reflexively applied cosmopolitan religious imagination can serve, first, as a basis for a polyphonic public space of discourse and, second, as a major (spiritual) source for practices of social responsibility in the city. In this way, it contributes to “the great re-­ connection” and to what Baker calls “the good city.” In critical analyses of the model of both the “fundamentalist city” and the “post-­secular city,” geographer Stephan Lanz (Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt [Oder]) calls for a theoretical research perspective on lived religion in cities around that world that is less loaded with preconditions. Adopting a post-­colonial approach which opposes premature thematic attributions, Lanz discusses “specific urban-­religious configurations,” understood as assemblages of material, social, symbolic, and sensuous spaces as well as social practices and subjectivities that mutually influence each other and thereby form specific modes of urban religion. Lanz demonstrates the fruitfulness of this approach with two examples: the self-­made religion of marginalized urban dwellers in Rio de Janeiro (that serves primarily as subaltern infrastructures helping people to survive) and the religious metropolitan mainstream observed in Berlin and Istanbul (that mainly serves as an expression of an individual lifestyle). Interestingly, both urban-­religious configurations operate in the framework of a ubiquitous global religious marketplace that functions in a similar manner and is founded on ideas, consumption habits, lifestyles, and messages which circulate globally and from which “consumers” or “believers” choose according to their needs. The city—understood here as the prime marketplace of heterogeneous worldviews—is the crucial place where these (urban) religiosities flourish.

Religious Pluralism: Conflicts and Negotiations in the City At the center of the more empirically oriented contribution of sociologists Marian Burchardt (University of Leipzig), Irene Becci (University of Lausanne) and Mariachiara Giorda (University of Turin) are the material and symbolic superimpositions of religious forms of expression in the urban spaces of Barcelona and Turin. In comparing these two European cities they explore how spatial strategies of religious groups have formed multifaceted, although highly contested urban fabrics. According to the authors, both Barcelona and Turin are

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shaped by what they call “religious super-­diversity,” that is, a socio-­cultural context in which established religions coexist with diaspora or migrant religions, and emerging spiritualities. Each of these forms of religion has developed a different kind of relationship to the cities’ power structures as well as spatial regimes. As a result, the authors observe different spatial strategies through which majority and minority religious groups compete for visibility and recognition: Inherited religious institutions such as the still dominant Christian traditions mostly apply strategies of “place keeping.” Diaspora and migrant religions, by contrast, adopt strategies of “placemaking,” whereas new religious and spiritual movements are mainly “place seekers.” All in all, their analysis shows clearly that that urban space is an iconic arena in which religious super-­ diversity becomes visible. The contribution by anthropologist Martijn Oosterbaan (Utrecht University) focuses on a city in the Global South: On the basis of the example of evangelical Christian carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro, Oosterbaan shows how an urban culture form which is extremely popular in Brazil—the street carnival—is captured by a religious minority group. Oosterbaan conceptualizes public space as a site where local and national belongings are fought out and confirmations and contestations of the relationships between nationality, ethnicity, and religion occur. In Brazil, Carnival as a cultural form is closely linked to both the Catholic and the Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, and is regarded as the most important marker of Brazilian national identity. In his article, Oosterbaan analyses evangelical carnival parades as a subversive spatio-­temporal intervention designed to participate in this very popular cultural practice—without (deliberately!) becoming part of it. The contribution of sociologist and anthropologist John Eade (University of Roehampton) also focuses on minorities, in this case, however, the migrant minorities of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in and around London. Of interest are the ways migrants think about the norms and values of their place of origin in relation to their place of settlement. What does integration mean in everyday life? What role does the religious background of the migrants play in finding a way into their new social and cultural environment? And what is the relevance of dominant public discourses in these processes, in this case the discussions in Britain revolving around “Brexit”? Eade shows that most of the migrants in his sample try to behave as “respectable newcomers,” which implies an emphasis on hard work, respect for rules and self-­reliance. Interestingly, very few of the people interviewed associated these values with religion. While some still benefit from being part of international religious networks (e.g., Pentecostal),

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most migrants obviously adapted their practices to the image of London/the UK as a secular place. Much like Eade, the contribution by religion scholar Veronika Eufinger (University of Bochum) deals with images and stocks of knowledge that guide social practices. In this case, however, it is not the social practices of individuals, but those of organizations. Eufinger investigates the organizational knowledge upon which the two major churches in Germany, the Roman-Catholic Church and the Protestant Church, act as players in German cities. The analysis makes clear that the city is regarded by both churches as, on the one hand, the site of a contested real-­estate market, in which it is economically necessary to operate with as much acumen as possible in order to be visible at central sites. At the same time, the city seems to be a site where—unlike rural areas—religion has no traditional place. For this reason the churches seek to create new religious spaces, for instance new community centers that mix secular functions with religious ones. Using the example of the Ökumenisches Forum HafenCity in Hamburg, Eufinger argues that it is through a careful aesthetic integration into the local neighborhood and a mixture of openness (for the worldly functions of the building) and closeness (of the chapel in the very heart of the building) that churches make their (new) places in the city.

Changing Urban Imaginaries The focus of the chapter by anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas (Emerson College Boston) is the lived, indigenous, taken-­for-granted, everyday encounter with the other, or in short, a “vernacular pluralism” typical for Indian cities. Through the example of her home city of Bangalore, Srinivas reconstructs the different historical layers which have made the city into a palimpsest of multiple and overlapping histories. This palimpsest reveals itself not only in a polycontextual, built fabric of the city, but it also brings out specific modes of sociability, which made interaction with and permanent confrontation with the other possible in the first place: Neighborliness, understood as everyday practices of social conviviality that downplay religious differences while making common local concerns more relevant, is a prime example of this. At the level of urban imaginary, a city as polyphonic as Bangalore obviously has the capacity to create a sense of belonging—to very different people. On the basis of comparative analyses of visual representations of secular and religious groups in Jerusalem, geographer Tovi Fenster (Tel Aviv University) identifies the emergence of a new form of urban, which she refers to as the

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“neo-­liberal global locality city.” Whereas until a short time ago Jerusalem’s public space was still primarily marked by in part intense clashes between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews over the use of space, as well as symbolic demarcations, recently a new consumption orientation found in both groups seems to be exerting itself: For example, in the ultra-­orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim, there are more and more high-­priced apartment buildings, cafés, bike shops, and other stores selling secular goods appearing alongside traditional shops for holy books and objects. At the same time, it is striking that in the secular parts of the city less and less graffiti critical of religion is being seen and public spaces are being beautified. Fenster interprets these changes as an expression of neoliberal urban development processes that “soften” previous lines of conflict—and at the same time produce new forms of exclusion and changing urban imaginaries. In the last chapter of the volume Ancient Oriental Studies specialist Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum (Free University of Berlin) deconstructs the view, widely accepted in both classical studies and in urban theory, that religion was a key factor in the development of the first cities in Mesopotamia during the third millennium bce, summarized in the concept of the “Sumerian temple city.” Until now it has been assumed that religion was the prime mover of civilization, and that the inhabitants of the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris were deeply religious people. As a result, the temple was not only regarded as the center of religious life in the city, but also as the nucleus of the state. However, CancikKirschbaum shows on the one hand through which discursive constellations the image of the religion-­dominated temple city developed in twentieth century classical studies and on the other hand that valid alternative explanatory approaches exist. Temples are described in these approaches less as one-­sided religious institutions and instead as large companies run by members of a ruling elite that in addition to their economic function also bore special social responsibilities, for instance, caring for the gods. Put differently, according to Cancik-Kirschbaum, religion was only one of many factors or movers of civilization. In fact, it is due to the mechanisms of modern science that the scientific model of the “Sumerian temple city” was transformed into historic reality, entering encyclopedias and general histories.

Part One

From Secularization to Pluralization

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Urbanity as a Vortex of Pluralism: A Personal Reflection about City and Religion Peter L. Berger

The subject is vast, and close to my heart, but I have no illusions about being a Renaissance man. So as not to disappoint my audience, I will begin by mentioning what I will not discuss (though not without listing what I would have to discuss if I did): I will not conduct a tour d’horizon of the role of cities in the history of religion. I will only propose that cities, as against the countryside, have always been the centers of innovative religious movements. The ancient Israelites, never mind how long, if ever, they wandered around in the desert, finally deposited the Ark of the Covenant in the holy city of Jerusalem, shunning the Ba’alim (premature environmentalists) who stayed close to nature in bucolic sanctuaries. The Jesus movement began in Nazareth, which was hardly a metropolis but was in the ethnically mixed region of Galilee (it is quite imaginable that Jesus knew at least some Greek). Christianity spread through the Roman world city by city—the itinerary of the Apostle Paul is a veritable tourist map of the Mediterranean. Islam is often thought of as coming out of the desert, but Mecca was an important trade center in the busy traffic between the Byzantine and Persian empires (Khadijah, first wife of the Prophet, was the widow of a wealthy merchant.) Finally to utter the word that is called for here: Great religious movements came out of situations of pluralism. Let me not forget the Silk Road, which linked Europe and China from one caravanserai to another, from city to city. For centuries there was intense interaction between Christianity (Orthodox and Nestorian), Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, and the gods know what else, before Islam threw its mantle over the whole region. Out of that particular vortex came the wonderful book The Questions of King Milinda (Davids 1890), a Socratic dialogue between a Buddhist teacher and the ruler of a Hellenistic kingdom left behind by the conquests of Alexander the Great (the king’s name was probably Menander).

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I will also not discuss the topic of cities in the development of modern sociology. The classical texts for this are two—Georg Simmel’s essay (1903/1984) titled in English translation as The Metropolis and Mental Life, where the city is analysed as a gathering of strangers, assailed by a multiplicity of stimuli—a situation that makes for anonymity, quick thinking, and sophistication—that is, creates the urbane individual. One could also describe this quality as blasé—one is surprised by nothing, or at least pretends so. Some years ago I had an instructive experience of this: I was on a walk in London with my wife and my younger son, who must have been about four years old. Suddenly he called out in alarm and rapidly jumped out of the way. He had seen a man walk by leading on a leash what looked like a small panther. I was struck by the fact that everyone else just went by without paying attention. The other classical text is another essay, by Max Weber, published in 1921 shortly after his death (Weber 1921/1958). Weber was not so much concerned with the social psychology of the city, as by its replacement of kinship as the basic social institution by more artificial forms of organization—from the Greek polis to the guilds of medieval Europe to modern municipal government. If you want a memorial to this continuity you can see it today in Rome, where potholes still exhibit the acronym SPQR, standing for the Latin “Senate and Populace of Rome.” Finally, much closer in time is the Chicago School of urban sociology, which flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. There a group of researchers studied every nook and cranny of the city of Chicago turned into a huge laboratory, especially what they first called its “subcultures”— such as the worlds of rooming houses, dance halls, ethnic or racial enclaves. Leading figures in this group were Robert Park and Louis Wirth (who told his students “to get your hands dirty with research”). They did not omit religion, pioneering among other topics the black church (during the period when masses of African-Americans migrated from the South to Chicago). The most massive work coming out of this school was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America by W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918). Sort of in passing they also created a new and influential approach to sociology called “symbolic interactionism”; one of its most famous propositions, “if people define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences,” actually began as a footnote in The Polish Peasant. I have spent the last few years working toward a theory of pluralism, to replace the secularization theory which, I believe, has been empirically falsified. I have sketched the outline of such a theory in my book The Many Altars of Modernity (2014). (I will take the liberty of again quoting my favorite Zulu proverb—“If I don’t beat my drum, who will?”). Actually, I like to speak of two pluralisms: The first is religious pluralism in the usual sense—a plurality of religions, worldviews,

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and moral systems coexisting in the same society; the other refers to the coexistence of religion with a powerful secular discourse without which a modern society could not exist. That discourse is what Charles Taylor has ably described as the “secular frame” in his book A Secular Age (2007); he just exaggerated the degree of hegemony achieved by this discourse under modern conditions (which indeed is the basic error of all forms of secularization theory). Exaggeration applies to both, those who still adhere to that theory, and those who instead propose a re-­sacralization of the world—nicely encapsulated in the assertion of “the return of the gods.” Except for a small portion of the world’s population (especially in Western Europe and in an international intelligentsia) the relation between religion and modernity is not a matter of either/or, but rather of “both/and.” To help you start thinking in these terms, which for many of you are probably implausible, I invite you to come with me to central Texas, where I have periodically taught as a visiting professor at a conservative Baptist university. There, in one of the most religious and economically dynamic regions of the United States you can meet successful petroleum engineers, brain surgeons, and computer specialists who believe that prayer can perform miracles of healing and some of whom believe that it can divert the course of a hurricane. If you want to follow up with two recent empirical studies of the Evangelical mind, I refer you to Tanya Luhrmann (2012) (anthropologist, Stanford) and Robert Wuthnow (2012) (sociologist, Princeton). It is not interesting to ask whether this coexistence is possible; we know that it is (it only takes about four hours to fly from Boston to Dallas)—the interesting question is how this feat is achieved, and achieved by very intelligent people with graduate degrees in the natural sciences. I now propose to look at how the two pluralisms occupy urban spaces today. They do so today in just about every country in the world beyond the level of modernity of, say, Amazonia. I start with America, because it is in the vanguard of both pluralisms—the most religious and religiously diverse country in the developed world (the comparison with Europe is most helpful here), and also the location of the most advanced science and technology (more Nobel prizes and international patents than anywhere else). Start in Washington: Go north on 16th Street, NW, from the White House toward Maryland. I have never found out why (probably zoning regulations), but this stretch of urban landscape is a veritable museum of comparative religion—different Protestant churches (including an African-American one), a big Catholic church, different denominations of American Judaism, a Greek Orthodox church, a Buddhist temple, a Baha’i center, and a building dedicated to one of the many syncretistic sects that sprouted in Vietnam. There is no mosque on 16th Street, when I last

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looked, but one of the biggest ones is one block away. I don’t know whether any formal interreligious dialogue is going on between these establishments (I would love to eavesdrop on a dialogue between Orthodox Jews and Buddhists). However, occasionally some of those who work in these places or who attend services there must be getting into informal conversation with each other (for instance, at big events they might negotiate over parking spaces). If these occasions occur repeatedly, even if theological topics are avoided, what is likely to occur is what I call “cognitive contamination”—when the beliefs and practices of these “others” begin to affect one’s own. If you want to get out of Washington (an understandable urge these days), I can suggest a more relaxing excursion: Go to Honolulu and take the Pali Highway across the island of Oahu. Even before you leave the city limits, you can experience another orgy of religious pluralism. As one would expect, there is a stronger Asia presence—more Buddhists than Orthodox Jews (though you might come across a guitar-­strumming rabbi in an aloha shirt who practices Tantric meditation). Granted, few other countries can match the exuberant religious pluralism of America (the Harvard religion scholar Diana Eck has called it, probably correctly, the most religiously diverse country in the world). But others are catching up. Some years ago I saw devotees of Krishna chanting and dancing in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, one of the monuments of European Christendom. And also some time ago I was at a party in Stuttgart, where I expressed the opinion that a media-­savvy Hindu holy-­man was probably a fraud. One of the other individuals there, who had been introduced as an engineer, took strong exception to my characterization. He said that he was a disciple of the guru; he spoke in a broad Swabian dialect. For the other pluralism we might as well take Boston. Someone has once described it, as not so much a city as a federation of campuses and medical centers. Its top universities, notably Harvard and MIT, calmly assume that they constitute the navel, the mythical omphalos, of the intellectual universe (I’m sure that this is an exaggeration), but myths often have long lives—to paraphrase the previously quoted W. I. Thomas (the co-­author of The Polish Peasant), definitions of reality, if held by elites, have a way of becoming reality. As to medical centers, if you intend to become seriously ill and have the required insurance, it is a good idea to do so in Boston. At the research center I used to direct at Boston University I recently organized a conference on the hospital as an interface between modernity and religion. Every hospital is a temple to the spirit of modernity: The therapy dispensed there is to be based exclusively on scientific knowledge and the most advanced technology is applied in its service. However, the organization of a hospital resembles that of a religious hierarchy. All doctors wear long white

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robes, and the top doctors, surrounded by acolytes, occasionally descend from the heights and pronounce judgments. Lesser medical personnel, nurses, and technicians wear less sacred uniforms. The patients, upon whom this entire hierarchy is imposed, go around in demeaning clothing (like the so-­called “johnnies” favored in American hospitals, the buttocks exposed to public view and every part of the body easily accessible to the clerisy in charge). They must wait until sentence is pronounced from on high; they hope a merciful one. Of course such temples of modernity do not exist in less developed situations—say, in a rather primitive African hinterland. Even there one will encounter agents or consumers of modernity, such as scouts for multinational corporations looking for untapped natural resources, or eco-­tourists looking for communion with unspoiled nature; these two cordially dislike each other. But, minimally, there will be three modern outposts sent into this remote territory by the national government—a police station, a primary school, and a clinic. But here too religion will interact with these modern intrusions. There will be traditional actors, such as tribal chiefs trying to preserve the old family virtues (there will probably be no television yet, but other immoral communications will have reached, possibly by way of sexually liberated eco-­tourists); the tribal chiefs will also resent the authority of the police station, as indigenous healers (aka witch doctors) will compete with the clinic. But there will very likely be religious impinging from the outside, some from very modern origins—such as the powerful Pentecostal movement which has been sweeping throughout subSaharan Africa. And here too there will be both conflict and collusion between modernity and religion. But back to Boston: The hospital, flying the banners of modernity, is ongoingly invaded by religion. Some of it is on the formal level. Large hospitals in Boston employ a multireligious group of chaplains. Some are sent in by outside religious bodies, some are actually on the hospital’s own payroll. Both groups very commonly go through a program that began many years ago under the heading “clinical training,” intended to teach aspiring chaplains basic techniques of “counseling” (a kind of psychotherapy 101). Wendy Cadge (sociologist, Brandeis) has written a very impressive study of hospital chaplains, Paging God (2012). One of her findings is that these chaplains prefer to describe their message as “spirituality,” rather than “religion.” This allows them to fit more easily into the discourse of the medical hierarchy, including doing entries into patients’ charts—a “spirituality” index being potentially added to all the other data— blood pressure, sugar levels, X-ray pictures, and so on. Cadge does not use this term, but what she describes is a process of secularization; she also found that

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Catholic hospital chaplains are most resistant to this process, because their ministry is largely sacramental (including the sacrament that used to be called “extreme unction,” though it is now named in such a way as not to suggest to anxious patients that they are about to die). Let me put the change starkly: Ministry to the dying, once called ars moriendi/ “the art of dying,” was intended to reconcile the patient with God while there is still time; the secularized ministry is intended to reconcile patients with unresolved feelings toward parents, spouses, and other “significant others.” But even on the formal level there is a two-­way traffic going on. I recently met the Buddhist chaplain of an originally Jewish hospital in Boston. We had an interesting conversation. I asked him whether there were many Buddhist patients—“No, hardly any.” Does he then teach Buddhism?—No, he wouldn’t be allowed to do this. Then what does he talk with patients about?—Well, he will talk about anything they want to talk about; but also he talks about some Buddhist concepts without identifying them as such. Which ones? He mentioned three—“attentiveness,” “non-­self,” and “patience.” These are traditional precepts, helpful in the quest for enlightenment, but it is open to question whether this secularization does indeed, as he seems to intend, smuggle in Buddhist contents under cover of a secular discourse, or whether it is an abandonment of the Noble Eight-Fold Path that was originally meant to release from the horror of endless reincarnations. Be this as it may, while hospital chaplains (at least non-Catholic ones) translate ministry into psychotherapy, medical faculties develop an interest in exploring “traditional ways of healing,” including forms of Asian meditation (a conspiracy of neuroscientists and witch doctors?). In other words, while the discourse of modern medicine, exemplified in the institution of the hospital, is very powerful indeed (and, let me hasten to say, does indeed heal and prolong life) there seems to be “mutual cognitive contamination” at work here. In addition to these formal interactions, there are numerous informal religious incursions—by visiting family and friends of the patient, by home clergy and pastoral visitors, and even by medical staff. Three episodes from my own experience (all in Boston): (1) About eight years ago I was seriously ill and had to spend three weeks in the hospital (I then recovered very well—no extreme unction required, not even a Lutheran one!). During one of the worst periods a young intern came to my room; I had never seen him before, I think he came about some medication. Out of the blue, just before leaving, he said: “I want you to know that some of us have been praying for you. I think this is important.” (2) A little later a middle-­aged cleaning women came into the room. She was a Latina, and I knew that she was Pentecostal (a faith that I, as incurably Lutheran,

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have never found appealing). She was sobbing, told me that her mother had died yesterday. I spontaneously took her hands in mine and said “somos todos en los manos del Senor” / “we are all in the hands of the Lord.” For a moment we had sacralized this space. (3) Much more recently, after an accident, I was in physical therapy. A woman I didn’t know phoned me. She had heard from a colleague about this, she is an occupational therapist, and she wonders whether I could use her services. I thanked her, but no—I only needed my head for my occupation, and it was fine. She said something friendly, then added before hanging up: “and have a blessed Ash Wednesday.” I was a bit startled; not being very attentive to the church calendar, I had not remembered that it was Ash Wednesday, but then I wondered: Did she think that I am Catholic? If so, why? But then more interesting: Does she wish everybody, whether thought to be Catholic or not, a blessed Ash Wednesday? If so, she had switched from a conversation of medical relevance to a religious one (be it with pastoral or missionary intent). The contemporary American or European city has clearly designated religious and secular spaces—St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Coney Island amusement park. Notre Dame and what used to be the red-­light district of Montmartre. And then, in both countries with a separation of church and state, secular political spaces with religious undertones—the Arc de Triomphe and the Statue of Liberty. But they tend to overlap, which is generally accepted by most citizens, except for ideological zealots (latter-­day Jacobins who want to ban religion from all public spaces such as ACLU lawyers in America offended by Christmas creches in public parks). Airport and military chapels in America have learned how to change symbols to convert these places from one denominational space to another—remove the crucifix and substitute a menorah, and the Catholic sanctuary has become a synagogue pro tem. Scholars of religion use the concept of landnama rituals, a Viking term meaning the ceremonial appropriation of space under a new sovereignty—as when the Spanish conquerors placed a cross and a royal banner on top of an Aztec temple to signify to whom this land now belongs. Call what happens now “pluralist landnama.” (Sort of like another contemporary institution—“serial monogamy”!) A concept coined by Alfred Schütz (1900–1959) is useful in describing the religious and secular spaces in a modern city—the concept of relevance structure. Some spaces are clearly marked as religious or secular spaces—prayer is in the relevance structure of a church, aesthetic experience in that of a museum. This becomes very clear when either relevance structure is deliberately violated (“transgressed”). Two examples from post-Soviet Russia: In 2012 a feminist punk rock band called Pussy Riot invaded the liturgy in the Cathedral of Christ

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the Savior in Moscow. They staged an obscene dance, with a libretto denouncing the Putin regime and its close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. The desecration was especially transgressive; there had been an earlier church in that location, razed under Stalin to be replaced by a swimming pool. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Cathedral was splendidly rebuilt, to celebrate the survival and renewed public status of the Church. The counter-­example of reconsecration was told to me by an American scholar of Russia with a special interest in religion. The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg was founded by Catherine the Great in 1764 and opened to the public in the mid-­nineteenth century. Among other treasures, it holds the largest collection of icons in the world. Ever since its opening it has been visited by many thousands of tourists, right through the Soviet period (even atheistic Marxists could visit the collection for purely aesthetic pleasure, also for scholarly or historical reasons). Around the time of Pussy Riot a group of Orthodox believers visited the exhibit. They stood before it with lit candles and incense, sang hymns, kissed the icons, and prayed to them. The administrators of the Museum threw them out, not because of old-­time atheism, but because the behavior of the believers was inappropriate—it transgressed the relevance structure of an urban museum. The administrators of the Metropolitan Museum or the Louvre would also have been annoyed (though hardly as shocked as the worshippers in the Cathedral in Moscow). The Hermitage was the scene of a dramatic instance of landnama: For a short time this secular space had become a sanctuary for Orthodox worship. Alfred Schütz was not much interested in religion. But his idea of relevance structures is very well suited to help us understand how secularity and religion can coexist, both in society and in the minds of individuals. It has always been possible to switch relevance structures. Some individuals whom Max Weber would have categorized as “religious virtuosi” can do this, and so can ordinary believers. St. Teresa of Avila, one of the greatest Catholic mystics, fell into ecstasies that filled her with the presence of God; along with her friend St. John of the Cross she also reformed the Carmelite Order in sixteenth-­century Spain. In the latter capacity she had to inspect many convents of Carmelite nuns. I think you have to switch off the relevance structure of monastic administration while in a state of ecstasy, and vice versa. And a good Catholic layman devotedly attending Mass, may occasionally engage in a bit of flirtation with a charming senorita in an adjoining pew. Nothing new here. But a modern society (not least because of the two pluralisms) is enormously complex, forcing its members to learn how to switch relevance structures from early on.

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In conclusion, I want to make a more personal observation: I have long thought of the big city (Simmel’s metropolis) as a place of mystery. Vienna, the city of my childhood, was reasonably big (already then with about two million inhabitants), but my movements through the city were obviously rather limited. My first really big city was Paris, where I lived for a few months as a very young man, and through which I roamed on the Metro and on foot. All these many buildings, their interiors hidden from sight—what secrets could they hide? Years later I took a course at the New School of Social Research under Albert Salomon entitled “Balzac as a Sociologist.” I sensed that Balzac’s novels conveyed the same experience of Paris—all its secrets hidden behind closed doors. What could be going on behind this particular door—a religious cult (Balzac was curious about esoteric cults), a great crime, an orgy, or a political conspiracy? During my student days I roamed endlessly through New York; since I was already obsessed with religion (as a friend of mine once put it, rather pejoratively, “once a godder, always a godder”), I visited every sort of religious space—not only regular Christian churches and different synagogues, but any manner of what for me were esoterica—a brand-­new Zen center, the Anthroposophical Society and its cultic offspring, the so-­called Christian Community (where one could attend a quasi-Gnostic ceremony in twentieth-­century America), a Mormon church, Pentecostal storefronts in Puerto Rican East Harlem (about which I wrote my M.A. thesis, my hands “dirty with research”), and the Baha’i (about which faith I wrote my doctoral dissertation). I could go on. But enough. I will observe that mystery is always, minimally, akin to the core of religious experience which Rudolf Otto (in my opinion the greatest twentieth-­century scholar of religion) called the mysterium tremendum. Thus it should not be a surprise that cities have typically been places of religious innovation (Pentecostalism, the biggest religious explosion of our time, mainly flourishes in the intensely pluralistic mega-­cities of the Global South).

Part Two

Between Fundamentalism and Postsecularism: Conceptualizing the Relations between City and Religion

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The Death and Life of the Fundamentalist City: A Prelude to a Medieval Modernity Nezar AlSayyad

Interest in religion and the city has skyrocketed lately. Something profound in the relationship of the city to religion seems to have happened in the world in the last two decades of the twentieth century which made some peoples, some communities, and some governments concerned! Have we really entered the era of the post-­secular city, assuming of course that such a city ever existed in the first place? The first part of this chapter deals with the concept of the “fundamentalist city,” while the second deals with the idea of “medieval modernity”; both are concepts articulated in earlier work. It is clear that regardless of what region of the world one studies today that globalization and the compression of space and time have fundamentally changed the standard relationships between peoples and places. Despite the considerable effect of globalization in opening markets and exposing societies to each other, the last decades have seen a strengthening of national, communal, and religious allegiances worldwide. Some scholars argue that the strengthening of such ties enables resistance to the hegemonic forces of globalization; others interpret the rise of fundamentalist practices as articulating alternative forms of non-Western modernity. Whatever the case, the unanticipated resurgence of older, more inwardly focused loyalties has given new meaning to religion in the public sphere, and Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic societies have all experienced surges in religious commitment and practice (AlSayyad 2011: 3).1 The spread of global terrorism has often been linked to such forces. But such a connection is often unjustifiable, and it would be a grave simplification to view all religious orthodoxy (or fundamentalism) as a basis for terrorist violence (AlSayyad 2011: 3). As in the case of the Arab Spring, these movements cannot be evaluated independently of evolving conditions. In many marginalized urban communities, religious groups—and in particular those affiliated with orthodox

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ideologies—have been called upon to provide social services, as local needs have increasingly been left unattended by state bureaucracies. In effect, the breakdown of state power in the late twentieth century following the triumph of the neoliberal economic paradigm created a vacuum that was quickly filled by religious groups (AlSayyad 2011: 4). As a result, there is considerable confusion among theorists as to how to interpret contemporary urban conditions. On the one hand, in settings like Latin America, an optimistic discourse envisions cities as arenas of livability, livelihood, and social transformation. In such locales, there is a sense that the decentralization of governance from the national to the urban scale has brought a “quiet revolution” to democracy. However, another discourse sees emerging forms of urban citizenship as fragmented and splintered, constituted through exclusionary spaces marked by deep ethnic and religious divisions (AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 2). In 2007, to study these developments, I initiated the “Cities and Fundamentalisms Project” at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. The main aim of the project was to focus on how and when the performance of religious beliefs or rituals evolves into exclusionary practices at the level of urban space. The project resulted in an edited book, The Fundamentalist City? Religiosity and the Making of Urban Space. This chapter is an expansion of those discussions.

Fundamentalism and urbanism The relationship between fundamentalism and urbanism is very complex. Few would dispute that, in the current moment at least, fundamentalism has a primarily negative connotation, associated mainly with militancy and regressive politics. However, the Oxford English Dictionary defines fundamentalism in more neutral terms simply as the “strict maintenance of orthodox traditional beliefs or doctrines.” What we tend to classify today as fundamentalism is therefore inflected by cultural conflict—often construed as a form of religiosity in direct conflict with secularism (AlSayyad 2011: 5). In reality, the historical record reveals that the contemporary concept of fundamentalism has Christian origins. The term was first used by the American Northern Baptist Convention of 1920 to describe more conservative evangelical delegates. This included those who stressed the inerrancy of the Bible and mandated its use as a binding historical document.2 Whatever the origins of the term, however, the underlying phenomenon is not new. As Michael Emerson

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and David Hartman (2006: 139) have suggested, “in the broad sweep of history fundamentalists are normal. There is nothing unusual in people taking religion very seriously. What we now regard as religious ‘extremism’ was commonplace 200 years ago in the Western world, and it is still commonplace in most parts of the globe.” This may also serve as a reminder that fundamentalist attitudes have not always been viewed as constituting oppressive systems of belief. What has changed in modern times is the introduction of a different value system offering a new vantage point. This perspective emerged as a result of the colonial project of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which spread the ideas of the European Enlightenment, with its focus on the individual, to parts of the world that for centuries had abided by totally different worldviews. The Enlightenment project advocated a new frame of reference, one which assumed that all human beings share the same values. And in the early twentieth century the peoples of many colonized regions invoked these universal values to justify rebellions against their colonial masters, which eventually led to the creation of new nation-­states. Forms of resistance ranged from appeals to the humanity of their oppressors, to invocations of religious principles, to sometimes desperate extremist violence. But during this early period, no one described such movements as fundamentalist. Yet, after the dust from these independence struggles settled, many of these new nations adopted modernist governance structures. And, thus constituted, they soon found themselves battling some of the same groups who had helped them achieve independence, but who were now rebelling against Enlightenment-­inspired universalism. These groups usually advocated a return to real or imagined former value systems and the revival of mechanisms of decision-­making from tradition (AlSayyad 2011: 6). The rise of information technologies and globalization, coupled with the re-­ emergence of religious activism, has today aggravated this situation. As Manuel Castells (1997) argued in The Power of Identity, the space of flows, which replaced the space of places, facilitates the rise of such fundamentalist movements not only in newly independent states but also in the lands of the former colonizers. And, as Benjamin Barber (1996) further pointed out in Jihad vs. McWorld, many nations in this new global order want it all: despite the obvious contradictions, they want Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and the Internet, while also insisting on restricting freedom of speech, movement, and communication. Tim Mitchell (2002) has described these conditions in a different light. He has argued that Jihad is not antithetical to the development of McWorld, and that McWorld is really “McJihad,” a necessary combination of a variety of social logics and forces.

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Indeed, he has pointed out that Jihad seems to have ridden on the back of the information revolution, and has done extremely well by it (Mitchell 2002). What is apparent from these analyses is that developments in many cities and places that we refer to today as tolerating fundamentalism are in fact a product of a specific moment in time, facilitated by the space of flows. Thus, it is not surprising that in one of the earliest books on fundamentalism, Defenders of God, Bruce Lawrence (1989) argued that “fundamentalism is an ideology rather than a theology that is principally formed in conflict with modernity.” This movement has also been informed by a characteristic aspect of monotheistic religions. As Barrington Moore (2000) argued in Moral Purity and Persecution, these have been prone to fostering gross intolerance—particularly through their constructions of impure ideas and people, which are seen as contaminated and contaminating. Martin Marty and Scott Appleby were among the first to recognize the upsurge of fundamentalism in the early 1990s (cf. AlSayyad 2011: 7). As part of an initiative supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, they convened a group of some one hundred scholars who studied the phenomena for more than five years and produced five edited volumes. Appleby and Marty (1993: 12) concluded there is “a family resemblance within Fundamentalism that, to a greater or lesser degree, unites movements within the religious traditions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism.” However, it would be naive to think that contemporary fundamentalism exists in complete opposition to the modern world or its various manifestations. Indeed, the category itself can be defined less by a rejection of modernity than by situated social, ethnic, and nationalistic grievances. One reading of this paradox might be that the relation between modernity and fundamentalism is more “transactional” than “antagonistic” (Appleby and Marty 1992). According to Steve Bruce (2000), fundamentalism “is the rational response of traditionally religious peoples to social, political and economic changes that downgrade and constrain the role of religion in the public sphere.” As I have noted elsewhere, this case can be illustrated by the challenge the Israeli settler movement has posed to the Israeli state in the occupied West Bank—and, more recently, by the problems the Palestinian Authority has faced with the takeover of Gaza by Hamas. In some of these cases, the conflict is between two, or more, usually antagonistic, understandings and regimes of knowledge and statehood. Here we must recognize that such conflicts are not just battles between fundamentalism and secularism; they are often battles between two irreconcilable forms of fundamentalism (AlSayyad 2011: 8).

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But can fundamentalisms really be understood as a new type of modern resistance? Most fundamentalist movements do invoke an invented history to justify their claims, but almost all modern nationalist movements did the same in earlier times. The major difference seems to be that fundamentalists invoke an essentialist history based on belief in the inerrancy of a text or texts. Thus, they justify a “nation of God” or a “city of God” by invoking scriptural truth; by comparison, the nation-­state invokes only the apparent truth of its own modernity (AlSayyad 2011: 8). The origins of this discrepancy in the Arab Middle East are largely historical. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the world witnessed the emergence of organized political dominance represented by colonialism. And, as part of its spread, much of the Arab world was brutally colonized. Indeed, if one analyses the issues of identity in the Arab Middle East today, one must take into account the processes by which Muslim identity was violated, ignored, distorted, or stereotyped during the colonial era. But once independence was achieved, the obsession with modernity on the part of the new national regimes failed to extend to the limitations Western societies normally place on manifestations of religion in public life. This set the stage for a religious revival in many of these countries three or four decades after independence, in defiance of the apparently secular attitudes of their rulers.

City and hinterland It is important here to step back and clarify an important connection. If fundamentalism is a religious or ideological categorization, how does it relate to cities? As with other social movements, the city is important to the establishment of fundamentalist frameworks, and urban space must be considered in our understanding of it. The point of making this connection, however, should not be to debate whether fundamentalism is or is not an essentially urban phenomenon; rather, it should be to understand the territorial manifestation of various fundamentalisms within the exclusionary and often hegemonic space of the city. In this regard, one might hypothesize two versions of the fundamentalist city: the parochial and the global. As I wrote in The Fundamentalist City? the parochial fundamentalist city is one where mainly local forces shape exclusionary patterns of space. One might cite here such cases as Peshawar under the influence of the Taliban or those parts of Hebron controlled by the settler movement in

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Israel. By comparison, the global fundamentalist city is one where networks of global interaction promote a broad spectrum of local exclusionary practices. One might point here to inwardly focused ethnic neighborhoods both in the cities of the Islamic Global South and in cities of the Global North with sizable Muslim minority populations (AlSayyad 2011). The relationship between the city and its hinterland is also important to the fundamentalist equation. This is a relatively unexplored connection among scholars of either religious or urban studies.Yet this core-­periphery relationship— which in certain cases may describe connections between city and desert, and in others city and town and village—may explain much about the roots of various fundamentalisms. A good example of the first type of city-­to-hinterland connection is the development of Wahhabism and its violent reincarnation in the twentieth century through the siege of Mecca in 1979 and the 9/11 attacks. Wahhabism, as a sect, is attributed to Muhammad Abd-­al-Wahhab, an eighteenth-­century figure from what is today Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi theology treats the Quran and the Hadith as the only fundamental and authoritative texts. Some thirty years ago, a group of Wahhabi militants laid siege to Islam’s holiest mosque in Mecca, led by a young man who believed himself to be the promised Mehdi, come to cleanse the earth of sin and bring the kingdom of God to man. The siege of Mecca, which occurred on November 30, 1979—the first morning of a new Muslim century—launched the first global jihad, and later contributed to the founding of al-Qaeda. Yet the connection between city (in which the action occurred) and desert (which served as a training ground) was as important for those responsible for it as it had been to the original rise of Wahhabism (Yaroslav 2008). A second example of desert-­to-city connections is the cultish Jamaat al-Takfir wal-Hijra in Egypt which emerged in the 1960s as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its members were Islamists who claimed not to be bound by the usual religious constraints. Although they were originally ambivalent about the city, and migrated to the desert to perform Hijra in the tradition of Prophet Mohammad, they were always interested in returning. The opportunity came in the form of a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after he signed the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Believing that the ends justified the means, members of the group were willing to adopt non-Islamic appearances to blend into the crowd and make themselves hard to detect once they returned to the city (AlSayyad 2011: 13). Their return culminated in the assassination of Sadat in 1981.

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Both these movements played on a special and mutually reinforcing relationship between the city and its desert hinterland. In both cases, plans concocted in the latter (assumed to be a space of virtue and purity) were executed in the former (condemned as a place of vice and infidelity). A second type of relationship between the city and its hinterland is evident in the relationship to the village or small town. A good example here are the events surrounding the Godhra train burning and the Gujarat riots in India in 2002. The Gujarat riots—and their repercussions, such as communal riots in Bombay— were interpreted worldwide as embodying a clash between Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists. They were thus seen as a predictable outcome of the fundamentalist ethos, motivated by religious zeal. However, certain aspects of the riots remain unexplored: most importantly, why did events in the small and unimportant towns of Godhra and Ayodhya find their most violent repercussions in some of the larger cities of India? In an essay reflecting on the rioting in Bombay following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, Arjun Appadurai (2002) claimed that the violence perpetrated against Muslims there was in fact motivated by a desire by Hindus to claim valuable urban resources such as property and water, and that this could only be achieved through the physical displacement of the Muslim population. Another incident illustrating how the urban milieu may create tensions between different religious groups comes from Israel. The New York Times reported in 2011 that an eight-­year-old girl from a small town with a considerable Orthodox Jewish population had been spat on by men and boys from a more extremist ultra-Orthodox group. This occurred while she was on her way to school, and apparently resulted from her modest modern Orthodox dress, which did not adhere to ultra-Orthodox standards (Kershner 2011). While religious extremism is hardly new to Israel, the story shows how ultra-Orthodox Jews have recently attempted to impose their sense of order on the public sphere, including efforts to enforce a strict interpretation of modesty, segregate genders, and exclude women from certain places entirely. Many Israelis, outraged by this incident, have since taken part in protests against such religious violence and fanaticism. Thus, the incident represents a skirmish in a larger struggle over the future of a religious state. To date, much of the work on fundamentalism and space has either abstracted the urban as a micro-­site of the nation or reduced it to a set of resources that define a subsidiary battleground in a larger ideological conflict. However, another way to understand the fundamentalist city beyond the lens of religious activism is to interrogate it through practices of exclusion. To facilitate this effort,

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one can use such frameworks as the apartheid city, the ghettoized city, or the ethnically, racially, or religiously divided city (AlSayyad 2011: 14). Oren Yiftachel (2006) has articulated this very point using the concept of “ethnocracy.” He has suggested that the urbanization of Israel can be seen as a social, cultural, and political engine through which the nation has been able to maintain its hegemonic control over the Palestinian territories, and thus fulfill its mandate as a Jewish state (Yiftachel 2006). Using the case of the city of Beer Sheva, he has also argued that Israel originally employed planning as an instrument of control to establish an ethno-Jewish nation (Yiftachel 2003). In the end, having one single, generic definition of fundamentalism may not be that useful to understanding the connection between cities and fundamentalism. The problem is that each successive urban context one studies may offer different, and possibly new, attributes to the definition of fundamentalism. Hence, I often speak of fundamentalisms in the plural. My use of the term in this sense is not an endorsement of the concept, but a pragmatic acceptance of its contemporary currency. It also embodies recognition that our inability to agree on a single definition of a specific phenomenon, or to invent a new term to describe it, should not hinder our ability to discuss its implications for cities. According to one group, a fundamentalist may be hero or a leader, while to another he or she may be a criminal. Indeed, some may consider the motivation of fundamentalists to be moral activism, and its manifestation in the city to be religious urbanism (AlSayyad 2011: 11). Whatever the case, it is important to study the connection between cities and fundamentalisms and articulate how the urban often becomes a micro-­site for religious contestations at work within a larger population.

The Fundamentalist City Another important issue to consider is what makes a city a fundamentalist, and in whose eyes? From this important question follow a number of ancillaries. For example: Is a city which deprives a particular gender of access to its streets a fundamentalist city? Is a city which requires religious minorities to observe and obey the practices and dress codes of its majority a fundamentalist city? Is a city which bans smoking and renders smokers a banished group a fundamentalist city? And when is this line crossed? These questions are not simply rhetorical, because these exact conditions exist in many cities around the world.

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As I have previously discussed, a fundamentalist city may possess a few hypothetical attributes. First, it may be a city which categorically excludes by law, tradition, declared policy, or latent practice individuals who are adherents of other religions or who belong to ethnicities other than those of the ruling power or majority population. It thus may be a city whose minority residents, belonging to different ethnic or religious groups, are denied access to basic urban services or specific public spaces. Second, it may be a city whose religious majority mandates, or practically expects, that its minority groups will conform to all the rituals of public behavior prescribed in the religious code of the majority. Third, it may be a city that is so gender segregated, as mandated by a male-­dominated society, that women have little or only severely restricted access to the public space. Fourth, it may be a city which normalizes most of the above-­mentioned forms of control or oppression in everyday life to the extent that the minority ceases to question them (AlSayyad 2011: 15). Of course, these are attributes of a generic fundamentalist city that exists nowhere—even one or two of them may apply to particular cities. Most importantly, it would be a grave error to use these attributes as test criteria. Indeed, any discussion of fundamentalism in a given place needs to take into account the specificity of local culture and its location within a web of global interconnectedness. In the end, however, it is important to ask whether the fundamentalist city is an approximation of the camp described by Agamben (2005) where the religious other are rendered “bare life” or is it a post-­city, offering neither citizens nor citizenship? Whichever, the fundamentalist city is a place where religious fundamentalisms do not see the urban as evil, but actually claim it as a new domain beyond the idea of the nation (in the case of Islam, the idea of the Umma). We should also not forget that fundamentalisms rely on an ideology of exception and a culture of constant surveillance. Thus, cities in the Arab Middle East (like their counterparts elsewhere in the Global South) are turning into fragmented landscapes made up of spaces of exception. Nowhere can this relationship of both fundamentalism and cities to issues of citizenship be better illustrated than in the events of the Arab Spring. Anyone who watched the events of the Arab Spring must have noticed the transformation of its spaces of protest to spaces of religion, as well as the resulting outcome from the rise and then the dislodging of the Islamic regimes that emerged from power after a brief period of ascendency, particularly in the case of Egypt. But as I have previously argued, it would be a mistake to over-­analyse these events as an Islamist takeover of Cairo. Yet anyone who has experienced the transformation

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of the city since the late 1970s can attest to how similar practices are now common in its public spaces. As the population of the city has doubled over the last thirty years, the number of its mosques has quadrupled. Many of these spaces are simply garages and basements in apartment buildings, converted to prayer areas—a development spurred by a massive increase in religiosity and religious practice and facilitated by a tax code which gives exceptions to such changes in use (AlSayyad and Massoumi 2012: 40). Today the effect of this social transformation can clearly be seen in the city’s spaces, particularly during Friday prayers and during Ramadan, when neighborhood mosques spread carpets in adjacent streets and are joined there by worshipers who bring their own prayer rugs. The effect, essentially, is to expand the space of small mosques by taking over the public realm. Meanwhile, shops in the area voluntarily close, and Copts, other nonobservant Muslims, and Western-­clothed women withdraw from the area or simply avoid being out in public space. Clearly, this religious revival implies the diminishment of the right to the city for residents who do not participate. And, in recent decades, many such subtle—and in the case of other countries like Saudi Arabia, not so subtle— forms of spatial restriction and exclusion based on religion have become normalized to the point that they are no longer questioned or challenged by excluded groups. This may be the genesis of the fundamentalist city (AlSayyad and Massoumi 2012: 40). In many of the examples I have presented here, for a majority of the local population, Islamist parties seem to represent the only prospect for restoring meaningful political justice. It is conceivable, given this reality, that a modern Islamic state might be needed to provide political and legal justice for today’s Muslims. However, this will only be possible if new institutions emerge that restore the constitutional balance of power, the rule of law, and meaningful political representation (Feldman 2008).

A medieval modernity Only time will tell what will become of the present reawakening of political dialogue in the Middle East, particularly as the struggle to balance Islam and democracy continues. The Turkey of Erdogan today is a good example of how this struggle is being waged and possibly won by fundamentalist forces. But in this regard, it is important to ask if the Middle East is evolving into a structure of “medieval modernity.” As Ananya Roy and I have noted previously, if the “feudal”

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is a system of “medieval,” a system of ordering space, then the seemingly oxymoronic phrasing “medieval modernity” indicates a medieval mentality that lurks at the heart of the modern and a feudal system that exists within capitalism (AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 16). In the fundamentalist city, examples of citizenship indicate how the modern city, with all its global interconnectedness, functions through a medieval ordering of space. The concept of medieval modernity thus “reveals the inherent paradoxes of the modern: fiefdoms of democracy, the materialist immediacy of religious fundamentalism, and the simultaneity of war and humanitarianism” (AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 17). It is clear that modern forms of national citizenship, particularly in the Arab Middle East, might be giving way to a splintered territorialization of citizenship based on a fundamentalist understanding of Islam and articulated in specific urban enclaves reminiscent of a medieval order not as a historical period but as a conceptual idea. In the medieval Arab world, rulings by religious jurists either formally codified or informally created conventions that controlled every aspect of the public sphere (cf. Marcais 1940; Marcais 1928; Sauvaget 1949; Von Grunebaum 1955). The balance of power between the different institutions that composed the state thus allowed cities to maintain a relative order, in which religion was often invoked as arbiter in the case of conflicts (Lapidus 1967). Of course, the historical record shows that such conditions have not been confined to the cities of the Middle East in medieval times. Indeed, there are many examples—from Mecca to Tulsa, Oklahoma—of contemporary cities that illustrate a relationship between religion and urbanism. Around the world the idea that religion shapes the city is not new. As I have already mentioned, what did change was that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the advent of colonialism, and later modernity, disrupted these traditional relationships. Today the linkage between urban fiefdoms and religious fundamentalist groups is particularly apparent in reaction to the austerity policies of the neoliberal state. Thus, the Arab uprisings have both reawakened older forms of social association and introduced new social arrangements reminiscent of medieval Arab culture. For example, in places like Egypt, one can today witness the evolution of syndicates and labor groupings along religious lines, similar to the old guilds of the traditional Islamic city. What the rise of these new forms of association indicate is that loyalties and group identities are changing or realigning. Unfortunately, this is sometimes accompanied by a degree of violence. The vicious attacks that have occurred in Egypt against the Coptic Christians, in Bahrain against the Shi’a majority, and in Libya and Yemen against certain

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tribes are indications of where the true loyalties of the inhabitants of these nations lie. And the stalemated condition of the uprisings in some of these states (where protesters have expressed their dissatisfaction with the current conditions, but where little of consequence has changed) is an indication that the countries in the Arab world will encounter different outcomes as they grapple with the desire for change. Collective violence against women has also become a major concern in the region, as fundamentalist groups seek to control women’s public presence and behavior. For example, all recent attempts to rewrite the Egyptian constitution have included language rolling back the progress toward equality made by women in the past sixty years. Many conservative Muslim women who are part of the Muslim Brotherhood have even advocated these changes themselves. Perhaps Barrington Moore (2000) was right after all! His argument that monotheistic religions foster gross intolerance—particularly in their constructions of impure ideas and people—has stood the test of time and seems to be more relevant than ever. In this paradigm, violence remains directed precisely at heresy and heretics, even if they are individuals or groups who share the same religion. Today this practice can be seen in attacks by Salafists on Sufi shrines in Libya, Mali, Pakistan, and other places. When the values of citizenship become irreconcilable with the intent of various fundamentalisms, the urban itself becomes a battleground. And the idea of denying existence altogether to certain groups, leading to ethnic cleansing at the level of nations, becomes the ultimate form of fundamentalism within and beyond the city.

3

Postsecularity and a New Urban Politics– Spaces, Places, and Imaginaries Christopher Baker

My thesis is that the void at the heart of the modern city is primarily an ethical and relational one. A common analysis, to which I largely subscribe, is that forty-­ plus years of neoliberal capitalism have created intense processes of change and innovation that have undermined and hollowed out the traditional sources of social and ethical capital, usually associated with institutions that were religious, educational, work-­based (like unions), and finance based (banks and mutual societies). All these institutions had both a physically proximate, but also relational engagement and therefore commitment to the localities in which they were situated. Many of these localized connections are being lost through globalized metrics of gentrification and spectacle (Harvey 2006, 2003; Mitchell 2003; Smith 1996), accompanied by planning priorities driven by narratives of privatization (Low 2003; Soja 2000), security and fear (Davis 1990; Dawson 2006; Waquant 2008), terror of child and human abduction (Katz 2006), and hygiene (Mitchell and Staeheli 2006). The cumulative effect of these multiple and overlapping factors leads to spatial splintering, or “splintered urbanism” (Graham and Marvin 2001). The effect of this splintering is to create urban spaces of increased inequality and unequal access, which further disrupt the conditions for sustaining settled and flourishing communities. “While some people may be living in a postmodern urban lifestyle playground, others have to live in a post-­ industrial wasteland” (Hamnett 2014: 704). However, this thesis is not intended to be simply a conservative knee-­jerk reaction against innovation and change. Many voices across a number of different disciplines have also identified these trends after forty-­plus years of what I am calling The Great Separation—namely the divorcing of economic and development agendas from more long-­term visions that have a progressive telos. Many have identified the economic and political unsustainability of the

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current “business as usual” model (cf. Critchley 2012; Kristeva 2015; Calhoun 2016; Sandel 2012; Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012; Stiglitz 2012). Such is the pervasive nature of the ideology of The Great Separation to influence the way we imagine the world, and then structure it accordingly (what Philip Mirowski calls, after Foucault, “the bio-­politics of neo-­liberalism” Mirowski 2013: 148), we often lose sight of the fact that we have internalized it and can therefore see no alternative. Cloke defines this totalizing imaginary as “market worship” (Cloke and Pears 2016: 35) and highlights the spatial impact of this hegemonic worldview. Because capitalist markets simply see the concept of locality as a form of material asset, “as a chessboard in which the pieces can be shuffled round to best suit economic strategy” (Cloke and Pears 2016: 35). The importance of “humans-­in-place” is thus willfully neglected, and disconnects citizens further from their unique contexts in which “traditions, cultural practices and local characteristics affect how people and communities are formed” (Cloke and Pears 2016: 36). However, there is also increasing evidence that amid the current turmoil still emanating from the global banking crisis of 2008, we are also waking up to the importance of what I am proposing is The Great Re-­connection. There is a growing recognition that a good city and vibrant civic polity cannot be built on technical innovation and adrenalized experience alone. Good transport, waste disposal, health care, and education systems are vital, as are iconic cultural and sporting venues and most important of all, decent and accessible housing (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2014; Lancione and McFarlane 2016). But that material infrastructure of services and welfare also relies heavily on a non-­material infrastructure to support it. This thesis suggests that material urban outputs and processes always reflect and are profoundly shaped by invisible or non-­human forces (Latour 2005; Stengers 2005): for example, air and water, discarded junk, memory, and the human senses (Blok and Ferias 2016: 45–62), as well as religious and spiritual beliefs, values, and worldviews (Beaumont and Baker 2011; Narayanan 2016). I will suggest that religions and beliefs, because of the confluence of current events and processes, have a significant role to play in generating both material and non-­material infrastructures of urban sustainability and humanization (Calhoun 2016; Baker 2016) I will seek to expand my thesis with respect to the following concepts: cosmopolitan religion; postsecularity; progressive localism; spiritual capital; and curating new political and ethical subjectivities and spaces. But I start with a brief excursus into a previous period of Western thought in order to show how far the parameters of the debate on religion and urbanization

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have shifted. Back in 1965, arguably the highest tide mark of secular modernity, the American theologian Harvey Cox wrote his seminal book The Secular City. Its narrative structure assumes that global secularization is the new normative paradigm that is irreversible. Cox envisages the modern city as a Technopolis, founded on technological innovation and planning and progressive social change in which most challenges confronting human existence—poverty, want, education, etc.—will be met by the critical mass of human ingenuity and connectivity that the modern city can bring together. This brave new world of secularization Cox argued, is willed by God to free humankind from superstitious and backward religion based on mystical and enchanted phenomena. Instead, in the modern secular age epitomized by Technopolis, religion and the church have to adapt to living an authentic faith founded on prophetic politics and discipleship in a de facto religionless world. Cox’s theology is deeply shaped by the work of German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Back in the 1940s, before his execution by the Nazis for his role in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer talked about the emergence of a “religionless Christianity” in what he called “a world come of age” (Bonhoeffer 1972: 366). The Secular City said Cox, is the new space for a more mature form of religion to emerge in which humankind no longer lives in servile humility to a controlling deity, but enters into a new covenant with that deity that is predicated on the virtues of stewardship, co-­production, and co-­responsibility. Under the auspices of this new theology, the role of the church and religion in relation to the Technopolis was to be a vanguard of a Kingdom of God community—a sort of prophetic leaven that announces in its social and liturgical life a foretaste of divine justice and reconciliation. The examples Cox gives of this new type of relationship are the prominent contribution of the church and other religious groups to developing and improving race relations and civil rights in deeply deprived urban localities (Cox 1965: 132–40). Cox uses metaphors such as “cultural exorcizer” and “God’s avant-­garde” to reinforce this point. This is because in Cox’s view, the Technopolis, whilst able to resolve many of the material and technical challenges to human life, would be incapable of creating a truly just and harmonious society. Reverting to a Babylonian critique found in the Hebrew scriptures (Genesis 11: 1–9), Cox recognized that the collective assembling of humankind represented by modern urbanism would also create a hubristic city—the expression of a demonic and damaging will-­to-power that would constantly need to be challenged and set in the context of more transcendent narratives of God’s redemption, but also judgment. The human

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and environmental cost of this excess of hubris would carry through in the form of oppression, exploitation, and inequality which would militate against the promise of abundant life envisaged by God in the new secular age. The question I have been forced to consider in writing this chapter is to ask the extent Cox’s vision still holds; is it all hopelessly outdated or do some elements still inform this debate? As part of the answer to that question, I now outline the emerging conceptual frameworks that I mentioned earlier that more actively connect and engage with twenty-­first century realities, framed as they are by the intensification of globalizing forces.

Cosmopolitan religion Ulrich Beck, as a critical theorist and sociologist in the post-Marxist tradition, develops this conceptual framework by juxtaposing the idea of two modernities, which he perhaps most fully articulates in his volume A God of One’s Own (2010). What he calls Modernity 1 is essentially the old and predictable modernity of the secular Enlightenment founded on the following elements: “ends-­means rationality, interests, classes, the market, science and socially-­constructed ‘nations’ which distinguish themselves from other nations and welfare states” (Beck 2010: 76). Modernity 2 emerges at the end of the last century, and is “modernity as globalization.” It intensely and vigorously attacks all barriers and hierarchies erected under the auspices of Modernity 1. “It refers to the erosion of clear boundaries separating the markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and the lifeworlds of different peoples and religions, as well as the resulting worldwide situation of an involuntary confrontation with alien others” (Beck 2010: 74). This modernity is a Global Risk Society because its heightened complexity and technological interconnectivity creates ever increasing numbers of unintended consequences, which now outnumber and subvert our intended ones. For Beck, this new modernity of risk is “reflexive” (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994), meaning that the impact of our actions rebound on us, interfering with our original aspirations. These unintended consequences pose risks or dangers that sit alongside (or are enfolded in), our human belief in unlimited growth and development. He was particularly vexed at issues like the growth in pollution in the 1980s which he accurately predicted would create the conditions for climate change along with the viral distribution of financial risk which he describes as the distribution of “bads,” not goods (Beck 1992). He concludes that this

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complexity and fluidity that we have permitted to be built into our systems has created a new global order which we no longer have the means to describe or control. This lack of accountability and control is both created and epitomized by a neoliberal form of capitalism which is driven by the constant search for new markets and the need to maximize efficiency and flexibility within a single, real-­time market. Beck surmises that the rise of global religion in the twenty-­first century has occurred precisely because it is ideally suited to the new conditions of hyper-­globalization that characterize Modernity 2. He suggests that the modern liberal democratic state—the love child, if you will, of Modernity 1—is at a loss to understand this new modernity that it has bequeathed, and even more of a loss to know what to do about it. This is Beck’s striking solution. A modernity that is always putting itself at risk requires the intervention of what he calls a cosmopolitan religious imagination and practice to co-­create a new viable and sustainable modernity. “It is hardly possible to overestimate the potential of religions as cosmopolitan actors—they can mobilize billions of people across barriers of nation and class, and exercise a powerful influence on the way people see themselves in relationship to the world (. . .) they represent a resource of legitimation in the battle for the dignity of human beings in a civilization at risk of destroying itself ” (Beck 2010: 198). However, this aspiration is far from easy to ensure, or to assume will happen. For it to be up to the task of saving modernity from itself, religion has to opt for what Beck calls a cosmopolitan orientation over a universalist one. Religion historically has chosen both. Universalism (which is simply another form of fundamentalism) insists, usually through the use of coercive violence, on a single narrative and identity to which everyone else must to varying degrees conform. Secularism and the nation-­state are, Beck adds, also perfectly capable of acting like bad examples of monotheistic religion. Or religion can face towards a cosmopolitan vision which, “is based on the actually existing historical impurity of world religions: the recognition that they are intertwined, that they are both one and the same. Learning to see and understand themselves in this way enriches religions’ own religiosity, mutually reinforces one another, and in this way they can practice and develop anew the public role of religion in the postsecular modern era” (Beck 2010: 178). This discussion of Beck’s work has allowed me to establish the idea of the search for public ethos of ethical and progressive political engagement in which religion has a major role to play if it so chooses.

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Postsecularity I now address the more specifically urban elements of my thesis, starting with the notion of postsecularity. The idea of postsecularity is naturally linked to the concept of the postsecular. For brevity, I simply reiterate Habermas’s classic definition which emerged from reflection on the demise of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century and the re-­emergence of religion in the subsequent vacuum. We must reconfigure our expectation, said Habermas, of the one-­sizefits-all secular public sphere and instead re-­imagine a postsecular public sphere “in which the vigorous continuation of religion in a continually secularizing environment must be reckoned with” (Habermas 2005: 26). Now, many objections have emerged in response to this term which is seen as controversial and contested on several counts. For instance, it can only be applied to affluent Westerns societies, it is over-­linear in its suggestion that secularism has been replaced by religion when it is still a normative political and cultural discourse, and the re-­emergence of religion in public life has been driven by the demands created by government policy (like austerity programmes) rather than any intrinsic shift in social and cultural trends. My critique of the term is that it lends itself to a somewhat de-­contextualized and abstract theorizing on the evolving relationship between the religious and the secular in the globalized public sphere. If this is the case, then does the idea of geographies of postsecularity allow us to better explore the material complexity of new urban spaces where these dynamics suggested by Habermas’s definition can be observed by inductively theorizing from emerging data and experience rather than the other way around? A working description of postsecularity currently under development (Baker, Cloke, and Williams forthcoming) focuses on three dimensions:

1 It highlights the emergence of new forms of urban assemblage that are arising from contemporary incursions of religion and belief into issues and practices of social responsibility. 2 It enables a space for a critical discussion of the different types of normativity, values, and political direction that is created by these assemblages. 3 It focuses on empirical research into these new assemblages that maps and analyses the extent to which different social actors deploy beliefs, values, and worldviews in forms of practical experimentation and dialogical translation that generate new “cross-­over narratives” of how society

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develops a capacity to sustain and ethical responses to social, economic, and political need. An example of postsecularity developed by Cloke et  al. (2015) is the Occupy protest in Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange in 2011. Based on extensive literatures that have emerged since that time, as well as first-­hand accounts, they suggest that Occupy demonstrated how religious and secular beliefs, worldviews, and practices became blurred and melded into a new third space of “emergent postsecularity” that challenged settled binaries of analysis. This happened, they suggest, in three ways. First, Occupy challenged the churches to move beyond the “silos of the sacred” and see public space outside “the Temple” as also sacred. The protests in Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange both deployed institutional religious space as an integral platform to the performance of the event (namely Trinity Episcopalian Church in Wall Street, and St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of the City of London). The calls for prophetic justice debate and lament (what Cloke et al. (2015: 502) call “spiritual geographies of political resistance”) took place in public space around the church thus offering a “faith-­without-walls” model of engagement. Second, the Occupy protests at these sites of globalized economic power, encouraged religion to move from hierarchical models and images of God to instead see the “church of the multitude,” and to join with others—the multitude of the common people—in the building of the Kingdom of God and the Common Good. The Occupy movement was an active non-­violent political and civic protest that “eschews the reinforcement of the privilege of the powerful, and instead enacts the conviction that God will prioritize is the needs of the poor, excluded and oppressed” (Cloke et al. 2015: 512). Third, Occupy also encouraged the church to take action shaped by the “discursive remembering and prophetic purposefulness” modeled on the camps pitched outside the citadels of ecclesial, political, and economic power. “The church needs to open up its sanctified spaces that expose the idol-­worship of success and consumerism and prosperity blessing, and that proposed sell-­ emptying practices of embrace, companionship, solidarity, caritas and agape” (Cloke et al. 2015: 513). The return challenge to non-­religious elements of Occupy by the religiously-­ inspired social actors was similarly three-­fold: First, as some religious actors reneged on their initial welcome to the protesting “multitudes,” different types of religious actors rose to the challenge of providing solidarity and support (via the deployment of protest chaplains for example) as well as initiating their own

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protests. This opened a new appreciation on the part of the “no-­religion” citizens for the prophetic and connected role of religion to civil protest, and challenged some of the prevailing stereotypes associated in many citizens’ minds of religion with neoconservatism. Second, biblically-­rooted events as the Sermon on the Steps and the symbolic parading of the Golden Calf created hybrid spaces where new expressions of spirituality could be explored and practiced; not only via the liturgical practices by the protest chaplains, but also a new feeling of being encouraged, on the part of “non-­religious” participants, to engage in religious ritual and symbolism. Liturgical acts at the Occupy camps included deploying resources from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Pagan, Buddhist, and Native American traditions and facilitated by priests, rabbis, and imams (Rieger and Pui-­lan 2012). Finally, new narratives of injustice and hope were generated by the inclusion of these religious actors, spaces, and imaginaries that were rooted in what the authors call: “theo-­ethical traditions: concepts of usury, languages of caritas, and the elevation of transcendental values of human dignity (. . .) used as innovative ways to trump economic metrics of value” (Cloke et  al. 2015: 17). The combined value of these mutually challenging perspectives, the authors propose, was to harness an emerging ethical and spiritual political subjectivity that colonizes urban spaces in ways that seem to transcend current theoretical concepts and frameworks.

Progressive localism Another concept I deploy in my work that further solidifies this emerging discourse on urban postsecularity is that of progressive localism. Emerging from post-Marxist political geography, this term attempts to redeem the notion of localism from its current policy framework where it is employed as a mechanism of neoliberal reform and austerity. Featherstone et  al. (2012) seek to imbue localism with a more empowering element, by placing the word “progressive” in front of it. For them, progressive localism defines a vision of a vibrant and flourishing civil society based on cosmopolitan global ethics. It is “outward looking and creates positive affinities between places and social groups negotiating global processes. These processes are expansive in their geographical reach and productive of new relations between places and social groups and can (. . .) reconfigure existing communities around

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emergent agendas for social justice, participation and tolerance” (Featherstone et. al 2012: 180). There are several important elements in this definition that need unpacking. Most important is that the word “progressive” is not interpreted in ways that suggest being liberal or elitist. Rather, it is simply defined as outward looking and outward facing. The opposite of this would be a regressive localism; namely, an inward-­looking form of civic engagement that was concerned only for the rights and welfare of your own group. Progressive localism suggests that a vibrant and flourishing urban ecology can only be based on new alliances and affinities between outward facing groups and institutions who can share a common vision of a just and participative social order, even whilst coming from very different cultural identities and thus from very different epistemological and ideological worldviews. Does this concept not capture the essence of the hyper-­diversity we now encounter in our global cities? What I also like about this definition is its suggestion that the geographical reach of these new “affinities” of progressive and outward looking participation transcends traditional and bureaucratic cartographies based on local authority areas or parish boundaries for example. A new urban progressive and cosmopolitan localism potentially requires all actors to cross over traditional institutional barriers and boundaries and create new spaces and new territories of engagement. But this crossing over of physical and institutional barriers also relies, I suggest, on a willingness to cross ideological and epistemological ones. Only then is a more sustainable and creative urban commons likely to emerge and then be upheld.

Religious and secular spiritual capital At this point that I would like to introduce the concept of spiritual capital. Spiritual capital, in the way that I am developing it, emerged from research I undertook with the William Temple Foundation in the early 2000s into urban regeneration in districts of south and east Manchester. We were interested in the role and contribution of religion in the urban regeneration agenda which lay at the heart of the then New Labor government’s policy agenda on re-­populating post-­industrial inner-­urban and suburban cores. The churches we engaged with in the research often represented, in these areas of high deprivation, the last vestiges of civic institutionalism; and they found themselves delivering goods, welfare, and other services that used to be provided for by publicly funded state

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providers: opening their premises to the poor, running credit unions, complementary health schemes, school mentoring schemes, youth work programmes, gyms, community radio, anti-­gang and gun crime initiatives, etc. (Baker and Skinner 2006: 92/3). These contributions were often produced as a result of innovative and strategic partnerships that were initiated with other agencies However, we were also interested in what the churches meant by the word “regeneration.” Long before the theorization developed from Habermas’s definition of the postsecular emerged into the public consciousness, this word seemed capable of generating “cross-­over narratives” that could hold multiple practices and discourses. The faith-­based understandings overlapped, to some extent, with government understandings of the term: Based around, for example, the wholescale economic regeneration of areas based on flagship housing developments, retail experiences, and the creation of new cultural quarters. But our church interviewees also wanted to attach definitions that highlighted the importance of process as well as product; of the means of regeneration, as well as ends. Thus, for example, regeneration: l

l

l

Focuses on transforming people personally and spiritually, as well as improving their area physically; Values personal stories, especially about how individual “regeneration” occurs; Believes implicitly or explicitly that God is at work within regeneration and civil society.1

It was clear that a vision for spiritual and emotional regeneration was integral to the faith communities’ engagement in the civic and public life. So in trying to capture the overlapping contributions of churches and other faith groups to regeneration, the William Temple Foundation used social capital theory due to its prevalent use in policy formation. It said that as a contribution to social capital, faith groups provide both religious and spiritual capital. Religious capital is, “the practical contribution to local and national life made by faith groups.” Spiritual capital meanwhile,“energizes religious capital by providing a theological identity and worshiping tradition, but also a value system, moral vision and a basis of faith” (Baker and Skinner 2006: 7). Religious capital is the ‘what’: i.e., the concrete actions and resources that faith communities contribute. The “why” is spiritual capital: i.e., the motivating basis of faith, belief, and values that shapes these concrete actions.

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But here is an interesting way that spiritual capital can be further developed. If it is the motivating energy of our beliefs, values, and worldviews, that orientates us in a certain way in the public sphere, and influences the way we contribute to social capital, then spiritual capital is not the sole preserve of people who label themselves religious or belong to religious communities. Secular or non-­religious beliefs and worldviews (i.e., secular spiritual capital—see Baker and MilesWatson 2008) are also potentially generative sources of social capital. If the thesis around postsecularity is correct, then some of those who define themselves as “No-Religion” are also actively seeking new spaces and affinities of progressive engagement by which their “spiritual capital” can be deployed in authentic and fulfilling ways. This thesis is already being born out with new Temple Foundation research in Understanding Unbelief which seeks to map the range of values, ethics, and beliefs that lie behind the cohort of those in the West who identify themselves as No-Religion, meaning not affiliating themselves with a religious identity. So, for example, the Understanding Unbelief programme seeks to “advance the scientific study of unbelief ” with reference to the following goals: l

l

l

“mapping” unbeliefs as psychological, social, and cultural phenomena, providing more detailed accounts of the diverse types of, and aspects to, unbeliefs, and documenting the different combinations in which these diverse “unbeliefs” manifest (Lee et al. 2016).

Early US research also suggests a wide diversity of stances within the “No-Religion” category, many of which are rooted in strong ethical and values-­ driven frameworks. For example, Chris Silver’s research on “nones” in the United States (2014) begins by stating that the “no-­religion” category is “fluid” before identifying six categories of “no-­religion” identity. Several of these categories reflect positions on religion and/or spiritualty that are open and positive to certain dimensions of the religious “experience” including an appreciation for religious ideas and aesthetics, alongside a radical openness to seeking authenticity and truth from all forms of religious and spiritual insight. So, for me, there is a clear link between progressive urban localism and spiritual capital. Both conceptual frameworks reflect the desirability and possibility of crossing geographical and bureaucratic but also increasingly, ideological and epistemological ones. The challenge, but also opportunity within urban postsecularity is to experiment and occupy new intellectual and political spaces, offering both cognitive and emotional hospitality to others, but from within the wells of our own values and beliefs. This wellspring of values and

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beliefs I have called spiritual capital. In all scenarios of emerging urban cosmopolitan ethics (Bloc and Farias 2016), I am suggesting that what is occurring is that citizens are investing their spiritual capital alongside others for the sake of making an intervention for change, but also so that their own wells of beliefs, values, and worldviews can be replenished. But these spaces and affinities of progressive urban subjectivity are fragile and quite ephemeral. They need consciously tending, and also propagating, and it is here that I want to move to my final idea; that of religion, deploying and displaying its cosmopolitan tendencies, not in a hubristic way, but an enabling way—as curating a new expression of urban politics.

Curating a new ethics and politics of civil engagement The basis of what I am proposing is predicated on the simple reality that increased “affective demand” is generating a surplus of places and spaces of “practical supply.” In other words, “spaces of convergence” (Cloke et al. 2015) emerge as people seek to reconnect what has been disconnected; both relationally but also ethically. These new spaces of convergence recreate a sense of place, solidarity, community, etc. Faith groups are inherently well placed to curate these new spaces of convergence, by which I mean two things. First I use the term “curate” in the secular sense—as in to curate an exhibition for example which involves organizing a space so that it makes sense of a collection of artifacts within it and tells a coherent narrative. For example, the online Oxford Learner Dictionary defines “to curate” as the ability “to select, organize and look after the objects or works of art in a museum or an art gallery, etc.”.2 But I am also using curate in the religious sense of the word. Here it means something more holistic; entrusted with the care and healing (or cure) of souls. As mine and others’ research shows, at their cosmopolitan best, religious groups hold the cure of souls and the cure and transformation of social and material structures—what I would call the physical and the spiritual infrastructures required to build a good city—in a unique and creative tension (Cloke and Pears 2016; Beaumont and Cloke 2012; Putnam and Campbell 2010; Beaumont and Baker 2011). They often use their institutional resources (for example buildings, paid leadership, and other forms of professional infrastructure) to provide not only an open space of hospitality, but also to consciously, and non-­hubristically, arrange new reasons and opportunities to citizens to meet, out of which emerge further relational initiatives that bring in ever-wider circles of different social

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actors. In this way, often inchoate searching for connectivity, authenticity, and a desire to make a difference by multiple different social actors is met in arenas of common public space and intent. I suggest that religious groups are well-­placed to curate a new urban politics for three reasons.

1 The inherently spiritual nature of this new politics that Cloke et al. have remarked upon and the increasing recognition from those outside religious structures that the spiritual is an important dimension to public and civic life (Kearney 2015). 2 Through their dense patterns of sociality and deep and enriching patterns of worship and ritual religious groups provide essential tools for living within our borderless and increasingly unsettled world order: an experience of relationship and a sense of home or dwelling. Anthropologists of religion like Manual Vasquez (2011) suggest religions facilitate relationships by creating opportunities for “face-­to-face encounter” within the context of “storied” space. Meanwhile Thomas Tweed argues that religious groups provide a sense of “dwelling” that allows migrants to be physically located in contexts which are otherwise bewildering and alienating. It also allows them to be nurtured and valorized by connections or “crossings” that speak of the past but also reflect future hopes through rites of passage, rituals, and regular acts of remembrance and worship (Tweed 2006: 167). It is the dialectic tension between dwelling and crossing that makes religions particularly adaptable to an era of globalized flows and migration. 3 In many localities, faith groups are often a vital institutional space of welfare and service—what you might call a public space. They still have substantial infrastructural resources in terms of leadership, buildings, volunteers, etc. Other citizens are therefore drawn to use and contribute to these spaces of performative care, such as foodbanks, mental health and addiction services, homeless projects, etc. One example of a faith-­curated space that picks up and amplifies these three criteria of urban postsecularity is a Muslim-­run example which is a foodbank and community food project called Sufra, which is based in the London borough of Brent. Sufra is a polyphonic Middle Eastern word which has connotations of tablecloth, dining room, space of hospitality. Ninety percent of the people who access their services are non-Muslim. Its first client was a young man named

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Stephen who on being given a bag of food had no idea how to cook it. This led Sufra to run a ten-­week cooking course for its clients which is now an accredited training for 16- to 25-year olds (25 people have successfully found work as a result). They run a vegetable box scheme—providing fresh produce at wholesale prices—and a food growing project. Fifty percent of Sufra’s funding and resources comes from other faith groups including the local Catholic Church and Jewish community, as well as a multi-­faith workforce including people from non-­ religious backgrounds. Meanwhile Sufra volunteers have been trained by staff from the council’s housing department to offer advice on housing needs something “never seen before” in Brent, and a “radical” change. Sufra was also a venue for pre-­election hustings of 2015 where the issues of food poverty and homelessness were center stage. Sufra’s director, Mohammed Mankami, says the project feels like the end of the road for many who step across the threshold for the first time, but he wants it to be the start of a new journey. It also aspires to be an organization where people of different faiths and no-­faith could “take part in social action together, fundraise together, and share resources together” to create what he calls a “sustainable common purpose”.

Conclusion So as a final coda, and returning briefly to Cox’s ideas of the relationship between religious and secular in the secular city. Fast-­forwarding sixty years from the publication of Cox’s ground-­breaking volume, we might say that the secular city is also increasingly the postsecular city (Beaumont and Baker 2011), and that the faith groups are not so much “God’s vanguard” and “cultural exorcisers”—although that prophetic role is still important. Rather, they are increasingly “co-­producers” of a potentially new progressive politics and curators of new spaces of urban convergence. These experiments in convergence require a maturity of belief and breadth of vision from all social actors; what I have been calling (after Beck) a “cosmopolitan imagination.” Of course, our world today is oppressed in many places by what Beck would identify as universalist and regressive religion, intertwined with other forms of regressive ideology. In these scenarios, religion reverts to or exhibits a hubristic will-­to-power that seeks to conform all other social actors to its cultural and psychological hegemony. Like Beck we can only hope that most religious actors embrace the new public spaces of postsecularity that are opening up so that they can help to guide (along with other cosmopolitan actors) an urban polity, always at risk from itself, into a more humane and sustainable future.

4

Religion of the City: Urban-Religious Configurations on a Global Scale Stephan Lanz

Urban scholars are agreed that religious rulers both of the (Islamic) city of the caliphs or the sultan and of the medieval (Christian) cities of Europe “wielded policing and administrative powers” and that the entire “idea of citizenship, of civitas, was synonymous with religious rule” (AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 4). In contrast, the relevance of religion in the modern city has only been accorded exceptional places such as Jerusalem, already described as the urban utopia of the “heavenly Jerusalem” in the Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine and still regarded today as a “city of longing” (Goldhill 2008) by the faithful of three religions. Beyond this, urban religion was for a very long time regarded as a social relic, a sign of urban backwardness, linked to migrant milieus not yet fully urbanized in “Western cities” or to (poverty) zones in “Third World cities” captive to their traditions. Urban theory overlooked, for example, the major importance of the liberation theology movement as a religious, social, and political actor in Latin America’s cities, both on the intellectual level and for its grassroots congregations. As a “theology of revolutionary social change” (Cox 1990: 95), liberation theology was a significant influence in intellectual post-­colonialism. Over the course of the 2000s, it gradually became clear that religion was a blind spot especially in critical urban studies dominated by Marxist approaches and a narrow analytical focus on the cities of the West. Based on a deconstruction of the historical myth of a presumed dichotomy between the secular city of the (Christian) West and the religious city of the (Muslim) East, I will first discuss current approaches that attempt to integrate modes and meanings of urban religion into the foundations of urban theory. I will then go on to examine the multi-­layered interactions between the urban and the religious by way of looking at two urban-­religious configurations that seem very dissimilar. The first of these is a self-­fashioned form of religion created by urban poor and undocumented

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migrants that serves as an urban infrastructure for its adherents, supporting them in a life characterized by precariousness. Here I will draw on several examples from Rio de Janeiro. The second configuration I will analyse, using examples from Berlin and Istanbul, is new urban modes of religion that primarily cater to academic middle-­classes. These examples serve to illustrate the emergence of a religious metropolitan mainstream that attempts to reconcile adherence to religious norms with a modern urban lifestyle grounded in individualism, material consumption, and a professional career. In the conclusion, I will discuss the characteristics linking these seemingly very different urban manifestations of the religious.

The (secular) city of the West and the (religious) city of the rest: Deconstructing a myth Some years ago, Stuart Hall (in MacCabe 2008: 38) noted that “we forgot about [religion]. We thought—and sociology told us—that secularization is an unstoppable process. All our notions of modernity and of progress are harnessed to secularization, the secular.” Similarly to sociology, urban theory is also generally founded on the theory of secularization, since it considers that modern urbanity, as the end product of the city’s long spiritual decline, can be equated with secularity. The secularization theory, following Max Weber, assumed that religion in the rational modern world, epitomized by the large city, would only be able to survive in reclusive communities and that “secularization as the rationalization of the world” (Gabriel 2008: 10) would spread from Europe across the entire globe. But urban history shows that even the radical phase of modernization fueled by industrialization, in which, according to Mike Davis (2004), God had “died,” was characterized by a religious dynamic whose effects still have an influence today. The early industrial cities in the United States and Britain in particular served as laboratories for religious innovations of all possible political, cultural, and social stripes. They produced, among others, the reactionary charity movement and the progressive “Social Gospel” movement, the “black churches” struggling against the racist exclusion of African-American communities from public spaces and Christian organizations of a new type, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association with its connection of religion and business or the Salvation Army that sought to sacralize all aspects of everyday life. Nowadays, this practice of sacralizing urban consumer culture has been adopted especially

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by Pentecostalism, which originated in Los Angeles in a poor church community of African-American believers who were marginalized by the racism of traditional“white churches” (Cox 1995: 45ff.).As early as the 1910s, Pentecostalism begun to spread to Latin American and African cities and is currently growing faster globally than any other religious movement. Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ assumption that urbanization would secularize the working class (Davis 2004) could best be applied to Berlin, which grew dramatically to become the third largest industrial city in the world and, as early as the 1880s, was regarded as the world’s most non-­religious city. In Berlin, even liberal middle-­class milieus rejected the Lutheran Church due to its close ties with the monarchic elites. In working-­class quarters, dominated by social democratic and communist beliefs, hostility towards the churches was part of everyday political culture (McLeod 1996). Berlin, then, proves to be a special case of urban irreligiosity in the early industrial city. If urban theory conceptualized the modern Western city as secular, it regarded the metropolises of the Middle East as precisely the opposite. They were characterized as Islamic cities with urban structures decisively influenced by religion. The Islamic city as a discourse was the invention of French orientalists investigating colonial cities such as Algiers and Damascus in the 1920s. Janet Abu-Lughod (1987) and André Raymond (1994) show that, in comparison to the European city, the supposed “Islamic city” is always defined by a lack. The prevailing theories regard the Islamic religious system’s dominance over the urban as responsible for the continuing decline in these cities, their chaotic spatial structure, and their lack of effective institutions. Such sweeping descriptions ignore the facts that cities under Islamic rule have very different forms, span a historical period of over 1,300 years, are found in three continents, and have a basic urban spatial design that precedes Islam, or that cities such as Cairo or Damascus have always been home to religious diversity. This indicates how the idea of an Islamic-­city model is based on an orientalism ascribing every cultural phenomenon in a region under Islamic influence to Islam. This is one plank in the discourse of the “West and the rest” (Hall 1992), which inscribes qualities like urban, modern, civilized, and secular into the concept of the West and regards the (Islamic) rest as underdeveloped, traditional, and religious: “The disorderly Islamic city was a trope that made possible the norm of the ordered European city. Such a distinction (. . .) resonates with the distinction drawn today between ungovernable Third World cities and governed First World cities” (AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 3). Here, too, Western urban studies reveals, aside from its orientalist perspective, how it exclusively connects religion

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to backwardness and labels it the antithesis of modern urbanity. Even nowadays, the Islamic-­city model is still taken as the dominant framework for studies on contemporary cities in the Middle East (Shwayri 2012).

Integrating religion into urban studies: Recent approaches In 2001, Lilly Kong (2001: 212) noted that research on interactions between religion and the city had either developed outside traditional centers or, where it did focus on Western metropolises, had concentrated on minority groups from immigrant communities. She consequently postulated that “[t]heories of urban space and society must take on board integrally the ways in which socially constructed religious places overlap, complement or conflict with secular places (. . .) in the allocation of use and meaning.” As recently as 2008, Hancock and Srinivas (2008: 620) rightly criticized the fact that “[o]ne of the persistently stubborn assumptions of much of recent urban theory and policy seems to be that religion is external, incidental or peripheral to the discussion of urban modernity or civic futures.” The last few years have finally seen the emergence of a number of different approaches that aim to repopulate urban theory with religion (see Lanz and Oosterbaan 2016). A variety of empirical studies on the urban have analyzed religion as an urban everyday practice that is exercised by ordinary citizens and produces specific urban identities, spaces, communities, cultures, and political phenomena (Gómez and Van Herck 2012; Desplat and Schulz 2012; Garbin 2012). Mary Hancock and Smriti Srinivas (2008), for instance, analyze popular religion practiced by migrants and subaltern groups in diverse cities of the Global South. They focus on the ways in which religion is enacted in urban space and on the role it plays in the constitution of “a modern urban realm” (Hancock and Srinivas 2008: 621). Not least, such an approach shows the modern character of contemporary forms of urban religion. It strips the sacred of its essentialist connotations and instead analyses it as a social construct or “fabrication” (Meyer 2012). Nevertheless, the emphasis on popular religion in cities of the Global South holds the danger of perpetuating the classical interpretation of urban religion as a niche phenomenon particular to subalterns and of downplaying the character of the fastest-­growing urban religions as global forms (see Lanz and Oosterbaan 2016). In some sense, the “fundamentalist city” approach positions itself at the other end of the spectrum of contemporary approaches to the field of urban religion:

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Building on an observation according to which in many cities worldwide, radical groups with essentialist religious positions have set themselves up as powerful actors who offer social services in marginalized urban communities neglected by the state, Nezar AlSayyad and Mejgan Massoumi (2011) have coined the term “fundamentalist city.” According to AlSayyad (2011: 24), the “fundamentalist city” is a city that denies those of its inhabitants who do not practice the dominant religion equal rights and ultimately renders them “bare life.” In addressing the question of which urban configurations provide the conditions for radical religious groups to constitute themselves as powerful actors, AlSayyad and Massoumi (2011) point to a multiplicity of mutually interwoven processes: These processes include power and exploitative structures inherited from colonialism, ethno-­nationalist projects, institutionalized forms of marginalization, the arrogance of secular or traditional religious elites, and modernizing processes that break up social structures. AlSayyad and Massoumi note that radical political-­religious groups can successfully establish themselves in cities by responding to such societal constellations with transcendentally-­ based practices capable of endowing meaning, providing social support, or facilitating new forms of citizenship and community. What makes the term of the “fundamentalist city” problematic is that it focuses exclusively on those aspects of religious urbanisms which political and academic discourse have most taken exception to, yet does not address the diverse ordinary forms of urban religiosity. It thus runs the risk of reifying the selective urban theoretical links as defined from the Western perspective between modernity/backwardness, order/disorder, and secular/fundamentalist. It would be more appropriate to understand the phenomena observed as dynamic urban constellations that are—in addition to other processes—also marked by fundamentalist logic. Put differently, the “fundamentalist city” as an overarching term submits highly diverse, often self-­contradictory or ambivalent urban-­religious constellations to an overly simplistic and dramatizing logic, according to which others are rendered “bare life” (Lanz and Oosterbaan 2016). Justin Beaumont and Christopher Baker’s (2011) “postsecular city” approach offers a quite different model. Following Jürgen Habermas’s description of contemporary society as postsecular, it fundamentally criticizes the secularist foundation of urban studies and argues that the re-­emergence of public forms of religion and the shifting boundaries between politics, religion, and the state are most visible in the cities (Lanz and Oosterbaan 2016). The approach also points to a general acceptance of the role of religious institutions in the provision of care and welfare in Europe and the United States, which contributes to a

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rapprochement of secular and religious institutions involved in the regulation of social life (Cloke and Beaumont 2013). This development, according to Justin Beaumont (2008), reveals a change in the relationship between the state and civil society that in turn is linked to the neoliberalization of urban space. To the degree that the local state redefines its socio-­political role—e.g., by shifting erstwhile state responsibilities to the citizens under the banner of “empowerment”—social and political spaces of action are opening up for new religious organizations. The “postsecular city”-approach argues that the integration of religious groups into urban governance does not automatically lead to conservative political change, but also facilitates the formation of overarching coalitions of progressive, secular, and religious groups. However, its one-­sided emphasis on the positive effects of the religious urban presence makes this ultimately normative concept, which interprets the city transformed by postsecularism as a laboratory of educational and ethical change, appear to be almost naively optimistic. It is particularly problematic in its “linear temporality” (Leezenberg 2010: 97) and its Eurocentric basis. It downplays the fact that secularization is a multifaceted historical process which occurred most saliently in Europe (Kong 2010). Lastly, a conceptual approach that allows for more diverse forms of possible interaction between the city and religion has been developed by the international research project “Global Prayers—Redemption and Liberation in the City” (Lanz, 2014; Schiffauer, 2014). Taking the blind spots of a Western-­centric urban theory (Edensor and Jayne 2012) as its departure point, this approach seeks to systematically incorporate religion into urban studies as an integral factor of the production of the urban in all its dimensions. This entails questioning those of its assumptions that locate both the origins and the vanguard of urban modernity in the cities of the West and concede the cities of the Global South at best a “catching up,” imitation version of modernity. Urban modernity is instead regarded as a phenomenon with multiple origins that is hybrid in nature and circulates globally (Roy 2011: 310). In response to the Western-­centric, secularist perspective of urban theory with its overemphasis on capitalist logic as well as to the overly narrow “postsecular” and “fundamentalist city” approaches, which submit the diversity of urban-­religious constellations to a simplistic logic, this approach focuses on the question of the religion of the city. Its conceptual framework has come out of a number of case studies into the transregional academic field of city/religion that were concerned less with (religious) world views or programs than with the “way of doing things” employed by the actors in urban-­religious constellations (cf. Schiffauer 2010: 27). Religion is investigated

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neither as “an independent variable nor an epiphenomenon or mere idiom” but “as part and parcel of specific urban-­religious configurations” (Meyer 2014: 595). These configurations are understood as assemblages of material, social, symbolic, and sensuous spaces, processes, practices, and experiences in which the religious and the urban are interwoven and reciprocally produce, influence, and transform each other (Lanz 2014). The “Global Prayers” case studies reveal the contradictory, ambivalent, hybrid, and fluid character of urban-­religious configurations across religions, world regions, and cities. The research through actor-­centered approaches has produced a significantly more ambivalent result than the two opposing homogenizing concepts of a fundamentalist city viewed as repressive and a postsecular city interpreted as a laboratory of ethical change. Religion, instead, turns out to be an “unstable signifier” (Ivakhiv 2006) that, depending on context and situation, can lend itself just as well to reactionary and fundamentalist claims as to emancipatory right-­to-the-­city claims (cf. Danusiri 2014; Rostum 2014). The increasing diversity of urban religion is in no small part due to the fact that its specific manifestations are often created by ordinary people themselves, especially in urban areas of poverty. In addition, it becomes apparent that urban religions and religious urbanities have emerged from the niches they have often been relegated to and have thrust their way into the heart of urban modernization.

Self-­made religions as infrastructures of marginalized urban inhabitants Many studies have linked the recent rise of urban religions to the increasing poverty and marginality in the Global South as an effect of neoliberal policies. This theory has it that, driven by desperation and efforts of “self-­protection” (Solty 2008) and manipulated by religious elites, the subalterns of the “slums” turn to the ideologies of fundamentalist movements (Davis 2004). This line of argumentation fails to recognize, firstly, that poor people—as argued by Asef Bayat (2007)—cannot afford an ideological stance: they tend to affiliate themselves with groups that are capable of supporting them in their everyday needs, and in many cities across the globe, these groups have, since the 1980s, increasingly been religious actors. Secondly, this argumentation does not take into account that the present-­day religions of the urban poor have, to a large degree, not been imported from outside but created by the people themselves and tailored to their spiritual,

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social, and material needs. Talk of “the return of religion” tends to cloud the fact that it is precisely the traditional religious institutions that are not part of the boom of religion in the world’s large cities. The “Global Prayers” research indicates how new religious communities distancing themselves from traditional orthodoxies interact to a significant degree with the urban in the process of their particular religion breaking away from its traditional embeddedness in a culture or a territory. This is confirmed by Olivier Roy’s (2010: 25ff.) theory of religion’s global individualization, “de-­territorialization and de-­culturation.” Amanda Dias’ (2014) research into a Salafist community in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, shows how a religious movement without traditional cultural and territorial connections or diasporic networks created itself in a predominantly Christian city. Its growth was derived from individual conversions of erstwhile Catholics and Pentecostals, which can be read just as much as an aspect of a dynamic religious market as the result of Rio’s specific social landscape. It is not least with a view to successful proselytizing that movements like these, which have cut loose from cultural and religious traditions, seek to find novel ways of embedding themselves culturally into urban space. The Salafist community, for example, has built a mosque to a transnational Islamic design in the city center, proselytizes in public space, and is actively engaged in civil society. The growth of this local Salafist community as a result of conversions by upwardly striving members of the lower classes is not an isolated phenomenon in the context of individualized and deculturized forms of religion. In the Pentecostal communities, too, the event of conversion represents a break with the convert’s previous lifestyle and an extreme endeavor to create a new personal identity. Such religious communities, then, can be understood as programs of conversion and redemption and as technologies of governance aimed at collectively implementing rules and anchoring them in the individual (cf. Marshall 2009). In doing so, they offer rituals through which individuals are, for example, “reborn” and fight a permanent “spiritual war” against evil. They provide a precise code of conduct with which the believers are to govern their own life on an everyday basis and give clear instructions concerning family life, gender roles, sexual orientation, and consumer behavior (Lanz 2014). In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, for example, the appeal of the Pentecostal movement is connected to the social uncertainties that the residents are subject to. There, religious interpretations traditionally “arise to provide meaning for concrete day-­to-day problems” (Birman and Leite 2000: 277). Conversion to Pentecostalism may, for example, enable a convert to free himself from his involvement with the drug complex that has been ruling the favela for a long

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time (Lanz 2016a). The favela’s governance constellation has always forced the residents to earn their living as “self-­made” entrepreneurs, drawing on a combination of all resources and options available to them. The new religious landscape of Rio’s favela, which has traditionally been dominated by Catholicism and Afro-­syncretistic religions, reflects these conditions: Many of the thousands of Pentecostal churches that have sprung up there in the past 25 years are independent mini-­congregations established by religious entrepreneurs who fashioned themselves as lay pastors. A large number of these, in turn, are “reborn” converts themselves, and many of them have a history as criminals or addicts. The favela’s self-­made urbanism provided the very basis for the emergence of the entrepreneurial mini-­churches. Most of its founders aimed to make a living from their congregation members’ donations and had very little financial means. As a consequence, many of them, drawing on the informal help of neighbors and friends, built their own church from a variety of materials—recycled, cheaply bought, found, or swiped from construction sites (Lanz 2016b). These mini-­entrepreneurial practices of born-­again lay churches fit seamlessly with their adherents’ reality. As an informal way of urban life expands from the secular to the religious field, an intertwining of religious, social, and economic practices takes place. The fact that the Pentecostal churches do not offer any relief programs for the poor is one of the keys to their success. What they offer instead is an option of self-­empowerment and autonomy that furthers the merging of religious and economic agency—albeit at the price of submission to a moral code that rigidly governs everyday life (Lanz 2016a). The existence of the Pentecostal churches, then, expands the range of options available in everyday life for attaining a dignified and safe life in the favela. Therefore, the entrepreneurial self-­made religion created by ordinary residents should be understood as an infrastructure in the sense of a “platform providing for and reproducing life” in the favela (Simone 2004: 408; see Lanz 2016b). Seen from an everyday perspective, the term “infrastructure” is taken here to mean a “complex social and technological process that enables—or disables—particular kinds of action in the city” (Graham and McFarlane 2014: 1). The religious communities in the favelas are thus an excellent example for AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2014: 33) proposition that “the distinction between infrastructure and sociality is fluid and pragmatic rather than definitive.” The research done by Gerda Heck (2014; Heck and Lanz 2017) on the role of Congolese born-­again churches in the migration routes that take believers from Kinshasa through Rio de Janeiro or Istanbul to Berlin or Paris also points to the role of religious communities as self-­made infrastructures suited to precarious

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living conditions. Against the backdrop of their believers’ continual global mobility, Congolese revival churches have evolved in metropolises worldwide. Heck shows how the believers make use of their churches’ globe-­spanning networks to emigrate and how for many of the migrants, the self-­organized churches serve as the infrastructural backbone—economically, socially, and spiritually—of their migration practices. Having arrived in a foreign city, the migrants imagine the church as their home and safe haven, not least because of the dangers they are exposed to as often undocumented migrants. But the churches also open up new prospective contacts for potential migration destinations, both for the transit migrants, for example in Istanbul or Rio, and for would-­be emigrants in Congo. Starting in Kinshasa, one can trace the diasporic network extending through time, space, and different urban settings in which religious spaces are embedded. The churches are pivotal in this network and often act as “subaltern counterspaces” (Heck 2014: 283): they serve as spaces to pray and to receive spiritual backing, as places to regroup as an— often stigmatized—Pentecostal migrant minority, and to mark the boundaries distinguishing their moral codes and lived identity from those of the sedentary population. Furthermore, churches serve as meeting places where migrants can find support in their search for a job and accommodation. The global mobility movements are not only used for the believers’ economic or individual purposes, but also imply the production of globally circulating orientations and the continual production of symbols, meanings, economies, and religious articulation of urban space. In Rio de Janeiro, an important transit hub on the way from Africa to Europe or to North America, the migrant churches are African cultural centers of sorts where even believers from other religious communities can meet the community, speak Lingala, or participate in social events. As the Congolese are a confident presence in poorer neighborhoods with strong afro-Brazilian and Pentecostal communities, they economically benefit from the huge market for Christian music, which offers them career opportunities (Heck and Lanz 2017). In Istanbul, where Congolese and Pentecostal believers are subject to racist marginalization and state harassment, they try to remain invisible, stick to the cosmopolitan city center, and secure their survival through collaboratively organized import and export businesses (Heck 2014). In Berlin, where the Congolese congregations are marginalized but not actively threatened, they attempt to establish themselves in migrant neighborhoods as state-­ supported actors in the process of social integration. These examples reveal an urban-­religious “worlding from below” (Simone 2001), a process that adapts itself flexibly to different urban structures.

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AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2008: 117) elaboration on transnational religious networks of African-Muslim migrants in Europe demonstrates that Islam, similar to the Christian born-­again communities, offers a framework for circulations in which African-Muslim migrants can easily “establish themselves both at home and abroad, to come and go and to use the resources of stays in the north as a way to change conditions at home.” Here, religion is a reference point connecting the believers’ initiatives, styles, interpretations, and experiences and offering a basis for resources that open up a broader range of options, even under conditions of discrimination and exclusion. All the above-­discussed examples of self-­made religions serving as an urban or/and a migration infrastructure for their subaltern believers manifest themselves as urban-­religious configurations in which global forms and circulations of new religious communities and interactions with the urban express themselves materially and symbolically. As complex urban-­religious practices, they defy one-­dimensional explanations as well as overall normative evaluations.

Religious metropolitan mainstream The “Global Prayers” studies highlight that, at the global level, many of the new religious players’ spatial practices and lifestyles as well as their local policies and economies are among the most modern expressions of late capitalist urbanity. It is no longer possible to reduce these religious players to special urban constellations, groups of the poor and immigrants, cultural niches, or fundamentalist politico-­religious groups. The increasing significance of certain religions should consequently be understood not merely as a product of present-­day urban capitalism but as one of its driving forces. The prosperity religions, which are particularly booming in large cities, serve to illustrate this: These forms of religion, which exist in Christian and Muslim variants, promote the doctrine of an ethically directed materialism and interpret individual prosperity and success as proof of God’s blessing. Brian Larkin and Birgit Mayer (2006: 310) have called the prosperity-­ oriented Pentecostal movements and their Islamic counterparts “doppelgangers” because of their striking similarities. They have more in common with each other than they do with the mainstream of their “own” respective religions (Schiffauer 2014: 50). Both of them are individualized, de-­culturalized forms of religion which find their social base in young, often well-­educated people,

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Western-­trained, and from cosmopolitan urban milieus. They grant access to global infrastructures and convert “members into a new religious regime thriving on new forms of subjectivation” (Larkin and Meyer 2006: 310), in which ethical and entrepreneurial technologies of the self and technologies of domination are intertwined. Both, according to Schiffauer (2014), rest on a promise of “salvation, asceticism and personal communitarism and missioning.” He for instance shows that the promise of salvation made by the Millî Görüş movement, which, originating in Turkey, has been able to establish itself across Western Europe, is dressed in a neoliberal language of mobilization that merges the secular and the sacred and depicts the world as an arena of competition. The prosperity religions gain entry into secular urban spaces in a wide variety of ways. They convert the abandoned spatial complexes of urban modernism into series of globally similar spaces of worship. In Latin American metropolises, for instance, countless cinemas, theaters, concert halls, factories, workshops, office floors, and stores have transmuted into Pentecostal churches. In addition, the prosperity religions show off their economic and spiritual power with spectacular displays of sacral architecture. This feature is exemplified by mega churches as the new global headquarters of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus in São Paulo (designed as a replica of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem), or by plans by Turkey’s AKP government to erect a gigantic mosque on the site of Turkey’s most important political gathering place, Taksim Square in Istanbul. In cities like Lagos (Ukah 2016) and Istanbul (Çavdar 2016) the prosperity churches have built religious gated community complexes that merge profit-­oriented real estate development with the creation of sacral spaces and spatially segregated living environments for the new religious middle and upper classes. In metropolises across the globe, religious lifestyles have emerged that combine the individualism, professionalism, and consumer culture of a neoliberalized urban environment with the moral rules of the prosperity religions. In competing with secular urbanites in the arena of modernity, these groups emancipate themselves from discriminatory accusations against religious groups as being anti-­urban. The Pentecostal “prosperity gospel” is a fairly well-­known example of a faith that is tied to the striving for material prosperity. The Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, Brazil’s globally most active prosperity church, interprets its members’ entrepreneurial successes as a heavenly reward for the strength of their faith. Ostentatious displays of tokens of wealth—luxury cars, villas, yachts—are systematically deployed as part of the church’s missionizing strategy. Islamic variants of prosperity religions receive less attention. For the “Global Prayers” project, Özge Aktaş and Eda Ünlü Yücesoy (2014) researched the

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attitudes of young, educated, religiously observant Muslim women in Istanbul towards consumerist Islamic lifestyles, tokens of which include religious luxury items (like high-­fashion hijabs), lifestyle magazines, fitness centers, beauty parlors, and upmarket bars that cater specifically to observant Muslims. The study notes that one characteristic that the otherwise heterogeneous lifestyles of these women have in common is a pervasive tension between their secular everyday life and their religious code. This tension is addressed through constant renegotiation of the boundaries between the haram (objects and actions forbidden to the believer) and the halal (those that are permitted), both internally and with the social environment. In practical terms, this results in the women rejecting some of the commodified attributes of religion while upholding others. Many of the female university students interviewed attach a lot of importance to fitness and physical beauty, legitimized by an ever-­increasing supply of fashion items, gyms, and luxury hotels that cater exclusively to observant Muslims. In this environment, the hijab loses its political connotations and becomes a fashion commodity. Developments like these attract their share of internal controversy within religious circles. The Islamic theologian İhsan Eliaçık, for example, criticizes the AKP’s prosperity Islam as “religiously purified capitalism” (personal interview, 2013) in which religion had devolved into “amusement for the rich.” Istanbul is not the only city in which the lifestyles of believers striving for affluence has produced ever-­new reinterpretations of religious norms. Ukah (2016), arguing along similar lines as Eliaçık, notes with regard to Lagos that the rapidly increasing number of urban development projects launched by the prosperity churches gives investors the opportunity to morally launder capital acquired by shady means. The emergence of these lifestyles is not limited to global religious cities such as Istanbul or Lagos, which serve as hubs for the global dissemination of religious modes of urbanity. Even in Berlin, an Islamic fashion industry has emerged which makes use of style elements that typically signify gentrification and can be read as an “urban mainstreaming of Islamic cultures of consumption” (Stock 2013: 2). Alina Gromova (2013) has shown, also with regard to Berlin, that among young Russian-­speaking Jews seeking to distance themselves from their traditional communities, “Jewishness” is no longer an essentialist category that a person belongs to by virtue of birth or socialization. Rather, it is an urban lifestyle conceived as a “community of common interests and experiences” (Gromova 2013: 282) that like-­minded people join of their own choice and often only temporarily.

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Beyond the prosperity churches with their entwinement with neoliberal politics and conspicuous consumption, new Christian communities have emerged especially in cities that, like Berlin, are not particularly religious. These communities engage with neoliberalized urban environments in more nuanced ways. Their practices play less to the striving for material prosperity than to the search for new forms of community and spirituality that are not tied to traditional churches, and they primarily cater to the so-­called creative classes. Concepts of the creative industries are ubiquitous in discussions about the prosperity prospects of cities across the globe. Far beyond controversial theories (e.g., by Richard Florida) according to which, in the wake of the industrial city’s demise, only “creative cities” will be able to prosper in the competition of the global market, the concept of the creative city is part of the dispositive of creativity that shapes “the new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). To the degree that the constant interpellation to subjects to “emancipate” themselves from the welfare state and become “creative professionals” results in continuing efforts to morally improve and discipline oneself, it is linked to disciplinary technologies of power. It seems that it is not least the gap between the individual freedom to realize one’s creative potential through entrepreneurial endeavors and the attendant pressure to perform that fuels the growth of Berlin’s new Christian communities. Among them are the evangelical church Berlinprojekt, established by two young theologians in 2005, as well as an offshoot of the Australian Hillsong Pentecostal church called Berlin Connect and two branches of the International Christian Fellowship (ICF), founded in the 1990s in Zurich. The religious programs of these fast-­growing churches differ quite widely, ranging from the liberal intellectuality of Berlinprojekt to Berlin Connect’s anti-­liberal sexual-­political stance. Nonetheless, they have in common that their members are drawn from among the young, entrepreneurial, creative milieus that are commonly regarded as representative of Berlin’s globally lauded metropolitanism, and they are notably international and mobile. All three of these religious communities see themselves as part of modern, creative Berlin. For the most part, they do not maintain their own sacred spaces but rent secular spaces like clubs, ballrooms, cinemas, and coworking spaces. In this way, they create ties with cutting-­edge metropolitan modes of community interaction that—like the clubbing and the coworking-­community—have their roots in Berlin’s typical mélange of subcultures and self-­entrepreneurship. The activities the three churches offer are tailored closely to their adherents’ career goals: Berlinprojekt organizes “art conventions” for “workers in the creative

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industries who want to discover the Christian faith as a source of strength in their work” (Berlinprojekt, n.d.). The ICF offers “open offices” for use as coworking spaces, and Berlin Connect organizes “dinners for young professionals.” At the same time, these churches define themselves both as an “antithesis” to the pressure to perform and be cool exerted by the creative industries and as a “source of strength” for those working in these industries (interview with Berlinprojekt, 2012). Their community concept is one of the main appeals of these churches: students and young professionals coming to Berlin from all over the world find accommodation through the churches’ Facebook pages and meet at “couch groups” (ICF) and dinners in apartments and parks. They make use of the churches’ global networks, do volunteer work, and unwind at church-­organized gallery evenings, fashion shows, concerts, and parties. Community offerings like these offer believers a social infrastructure that is suited to career-­oriented lifestyles requiring international mobility. In creating social, professional, and spiritual networks that young professionals worldwide can plug into, these churches not only compensate for traditional modes of solidarity that have fallen by the wayside, they also create new modes of community formation that meet the demands of a globalized professional career. They are hence not so much “movements of self-­protection” (Solty 2008: 623) as they are technologies of government in the Foucaultian sense, supporting believers in their effort to successfully internalize the neoliberal appellation to be a creative, entrepreneurial self.

Religion of the city Taking a look at the two forms of present-­day manifestations of urban religion discussed here—the self-­created religions of subaltern people in a SouthAmerican metropolis and the new religious expressions by academic middle-­ class people in two European cities—it becomes obvious that, in spite of being situated at opposite ends of the hierarchy of global urban society, they have much in common. Both are unmoored from the cultural environments that traditionally socialize individuals into social orthodoxies; both rest on globally circulating ideas, consumption habits, and messages. These “religiosities are similar, even if their religious identities are divergent. The standardization of lifestyles, norms and values is a corollary of globalization. As people are seeking identical things (self-­affirmation, fulfilment, happiness, salvation), religions format themselves according to these demands” (Roy 2010: 8). This phenomenon

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leads to the emergence of a religious marketplace whose consumers—the believers—choose from among competing products the ones that best suit their individual needs. In the context of the environments examined here, this may mean that they convert from Catholicism to Salafist Islam, keep switching Pentecostal churches, or join whichever new religious community best supports their career-­oriented, globally mobile lifestyle and offers a model of salvation and community to match. Thus, all urban religions discussed here have been created by their adherents themselves, while at the same time serving as urban infrastructures in the sense of platforms “providing for and reproducing life in the city” (Simone 2004: 408). It is the unique character of the urban that makes such religious lifestyles possible. The city as a marketplace and a palimpsest, with its global web of connections, its anonymity, heterogeneity, and complex cultural and social dynamics, produces spaces in which new religious worldviews, identities, and organizations can develop in engagement with others, free from the social control exerted by traditional orthodoxies: “And then a religion of like-­minded people emerges who tend to have genuine religious interests rather than merely wanting to adhere to social control” (Schiffauer 2012: 266). According to Harvey Cox (1990), it is the “cosmopolitan confrontations” of city living that have made it possible to examine the relative nature of previously unassailable religious myths in the first place. Finally, “the world of the modern city has necessitated, encouraged, or simply made possible a tremendous explosion of religious innovation and experimentation” (Orsi 1999: 45). This is particularly true of times of radical change: In the course of urban industrialization, for instance, religion, rather than disappearing, underwent a transformation process which responded creatively to new forms of urban life. In a certain sense, this development seems to repeat itself in the major change from the industrial city shaped by national identities to the multi-­ethnic and globalized post-­industrial city which began in the last third of the twentieth century. All contemporary urban manifestations of religion cross conventional boundaries between the secular and the sacred, between religion, politics, economy, and culture and renegotiate them, thus creating novel hybrid structures. Not only do they respond to social and urban change, they are integrally entwined with it and are a factor in propelling it. In other words, they are not merely religions in the city but religions of the city: Rather than being independent variables, epiphenomena, or mere idioms within, but separate from, the city, they are part and parcel of dynamic assemblages in which the religious and the urban are interwoven and reciprocally produce, influence, and transform each other.

Part Three

Religious Pluralism: Conflicts and Negotiations in the City

5

Religious Superdiversity and Urban Visibility in Barcelona and Turin Marian Burchardt, Irene Becci, Mariachiara Giorda

The links between religion and urban space have attracted the interest of an increasing number of sociologists over the last decade. Starting from a critique of the assumption that urbanization leads to the decline of established religions, scholars have focused on the vitality of urban religion spawned by religious innovations, urban religious events, and transnational migration (Hervieu-Léger 2002; Casanova 2013; Orsi 1999). In order to analyse this complex context of multiple urban diversities emerging from new waves of immigration, scholars have drawn upon the concept of superdiversity, coined by Vertovec (2007). Starting from the observation that the number and type of religious communities settling in European cities after the Second World War have multiplied spectacularly, in this chapter we explore how in contemporary European cities, different historical memories, each storing a variety of collective religious and secular experiences, are layered upon one another: materially and symbolically in architecture, immaterially in urban religious imaginaries, and socially through the coexistence of multiple religious mobilizations and expressions. The term “superdiversity”1 describes the diversification and mutual conditioning of factors linked to the status and experiences of contemporary migrants that shape the multicultural context of cities. These include “differential immigration statuses and their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent labor market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents” (Vertovec 2007: 1025). As a matter of fact, a complex set of moving boundaries develops in cities around categories of gender, age, religion, ethnicity, culture, language, or other signifiers, actualized in local interactions and informed by global discourses and transnational networks.

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However, critics have questioned the analytical purchase of this term as compared to diversity, lamented its failure to address power relations, and raised doubts about the newness of the processes it aims to describe (e.g., Anthias 2012; Meissner 2015). Being aware of these criticisms, in this chapter we argue that the term’s analytical usefulness can be brought to fruition by disentangling the relationships between religion and other dimensions of diversity. As Meintel (2016) argues “religious diversity is by no means isomorphic with ethnic diversity. Nor is religious diversity simply the result of increased immigration or even immigration from a wider range of source countries.” Against this backdrop, we develop our own conceptualization of religious superdiversity to examine the place of religion in complex superdiverse cities. More generally, we argue that the notion of religious superdiversity highlights the complex imbrication of cultural, biographical, social, political, and economic factors that shape religion in contemporary urban spaces. We explore in comparative fashion how the spatial strategies of religious communities have formed, and imparted urban visibility to, religious superdiversity in two European cities—Barcelona and Turin. Being located in economically powerful regions in Southern European countries, both cities’ labor markets have attracted national migrants for long periods but became hubs of transnational migration only since the 1990s, that is, much later than Northern European multicultural cities. In both cases, immigration levels rose dramatically in a short period while migrants’ profiles are hugely diverse encompassing both high- and low-­skilled workers and literally all world regions as places of origin. Most sociologists use the term religious diversity to describe the migration-­ driven presence of “world religions” (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) on different social scales (neighborhoods, cities, nations).2 In contrast, we define religious superdiversity as a more encompassing and complex cultural and social formations involving variables and dynamics such as religious innovation (e.g., scientology, Soka Gakkai, or transcendental meditation) that are not necessarily related to migration. This matters because new spiritual movements and migrant religious groups may—or may not—be subjected to the same urban regulations of places of worship.As we argue in detail below, religious superdiversity is intended to capture the ways in which different kinds of religious differences— those related to confessionalism, to current forms of schism, heterodoxy, and new spiritualities, and to migration—are articulated in urban space and intersect with other signifiers and categories such as gender, age, or marital status (see also Becci and Burchardt 2016 as well as Becci, Burchardt and Giorda 2017).

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This understanding of religious superdiversity also helps to distinguish superdiversity from the term multiculturalism, which it was meant to replace. Based chiefly on migration-­driven differences, multiculturalism was not intended to, and cannot, account for the diverse religious differences and their respective spatial dynamics, which is the object of this study. In this chapter we argue that urban and religious changes can be addressed comprehensively if linked, more generally, to the social and political controversies about secularization, migration, and religious diversity. We draw on a notion of spaces as emplacements, i.e., as practiced places resulting from the interaction between their symbolical and social significance as well as physicality (Smith 1987; Cresswell 2004). We observe and analyse, in a Spanish and an Italian city, three different ways in which religions intercalate in urban space, describing the way inherited religious institutions, i.e., mostly dominant Christian traditions, negotiate spatial regimes through “place-­keeping” strategies. Diaspora and migrant religions, by contrast, adopt different “place making” strategies, while new religious movements and practitioners of contemporary spirituality are “place seekers,” in line with their stress on flows, fluidity, and journeying. We elaborate on these categories below. The actual practices of religious communities can, of course, traverse several of these categories. We do not argue that they exhaustively describe the dynamics around religious diversity in cities. Rather, they point to the fact that all religious groups and their practices are entwined with one another and with secular spaces of the city. Paying attention only to the actions and strategies of migrant groups carries the implicit assumption that other religious communities are simply in standby. It is this idea that we challenge with our threefold conceptualization of religious spatial strategies.

Cities, religion, and space Cities are located within spatial regimes, which are relatively stabilized by laws and rules but which are also always socially contested modes of spatial organization. Secularization and globalization have fundamentally shaped the ways in which religion has been inscribed into these regimes, yet not in a historically linear way. McLeod (1996) demonstrated that for European cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, religious innovations always accompanied secularization. For instance, churches adapted to urbanization by fashioning new strategies for evangelization and outreach to urban working

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classes. Today, religious innovations involve the “branding” and marketization of religious sites according to the logics of the tourism industry. Conversely, emergent religious groups often develop new spiritual investments in secular urban space. Second, we observe the strategic positioning of specific religious sites within the logic of religious “events,” whereby inherited religious festivities are conjoined with broader cultural processes towards the “eventization” of leisure and religion.3 Through such events religious communities also reinforce changes in urban real estate economies and engender transformations of patterns of use. Religion and urban space are thus transformed together by current social processes. The current success of the notion of “spirituality” is better understood if viewed from a spatial angle as a newly emergent practice which opposes both “secularity” and “religion”—understood as institutional traditions that are spatially fixed in Europe. During the last decades, there has been a rise of practices imported from Asia and Latin America and refashioned by Europeans as new spirituality. In this context, the notion of “newness” draws on territorial terms, as these practices and discourses on spirituality are new for Europe but have existed elsewhere for centuries; but it also draws on cultural-­historical terms in that they emerged through processes of hybridization and syncretism and are therefore unprecedented.

Understanding religious superdiversity As argued above, contemporary religious diversity is part of the broader phenomenon of superdiversity. Importantly, many European cities have been religiously diverse for generations and marked by contrasts between the established religion controlled by clerics and popular or folk religiosities. However, new processes of religious diversification occurred in European cities chiefly from the 1960s onwards as ideological sub-­currents and upshots of the great counter-­cultural movements (Houtman and Aupers 2007). Since then, urban youth have invented new spiritual and religious practices in line with their critique of oppressive forms of authority around gender, the capitalist economy, and the military complex. Ironically, the presence of numerous New Age, NeoHindu, and Western Buddhist communities in urban contexts comes along with new consumer patterns, which reinforce gentrification processes in unintended ways. Survey research documents an increase in the number of people since the

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1990s, defining themselves as spiritual as distinct from religious. In a survey in Barcelona in 2014, 15.9 percent of inhabitants strongly agreed with the statement “I am a spiritual person” while 32.2 percent still “pretty much agreed.”4 In Italy the trend is weaker but still exists (10 percent in 2007, Palmisano 2013). Importantly, defying ideas of permanent membership in a congregation, adherents of new spirituality draw on spiritual offers in a discontinuous fashion, adopting practices and beliefs about “life” and “energies” in ways inconsistent with traditional religious practices and notions of place. In order to illustrate the current religious superdiversity in cities, we look at the interaction between spatial dynamics and religious-­spiritual productions by presenting the results of empirical research conducted in two settings— Barcelona and Turin. In both cases, we distinguish three different ways in which, under current conditions, religions intercalate in urban space, according to whether they are: (1) established religions; (2) diaspora or migrant religions; or (3) emerging spiritualities. Each of these forms of religion has developed a different type of relationship to regimes of secularism and urban infrastructures. In addition, each of these forms of religion is shaped by particular spatial practices and topographies, which are linked to city histories, including their ethnic hierarchies and power relations that shape the meanings of place. Taken together, these locally grounded and historically sedimented layers of religious expression articulate what we call formations of religious superdiversity. As a theoretical consequence and from an urban sociological perspective, we argue that in order to fully understand religious superdiversity one must not only consider the relationship to space and place of one form of religious expression, but take possibly into account all the religious practices that exist in a given spatial setting. Superdiversity is usually understood to be a feature of large metropolitan hubs of global migration such as London, Paris, or New York. A good illustration is Wessendorf ’s (2014: 8) description of the population in the London borough of Hackney in terms of religious diversity. Analysing census data she finds that those identifying as Christian are of a variety of “denominations ranging from Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist to Church of England and Roman Catholics.” In addition, she mentions the diversity of Muslims, including Alevi Kurds and Sunni Turks, of Jews who are part of the Charedi Orthodox community or considering themselves as secular. Besides Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists a large group of persons declares to have “no religion” or do not state any religion. By contrast, Barcelona and Turin are two provincial capital cities from Southern European countries. This case selection is driven by two observations:

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First, Barcelona and Turin have experienced particularly rapid immigration processes that added new layers of religious diversity but have thus far been ignored in mainstream debates on superdiversity. Second, religious superdiversity not only emerges from transnational migration but is also shaped by religious dissent, doctrinal heterodoxy, and spiritual innovation. Therefore, it is promising to explore religious superdiversity in cities with comparatively long histories of interreligious relationships and analyse how these associations are expressed spatially. While these cases share a similarity in terms of religious innovations combined with eventization, the cases differ in terms of demographic size, religious history, and histories of migration. These are specific to their historical and sociological profile, which makes the comparison particularly rich. Significantly, the spatial strategies we identify are neither representative of all European cities nor limited to them. However, Christianity’s historical dominance upon European urban space imposed a cultural pattern that Nelson and Gorski (2014) call the “parochial package.” This notion illustrates a particular way of organizing residential populations into units of religious membership centered around spatial cores of ecclesiastical structures (churches, schools, hospitals). This occurred first in Catholicism and later in the transformations wrought by Protestantism. As the most important outcome of Christianity’s early place-­ making strategies, this package comes along with relatively tight regulations of religious uses of public space. Similar cases are found, for instance, in Singapore but they differ dramatically from the massive use of streets for religious festivals and performances in Mumbai (van der Veer 2013). The factor that explains these differences is confessionalism, imposed by British colonial rule in Singapore yet absent in India. In keeping with our interest in the relationships between historically grounded spatial strategies and contemporary superdiversity, we employ a methodology that combines the historical reading of urban religious spaces with data from observation and problem-­centered qualitative interviews with religious leaders, congregants, policymakers, and urban planners. In Barcelona, we build on interview, archival, and observation data gathered between 2012 and 2015.5 In Turin, we visited eight Catholic places (including distinct migrant communities), sixteen Islamic prayer rooms, three Orthodox churches, seven Pentecostal communities, and ten new religious movements over a period of seventeen months. Representatives of religious communities were selected with a view towards achieving maximum contrasts in terms of length of historical presence, numerical size, and religious understandings of space. The data analysis was geared towards the development of a typology of spatial strategies. As a next

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step, we describe the historical and demographic context of the two cases starting with Barcelona.

Religious diversity in the post-­anticlerical city: Barcelona With 1.6 million inhabitants and more than 5 million people living in the metropolitan area, Barcelona is one of Europe’s biggest urban agglomerations, the capital of the region of Catalonia, and one of Spain’s economically most important cities. Since the beginning of the fourth century and through Roman influence, it has been dominated by Christianity and the parochial system of spatial organization described above. At the same time, as a harbor city Barcelona always attracted people from other countries, especially in the Mediterranean region, which led to the presence of a sizable Jewish community until its expulsion under the reign of the infamous Spanish inquisition following the Reconquista in 1492. There are municipal attempts to lend stronger visibility to this historical Jewish presence in their former neighborhood called the “call” (in Catalan) as part of the city’s strategy to showcase the diversity of its history and population while the contemporary Jewish community, mainly made up of migrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Argentina, live scattered across the city. Protestants, by contrast, have been present in Barcelona since the nineteenth century when North American, French, and British missionaries began to settle in the city and their Presbyterian and Methodist congregations slowly began to attract local converts (Estruch et al. 2007: 100). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the increasing strength of the labor movement, anarchist mobilizations and an increasingly vociferous freemasonry all became articulated with Catalonia’s reinvigorated nationalism and led to the dramatic sharpening of clerical-­anticlerical antagonisms. These antagonisms first culminated in the setmana tràgica (“tragic week”) in 1909. Protesting against a conscription campaign of the Spanish army, Barcelona’s working classes directed their anger not only against the military and industrialists but also against the Catholic Church whom they saw as their ally (Delgado 1992). As a part of their protest, they burned convents and profaned sepulchers. In the context of the Spanish civil war, 30 percent of all Catholic priests in Catalonia were killed. Numerous churches and monasteries were torched and torn to the ground and in many city quarters the material patrimony of Catholicism was literally eradicated.

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With the establishment of Franco’s rule and his system of National Catholicism, religious minorities were again denied recognition and the right to build places of worship, forced to gather in underground conditions and to retreat into public invisibility. The Catholic Church, by contrast, embarked on massive re-­evangelization campaigns trying to revert dramatic processes of un-­ churching that were already visible in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite this, secularization processes deepened during Franco’s rule and Barcelona’s population increasingly acquired and cultivated a self-­image as a secular and cosmopolitan city. Significantly, this self-­image was fashioned as a contrast to Spain viewed as Catholic, monarchist, and backward (Burchardt 2016a). While especially during the decades of Francoism, Barcelona received many internal migrants from other Spanish regions, since the late 1990s it also transformed into a major hub of transnational migration attracting people from Latin America, China, North Africa, India, and South-Eastern Europe. The foreign-­born population rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 18.1 percent in 2009 and fell again to 16.3 percent due the economic crisis, which motivated almost 40 percent of South Americans to leave the city.6 While migrants from Southern Spain and Latin America diversified the urban field of Catholicism, migration from North Africa, India, and China led to the presence of Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Importantly, Evangelical and Pentecostal communities from Latin America also contributed to the far-­reaching reconfiguration of the urban Protestant field. Barcelona is thus a supreme case to study the ways in which multiple registers of religious diversity and secular mobilizations are layered upon one another. At the level of urban government, religious diversity was recognized as an important feature of urban life as early as 1992 when in the context of the Olympic Games urban authorities fostered interfaith activities (Griera 2012). In 2005, the city government founded the Agency of Religious Affairs with the task to promote, manage, and organize religious diversity in the city and to develop harmonious relationships with all religious communities. These strategies sharply contrast with the near invisibility of religious minorities in terms of architectural registration. Partly due to sheer density of the inherited built environment in the central districts and the difficulties of acquiring land for purpose-­built places of worship, most minority groups rent locales as storefront churches or mosques, which are rarely identifiable as religious sites for non-­members (Burchardt 2016b). And yet African Protestantism, Western Buddhism, and Latin American Catholicism have emerged precisely from the multiplication of cultural and religious differences that we aim to capture with the term religious superdiversity.

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Religious superdiversity and spatial politics in Turin Until recent years, Turin was one of the most important industrial hubs of Italy and an epicenter of national political struggles. The Albertine Statute, that is, the first declaration of civil rights and freedom of religion (accorded to Jews and Waldensians) in Italy, was passed in Turin in 1848. Before the Statute, Waldesians and Jews resided in the city, but they were denied urban visibilization through designated buildings. There was a prayer hall in the Jewish ghetto while most ritual life took place in private homes. After 1848, more congregations were granted building permissions, and subsequently the quarter of San Salvario was designated as one of the expansion areas of the growing city in the capital enlargement plan, which provided an opportunity for non-Catholics to erect their places of worship. Like other cities in Italy, a diverse migrant population settled during the first years of the new millennium. Originating from Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, and the Philippines, there are currently around 222,000 immigrants, i.e., almost one-­quarter of the cities one million residents is a recent immigrant.7 Following up on earlier waves of internal migrants arriving from Southern Italy after the Second World War, their presence has radically changed neighborhoods like San Salvario, which is today one of Turin’s most rapidly gentrifying areas. As a consequence of immigration but also due to the rise of new spiritualities, religious demographics have changed dramatically. In the last few decades the number of religious communities rose from 120 to 200.8 While religious superdiversity has thus engendered new modes of situating religious practices in urban space, it also entails challenges in terms of public recognition, visibility, social integration, and religious citizenship, to which urban authorities have responded with policies and projects.

Three spatial strategies in religiously superdiverse cities Religions have been part of the urban fabric since the development of cities. Some religious traditions are from their start more urban than others, and some cities have been built on a spatial imaginary deeply framed by religious ideas (see Racine 1993). Knott and Vasquez (2014: 327) conceptualize the “place-­ making” spatial strategies of migrant religious groups in contemporary global cities as something that encompasses both dwelling, which includes mapping, building, and inhabiting, as well as crossing “in so far as it is inextricably connected with mobility.” We expand their approach by contrasting and relating

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migrants’ spatial strategies to other urban religions that are not necessarily of migrant origin. For migrant communities, the “making” of places of worship is linked to embodied performance of urban presence, to the spatial management of difference and belonging, and to multiple embedding across networked spaces (Knott and Vazquez 2014). Established religions such as Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, or Anglicanism, by contrast, have, since the early Middle Ages, been dominant in most European countries and have profoundly shaped urban geographies. Next to Judaism, only Christian religions have left deep imprints in urban architectural landscapes as a result of their social power, material resources as well as the architectural sophistication that emerged from the close relationships between churches, architects, and political authorities. Currently, however, these churches are concerned with questions about how to keep their place in the city and adopt strategies accordingly. Traditional Christian churches face considerable concerns, such as diminishing membership, decreasing participation in church services and other religious activities, changing residential demographics, and aging populations. Due to these issues, sometimes they have difficulties maintaining their buildings. However, religious places often carry special significance within collective memories, not only those of active congregants but also of entire neighborhood populations that inhabit the surroundings of these churches. Numerous churches constitute essential spots for tourists when visiting European cities. Actors in the field of contemporary spirituality or new religions, by contrast, are mainly on the move to find a place according to its “energetic valence,” inventing its aesthetics, and locating their urban presence. We capture this bundle of aspirations in the notion of “place seeking.” Usually, these groups do not desire to develop the kind of “architectural registration,” e.g., culturally anchored styles, and outwardly oriented decorum (Knowles 2013) that established religions have, and some migrant groups aspire to attain. Therefore, their places often show similarities to secular places built for leisure, sports, arts, or health-­related activities. As mentioned, this spatial closeness blurs the boundary between the secular and the spiritual. For instance, one may accidentally bump into a Buddha statue when going to the hairdresser or into Sanskrit verses when attending a therapy course for back pain. Of course, these boundaries are drawn in an ideal-­typical way. These religious actors refer to each other and are occasionally influenced by each other’s strategies. The historical and structural conditions, however, place them in divergent social positions.

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All of this implies that urban space is never a level playing field for religious groups, but can become a terrain for negotiation that reveals the boundaries of citizenship that would otherwise remain hidden. Conflicts over the urban visibilization of Islam, especially with regard to mosques and minarets (Astor 2012), are the most emblematic examples of this. More generally, though, religious diversity becomes visible in urban space, for instance through the public display of religious symbols and rituals. We argue that the sociological analysis should not be limited to conflicts around visibility but consider formations of religious superdiversity as part of urban spatial regimes. In addition, visibility is not only an issue for migrant or new religions but also a stake for established religions as our empirical cases demonstrate.

Strategies of place-­keeping: Traditional religious communities By place-­keeping, we mean religious investments aimed to preserve urban presences across changing political and cultural conditions and to reproduce symbolic power. In Barcelona, Catholic hierarchies have long been used to operating under conditions of advancing secularization and are increasingly adapting to the new situation of religious superdiversity. Their central strategy to do so, however, is to define their own presence in the city as lying outside of this field of religious superdiversity. This became apparent in Catholic mobilizations against a “Law on Centers of Worship,” which the regional government proposed in 2005 in response to problems with the establishment of mosques and other religious minority places and as a way to curtail Catholic privilege and treat all religious communities as equals. Church officials vehemently opposed the initiative, arguing that Catholic churches should not be subjected to the same regulations as centers of worship catering to other religions, given the centrality of Catholicism to Catalan heritage and culture. Joan Enric Vives, the secretary of the Tarragona Episcopal Conference and spokesman for Catalan bishops, criticized the draft bill for using “the same law to regulate the very diverse realities of churches, synagogues, mosques and other centers” (Noguer 2007). He later clarified the Church’s position on the initiative, stating, “It will probably always be inappropriate to use the same legislation to regulate centers of worship and gathering that vary so much by religious confession and that have such an asymmetric presence in Catalan society” (Guil 2008). Importantly, similar to what we observed in Turin, many Catholic parishes have opened their doors to religious communities who lacked a place of worship, especially to Romanian Orthodox Christians but also to non-Christian groups.

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They have offered premises they did not need urgently for their day-­to-day activities and showed hospitality to religious newcomers. Such hospitality was also illustrated in many social projects offered to youngsters and other disadvantaged people of non-Catholic immigrant background. Catholic strategies of place-­keeping, however, predate current concerns over increasing religious diversity and harken back to struggles over symbolic power in the city in the late nineteenth century marked by the beginning of the construction of the Basilica of the Sagrada Família in 1894. Widely viewed as being intended to demonstrate the reinvigorated power of the Catholic sections of the Catalan bourgeoisie, this church covers a vast terrain in the neighborhood of Eixample. It is visible from any point in the city and became a UNESCO world heritage site in 2005. Consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI on November 7 2010 in front of an audience of 6,500 inside and more than 50,000 followers outside the church, the building has become the most powerful symbol of Barcelona’s urban identity across the globe. We suggest that the long period of the construction contributed to conveying to urban populations a strong sense of Catholicism’s ongoing and self-­transforming presence in urban space across periods of violent anticlericalism, Franco’s National Catholicism, and continuing secularization. While the Basilica of the Sagrada Família with its modernist architectural language is a rather curious case of heritagization, making claims to religion as heritage is indeed a central place-­keeping strategy for Barcelona’s Catholicism. As the director of the city government’s department of cultural heritage emphasized in an interview with us, the presence of Catholicism in Catalonia has been particularly important and the law on cultural heritage also recognizes this special status. Importantly, Catholicism can count on two different forms of preservation, one in which the church is responsible for the material patrimony, and another one in which the state itself becomes the owner of Catholic places and assumes responsibility for the preservation. Within official conservationist discourse as illustrated in several interviews with heritage officers, the preservation of religious places is locally construed as a decidedly secular affair. One could indeed argue that heritage as a place-­keeping strategy straddles the divergent path of reproducing hegemonic urban visibilities while simultaneously casting Catholicism within the secular idiom of museology, creating, as it does, a sentiment of detachment or disengagement from the original religious site, which thereby becomes a place of memory and secular contemplation. Catholic place-­keeping practices thus amount to three different strategies: first, the Catholic Church seeks to strengthen and visibilize its classical parochial

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presence by focusing on public festivities, ceremonies, and processions that feed on broader notions of the eventization of religion and mark public spaces as Catholic. Second, through practices and discourses of conservation and religious heritage, Catholicism manages to generalize its own significance for cultural definitions of the city; definitions that transcend the boundaries of religious difference and help to establish its position as above the framework of religious diversity. And third—and similarly—offering spaces and services to non-Catholic religious groups engenders a kind of spatial presence that encompasses (Dumont 1980) religious diversity. Having been dominated by Catholicism as well, in Turin place-­keeping concerns first and foremost the Catholic Church. The first non-Catholic religious building in the modern Turin was the Waldesian Church, finished in 1853 (Cozzo, De Pieri, and Merlotti 2003), and in 1883 a synagogue was inaugurated in the same quarter, San Salvario. Both buildings are prominently located overlooking the streets and marked by their height and “architectural registration” (Knowles 2013). Significantly, a series of activities with strong connections to urban society started to concentrate around these places, such as a Jewish school, meeting places, charity centers (visited by thousands of people on a daily basis), as well as the Waldesians’ bookshop and publishing house. Moreover, some of these activities, e.g., the Waldesian hospital, spread well beyond the quarter. In order to account for urban religious superdiversity, however, we also need to unpack the monolithic notion of Catholic hegemony and recognize the counterhegemonic forces that emerged from early class cleavages such as the movement of “social saints” around Giovanni Bosco. In 1882 the Catholic Church of San Giovanni Evangelista was built in the same area. Simultaneously, the church responded to the pressures of urban secularization visible in empty pews by reinforcing efforts of re-­evangelization towards Waldensians, e.g., by hosting young people and offering them different activities (homework, sports, leisure). As our interviews showed, conflicts with Don Bosco served to unify Waldensians around a shared urban identity (Straniero 1998). While Turin’s Catholicism has increasingly been affected by secularization since the 1990s and thus much later than Barcelona, its visibility in urban space is similarly being affirmed. In 2006 the monumental Church of the Santo Volto (Holy Face) was consecrated in a formerly dilapidated area of industrial factories, smelting furnaces, and steel mills that had turned into an urban redevelopment project with new apartment blocks. Here, Catholic desires to place-­keeping were articulated with ambitions to post-Fordist urban rejuvenation in a strategic city

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location on more than 12,000 square meters. The belfry, enclosed in a helical metallic structure, is the ancient steel mill chimney, which symbolizes the new that is based on the past; the layered dimension of the holy place tells a story of the former industrial city, illustrating how Catholicism renegotiates its urban identity by reclaiming urban territory. We suggest that constructions such as the Church of the Santo Volto that draw on the charismatic qualities of auratic architecture and blend into stylizations of urban heritage, affirm Catholic hegemony in “place-­making” terms: mapping, building, inhabiting. At once they draw on such place-­making practices as parts of a place-­keeping strategy as heritage architecture inevitably fosters the heritagization and musealization of places of worship. In other words: heritage architecture aims at keeping places by transforming them from traditional places of worship into temples of aesthetic experience. For the first time, the territorial system of parishes as confessional centers for homogeneous groups of residents was disrupted. This disruption was due to the place-­making strategies of Protestant groups emerging in the wake of mass evangelism after the Second World War linked to migration flows from Southern Italy. Place-­making strategies, which we explain in the following section, are in many ways one of the most dynamic elements of the spatialization of religious superdiversity in contemporary European cities.

Place-­making: Religious diaspora in the city By place-­making, following Knott and Vasquez (2014), we mean sets of religious practices—mostly by migrant communities—aimed at symbolic and material appropriations of urban space, geared towards producing familiarity and belonging in already religiously marked terrains. In Barcelona, religious demographics changed dramatically with new waves of immigration from the 1990s onwards. As mentioned above, new forms of migration-­driven religious diversity were addressed through founding of the Oficina d’Afers Religiosos (Office of Religious Affairs) with the aim of establishing cordial relationships between religious communities and urban authorities, organizing public religious life in the city and regularizing the places of worship of newly arrived religious minorities. While city officials often present the office to showcase their diversity policies, office employees complained in interviews with us about lacking commitment of the city government to their work. Again, however, the most interesting finding was that while officially being in charge of all religions most of the office’s work effectively deals with religious

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immigrant groups. There are thus two separate urban administrative regimes for religious minorities and Catholicism, which reproduce rather than under­ mine the different statuses of minorities and the dominant tradition in the urban domain. While public religious festivals of minorities and the ephemeral religious visibilities in urban space they engender are relatively unproblematic, religious minorities’ spatial strategies aimed at durable places of worship are complicated by the complex spatial context. Free land for new buildings is extremely scarce in the central districts, which makes it difficult to erect purpose-­ built places of worship. These problems are further compounded by astronomical prices for real estate that have been engendered by the turn to neoliberal urbanism during the 1990s (Montaner, Álvarez, and Muxi 2012) and the sometimes negative attitudes of neighborhood associations, especially towards mosques.9 As the members of most migrant communities have relatively low incomes they are rarely in the position to buy land. As a consequence, they rent locales in existing buildings. Because of the high population density in central districts such as Raval, Borne, and Poble Sec, however, building codes and the regulations of activities, for instance with regard to maximum numbers of users, noise nuisance, hygiene, and logistics, are relatively strict, which again imposes limitations on religious uses of regular locales (Burchardt 2016b). This situation has consequences for the place-­making strategies we identified in Barcelona. First, communities that aim to gather relatively large groups of followers such as Muslims, sometimes choose sites in urban peripheries or industrial estates as these areas offer more space for lower prices. While often human rights groups harshly criticize urban authorities for pushing religious minorities to urban peripheries and invisibilizing their presence, religious minorities may actually view conditions in such areas as more suited to their needs. Some industrial zones are also well connected by public transport allowing for new forms of religious commuting. Second, those who decide to rent locales in central neighborhoods have to refrain from large decorations and are limited to rather modest signposts as their means of creating urban visibility. Moreover, they have to manage good relationships with residents as complaints about noise (especially loud music that is part of Pentecostal worship) and congestion (especially Muslims occupying sideways and streets after worship) were on the rise during the 2000s. Contrary to this, however, there have also been spectacular architectural proposals by Muslim groups to build a large representative mosque. Such a building has been debated since the early 2000s as the number of Muslims grew

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and Barcelona remained the only big Spanish city without a large, representative purpose-­built mosque. The first proposal was to convert the bullfighting ring Las Arenas into a mosque but Saudi financers abandoned the project because of disagreements with urban authorities and the ring became a shopping mall. More recently, in 2014 the Islamic Federation of Catalonia, backed with 2.2 billion Euros from Qatari funders, proposed to convert another bullfighting ring called La Plaza Monumental into Europe’s largest mosque with a capacity for 40,000 worshippers. Proponents argued such a project would help to draw Muslims into the project of Catalan national independence from Spain. However, in 2015 amidst heated political and mediatized debates all political parties in the city rejected the idea to allow religious uses of the former ring and currently it is used for cultural festivals. In Turin, the most significant presence within the complex Protestant-Evangelical scenario are Pentecostals, most of whom are immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa.10 These small, independent churches, tied to a charismatic leader, are multifunctional spaces and tremendously important for followers as bridges to social integration. While their churches are often located in religiously unmarked rented locales, Pentecostal forms of place-­making are reflected in music-­driven long celebrations widely perceptible in the vicinity. Place-­ making is thus not only about visibility but addresses different urban sensorial registers. Currently, the most rapidly growing religious community in Turin is Muslim, with around 35,000 people from Africa and Albania.11 There are sixteen prayer halls in Turin; particularly significant among them is “The Mosque of the Merciful—The Palm Social and Cultural Centre,” frequented mostly by Maghrebian Muslims. Prayers are recited partly in Arabic and partly in Italian. Furthermore, due to such large attendance, people sometimes spill into the open courtyard, for instance during Ramadan. Inhabitants of the neighborhood are familiar with Muslim worshippers who offer many cultural activities in the area near Porta Palazzo market, one of the largest markets in Europe. In addition to shared religious practice, there is a strong civil bond expressed through lively participation in the activities of the Islamic Institute of Italy housed in the mosque, e.g., educational services for children and youth, and entertainment. The Institute also offers support and orientation service, literacy and integration programs for women (including visits, events, and debates, awareness raising on health issues), Italian language classes, and courses on housekeeping practices and childrearing. Similar to Barcelona, this is a place

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through which Islam becomes visible to broader urban audiences, as groups of teachers and students visit on a weekly basis in order to learn about Turin’s Islam. These visits reflect larger political efforts and programs to promote knowledge about Islam among autochthonous Italians on the one hand, and to foster political loyalty and social integration among Muslim immigrants on the other. In 2016 the Mayor of Turin has signed a “Pact of Sharing” with the imams of Turin, an informal group which has been working for two years in order to coordinate Muslim activities and make them visible to the whole population.12 Yet despite these efforts to foster conviviality, Muslims are continuously tasked to demonstrate urban transparency, i.e., the imperative to identify as Muslim citizens in public space, as an expression of Islam’s securitization. Nevertheless, Turin’s Muslims continue to face tremendous difficulties to build places of worship, which display Islamic architectural elements. In addition, the places Muslims are actually able to make are insufficient and undignified (small buildings in the middle of courtyards, apartment buildings, empty stores, etc.). In these places called “garage mosques,” Muslims constantly need to improvise, in practical matters but also theologically. While strategies of place-­ making often concentrate in places of worship that are durable sites targeted for dwelling and envisioned as bridges for crossing (Knott and Vasquez 2014: 327), they also go beyond that, such as at the end of Ramadan when thousands meet in a large park near a former factory. Some religious communities are ambiguously situated between place-­keeping and place-­making strategies, such as the churches of immigrant Catholics that emerged in the early 1990s but stabilized over time and contributed to Catholic pluralism and to the further disintegration of the parish model of spatial organization. The most emblematic example of this is the church of San Giovanni Evangelista, mentioned before, where a large and active Filipino community has, since 1998, attended the liturgy in Tagalog in the Philippine Chapel. These buildings are thus closely connected to a transnational social context (Campobenedetto Robiglio and Giorda 2016).

Seeking place We define place-­seeking as spatial strategies that produce ephemeral and evanescent presences as a result of spiritual notions that champion embodiment and mobility over emplacement.

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In Barcelona, strategies of place-­seeking are important for both migrant religious communities and followers of new spiritualities. The Office of Religious Affairs, for instance, fosters temporary symbolic appropriations of urban space by religious minorities through the supporting of their festivities. Employees have developed a religious calendar containing the major festivals and holidays of all religious groups and support the communities in obtaining permits to block streets and invite urban dignitaries. Barcelona’s urban space has thus increasingly been pluralized and hosts festivals such as the Shiite Ashura commemoration, the Sikh festival of Baisakhi, or the Buddhist celebration of Veshak, to name just a few. Simultaneously, in Barcelona over the last two decades there has been a rise of holistic spiritualities whose place-­seeking strategies are punctuating urban space in novel ways.13 Groups such as those connected to the globally organized mindfulness movement organize meditations and spiritual flash mobs in public squares. Loosely drawing on diverse Buddhist resources, the mindfulness movement attracts people with diverse ethical, spiritual, and philosophical commitments and members routinely emphasize the openness of the movement to everybody. Importantly, this openness plays out in their presence in urban space and the ways they successfully draw bystanders and passers-­by into their meditations. The public meditations on the occasion of the International Day of Peace they organize annually at Barcelona’s beachfront, for instance, attracts Buddhists but also all kinds of strollers and tourists. The evanescence of place-­seeking is thus linked to spontaneity and, to an important extent, to the portability of religious objects (such as the Buddhist prayer bell) and the practical items that sustain meditations: pillows, mats, and blankets. Followers bring these items to any meditation or flash mob and their portability definitely shapes the ways they see their spiritual practices as floating freely and effortlessly in urban space. In an interesting contrast to this notion of space, we also observe that most public meditations and flash mobs are concentrated in central districts, which provide maximum urban visibility. Mediations taking place at sites such as Arc de Triomphe, Saint Jaume Square, or the Square Placa del Sol in the fancy neighborhood of Gracia also call forth the cultural imbrications of these movements with the so-­called creative classes and urban bohémes that according to our observations dominate these neighborhoods. However, place-­seeking strategies are also reflected in indoor activities that do not create permanent presences. We observed, for instance, meetings of a Buddhist group linked to the Wake-Up Movement that occasionally uses spaces in a civic center that belongs to the municipality. These spaces have no particular religious or spiritual décor at all and give visible testimony to the way they are

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also used for classes of all kinds, for ballet training or as gyms. Contrary to public meditations that command massive attention by urban populations, we suggest that such indoor sites of place-­seeking form networked but largely “hidden spiritual topographies” (Burchardt and Becci 2013). In Turin, the groups that best represent the flux, mobility, and the transience of place-­seeking are those connected to new spiritualities, but in contrast to Barcelona they have been established here since the 1970s (Remotti 2006). There are numerous Buddhist and meditation centers, study centers, and wellness centers: a whole world inspired by neo-­oriental spirituality, conjoining spiritual and physical practices. Often, these are places to practice yoga and eat vegan food, tiny places that in Turin as well form a “hidden spiritual topography” in the city’s buildings, signaled by almost invisible signposts. The Sokka Gakkai movement has, since its arrival in the city in 1978, penetrated the urban fabric and private homes. Significantly, for more than 3,000 followers, private apartments are still the regular meeting places for discussions, exchanges, and prayer. Each member has received a Gohonzon—the object of worship—and keeps it in the home, which is the privileged place of worship despite the existence of an official center, the Kaikan. While in early 2004, members rented a theater for larger events, their gatherings and great events now take place in the Kaikan. The spatial strategies of spiritual groups also entail complex articulations between urban and rural spaces. The Damanhur Community, for instance, founded in 1975, moved from Turin to Piedmont out of spiritual considerations. Damanhur’s settlements, a kind of eco­village—extend over an area of almost 500 hectares including woods, fields, residential areas, and around 100 private homes, but also laboratories, arts and crafts ateliers, enterprises, and farms. Followers participate in pranotherapy, phonochromotherapy, wellness treatments as well as courses in meditation, spiritual physics, plant music, and hypnosis. All of these practices embody forms of place-­seeking that starkly contrast to both place-­keeping and place-­making: since new spiritualities emerge from fundamental fluid and networked practices they resist processes of institutionalization that spawn incentives for place-­keeping strategies. Simultaneously, compared to diaspora communities, they tend to be organizationally more decentralized and religiously more individualized, which renders place-­making less significant.

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Conclusions The comparative analysis of the cases of Barcelona and Turin suggests broader lessons for research on religious superdiversity. First, spatial strategies may be sequenced and evolve in pathways as communities are gradually folded into cities’ spatial regimes. During periods of growth, communities may be place-­ makers, while in moments of retraction/diminution turn to place-­keeping. Second, spatial strategies are shaped by both urban contexts and religious ideologies. Urban contexts (immigration, demographic change, economic cycles, power structures) incentivize some strategies over others. But as especially place-­seeking practices and the move towards flow and impermanency demonstrate, spatial strategies are always informed by religious notions of space and “being in the world.” Third, spatial strategies may have paradoxical effects for the visibility of religious superdiversity: current migrant communities’ place-­ making power does not always add up to real visibility. The evanescent presence of new spiritualities, by contrast, may be highly visible. As large open-­air meditations and spiritual festivals are attuned to the logic of eventization described above, place-­seeking may afford more visibility than place-­making because it feeds into city-­branding logics and cities’ spatial regimes that hierarchically rank desired uses of urban space. More generally, we demonstrated how religious diversity and cities mutually shape one another over longer historical periods. On the one hand, cities affect religion by casting religious communities and their forms of sociality within particular spatial regimes and contributing to the territorialization of religious categories. These regimes also involve questions around places of worship as key sites for organizing religious communities, celebrating togetherness through shared religious rituals, and expressing and consuming religious aesthetics. On the other hand, religious groups shape cities by leaving durable architectural imprints on them. While at national levels the state shows growing difficulty in defining national citizenship and adapting its rules to the newcomers, urban political institutions are the terrains where rights and duties directly affect people’s daily lives, where concentration implies coexistence, and where public debate and democracy remain accessible and produce practical effects for communities and individuals. Again, it is in the city that new forms of citizenship emerge from the bottom and grow to be openly recognized, and to be celebrated in public space in the forms of architecture. The Catalan philosopher and former Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Jordi Borja, closed his reflections on city, public space, and citizenship with

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the proposal of “urban rights” that cities should grant to “all those who live and desire to live in the cities.” The right to public space and monumentality, the right to beauty, the right to displaying a collective identity are listed first (Borja 2003: 121–4). We argue that urban space is the iconic arena in which religious superdiversity becomes visible through the ways in which religious spatial strategies interact with cities’ spatial regimes. Importantly, the relationships between religious communities and spatial strategies should not be reified but applied heuristically. Our typology is meant to serve as a tool to read complex processes taking into consideration both historical paths and contemporary religious formations.

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Capturing Carnival: Religious Diversity and Spatial Contestation in Rio de Janeiro Martijn Oosterbaan

In the past two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have criticized the modernist developmental framework that pictured religion and the city in anachronistic terms (Lanz and Oosterbaan 2016; Hancock and Srinivas 2008; Kong 2001; Orsi 1999). Contemporary urban shifts around the world have pushed religious manifestations to the forefront and have urged scholars to rethink the framework to analyse contemporary urban religion. Cities that were formerly described as “secular” in fact show (renewed) struggles and negotiations about the place of religion and ask us to reconsider our understanding of modern urbanity (AlSayyad 2011). In the wake of these struggles it has become apparent that cities are not level playing fields that contain particular religious places as distinct yet equivalent islands of worship but rather that diverse religious practices and representations have strikingly different connections with national imaginations and public space. Though governmental regimes that enforce boundaries between private and public spheres frequently picture religion as “private matter” (Meyer and Moors 2006), in practice certain religious forms have maintained or have acquired a preferential position in relation to the nation and its representations (Bender 2012; Van der Veer and Lehmann 1999). Especially cities that are the locus of national monuments, statues, temples, and churches impose common notions of shared cultural and religious identities by way of various material manifestations. As a result, religious forms and practices leave different imprints on cityscapes, depending on their changing connections to national imagination, citizenship regimes, political struggle and commerce (Knott 2016; Oosterbaan 2014; Van der Veer 2015). In light of the historical formations concerning religion and the nation, minority religions generally struggle to gain physical space for their practices

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and they struggle to obtain a place in nationalist schemes and representations. Even in societies where religious diversity is protected by constitutional decrees, minority religious groups frequently encounter obstacles or even violence when they attempt to build shrines or temples or when they exercise their faith publicly (Kong and Woods 2016). Impediments to particular religious presence—such as the banning of buildings, processions, or gatherings—are strongly related to historical relations between certain religious (and ethnic) groups and nationality on the one hand and the problematization of other religious groups on the other. Nevertheless, because national manifestations shaped or influenced by specific religious traditions are frequently pictured as “cultural” manifestations—think of parades, for example—minority religious groups occasionally have a chance to participate in such manifestations and perform counter-­hegemonic acts. This chapter provides a case study of evangelical carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro in relation to the hegemonic position of Roman Catholicism and the growth of evangelical movements in Brazil. It will focus on the evangelical perception of Brazilian carnival and the ideas and practices of people who participate in evangelical parades. The analysis will show that urban evangelical parades should be understood in relation to the historical configurations that connect(ed) Roman Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religion to the Brazilian nation amongst others by way of carnival parades. This historical religio-­national configuration greatly affects the evangelical perception of the urban carnivalesque time-­space. Many evangelical groups regard the carnival as defiling the city and some blame the municipal government for this tarnishing. Consequently, evangelical carnival parades are not merely religio-­spatial interventions in the strict sense; they should also be seen as political statements regarding the governance of the city in relation to its spiritual condition and as a form of counter-­cultural politics. Last but not least, evangelical responses to the worldly carnival display how urban space is experienced bodily and demonstrate the roles that sound and music play in the constitution of that (religious) space.

Public parades, national belonging, and religious diversity Urban parades frequently acquire a political character in the broad sense of the word because they draw attention to particular social groups and make visible that which might otherwise be restricted from view. David Garbin (2012), SaintBlancat, and Cancellieri (2014) and Kim Knott (2016) convincingly argue that in/visibility is at the heart of the political struggles over the recognition of

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(minority) religious groups. Public urban space, in the words of Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri (2014: 5) can be considered a “field of gazes, an arena of intervisibility among different actors.” Public space, as Nirwal Puwar (2004) has argued, cannot be regarded a neutral terrain of visual exchange, however. It is generally codified according to ethnic/racial and gender identities (bodies) with the result that certain bodies are pictured as accepted occupants of public space, whereas others become highly visible as “others.” According to Puwar, people that diverge from the norm are often perceived as “space invaders” and thus challenge implicit ethnic/racial and gender codifications of public space. Codifications of public space are not only dependent on normalized ethnic/ racial and gender identities but also on (trans)national and religious identities and, as such, public space is not only the site where struggles over local and national belonging take place but also the site where confirmations and contestations about the relations between nationality, ethnicity, and religion occur (Hatziprokopiou and Evergeti 2014). Parades and processions can be considered special kinds of public spatial interventions because they are (spectacular) temporal-­spatial performances— akin to other kinds of rituals—that are presented as extra-­ordinary (Kong 2005). By no means suggesting that this spatio-­temporal bracketing is necessarily or entirely subversive (see Gotham 2005), parades and processions thus offer actors theatrical spaces to represent social relations, ideologies, and cosmologies that might affirm and contest hegemonic notions of society. David Garbin (2012), for example, shows how a Congolese Kimbanguist brass band, consisting of migrants, uses London’s New Year’s Day Parade to become visible and audible in the city and to present elements of their religious understanding of the world that contrasts with other secular or sacred ideologies in a superdiverse city. According to Garbin (2012: 444), the visibility of this Kimbanguist brass band “is bound up with a particular grammar of recognition in the British context and also operates as a counter-­discourse to various dominant images and representations of Congo, Africa, Congolese, or Black youth.” Saint-Blancat and Canecellieri (2014) show how urban religious processions challenge taken-­for-granted notions of public religion and national/ ethnic belonging. Their analysis of the Filipino Santacruzan procession in Padua, Italy, shows clearly how existing cultural-­religious traditions that are considered part of the local national Italian identity and heritage allow space for Filipino religious actors to parade publicly. While providing the authoritative framework in which similar yet different ethno-­religious identities can become public, the Paduan Roman Catholic Church does not wholeheartedly embrace all of the

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differences and, perhaps more importantly, in the eye of the native Italian public, the Filipino Santacruzan procession also confirms the otherness of the participating migrants. Besides bringing to light the conflicting conjunctures of religion and nationality in the face of global migration, the work of Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri underscores that religious manifestations become public in diverse ways, depending on power struggles, moments, and contexts. Moreover, they show how existing cultural-­religious traditions such as processions not only challenge or affirm the secular/sacred divide (Kong 2005) but also offer space to challenge local hegemonic understandings of religiousness within a particular tradition (in this case a Roman Catholic). Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri (2014) and Garbin (2012), explicitly formulate their arguments in the context of the large-­scale global migration flows and diasporic community formations that present demographic changes and challenge hegemonic understandings of public religion. However, migration is not the only driving force that pushes groups to search for public presence or that intensifies struggles in and over urban public domains in relation to religious diversity. Urban religious struggle is not only the result of (forced and voluntary) migration but also of on-­site conversion and local religio-­political transformation. In the Brazilian context, widespread conversion to evangelical Christianity has led to urban interventions in relation to national festive traditions such as the carnival. Struggles to become publicly present and to occupy spaces in relation to hegemonic configurations have to be understood contextually— spatially and temporally—and that means that efforts to become public in urban settings differ greatly as different cities display varying calendars of sequential public manifestations (commemorations, festivities, celebrations). Some of these manifestations may have a distinctive local character but especially in large and/ or capital cities such manifestations may have a profound national character and may be symbolically tied to the life of the nation as a whole. It is during those moments that connections between the nation and certain religions (and “cultures”) are established, confirmed, and contested.

Brazilian evangelical Christianity In the past decades, Brazilian evangelical Christianity has grown tremendously and evangelical movements have progressively become part of the political Brazilian landscape.1 Evangelical pastors have emerged as community leaders

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and many evangelical candidates were elected during the last three democratic elections for municipal, state, and federal governments. The growth of evangelical churches in Brazil largely corresponds to its success in the rest of Latin America and in most other parts of the world. In Latin America evangelical groups have grown substantially since the 1980s, and in various parts of Africa Pentecostalism particularly has become one of the most popular types of Christianity. While it is not uncommon to encounter evangelical churches in the city center and beach areas of Rio de Janeiro, most evangelical churches can be found in the periphery and in the favelas on the hillsides in the city.2 Nevertheless Brazilian evangelical churches have become increasingly visible in the public domain, with the globally operating Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD)3 as the forerunner. The IURD has built huge “cathedrals” in cities throughout the country and in Rio de Janeiro it has also made an effort to establish their churches in buildings in dense and lively neighborhoods, for instance in former theaters and cinemas that had lost their appeal. Besides the IURD and older Pentecostal churches such as the Assembléia de Deus, other churches have also gained much attention in the public sphere. The Igreja Internacional de Graça de Deus has acquired much airtime in the past decades, for example—and new churches regularly rise to the urban surface— think of the Bola de Neve Church that attracts many youngsters or the Comunidade Evangélica Sara Nossa Terra. In Rio de Janeiro, an evangelical radio station Radio Melodia is the second most popular radio station of all broadcasters and the most popular among the youth. The growth of evangelical churches and their appropriation of media channels have upset the hegemonic connections between Brazilian “culture,” the state, and religion (see also Birman and Lehmann 1999). For a long time, Brazil was considered one of the most Catholic countries in the world (Birman and Leite 2000).4 Several Brazilian scholars such as Patricia Birman (2003), Joanildo Burity (2011), Emerson Giumbelli (2014), and Paula Montero (2015), show how the categories religião (religion) and laicidade (secularity) played crucial roles in the restructuring of the governmental roles of the state and the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil and they investigate what this means for hegemonic understandings of religion in Brazilian public space. At the birth of the Brazilian republic in 1889, which introduced the political separation of church and state, the Brazilian Catholic Church strategically defined itself as the privileged partner of the state in several of its governmental projects. During the republican, dictatorial, and democratic periods of Brazil, Roman Catholicism was tightly

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connected to national projects in such a way that its symbols and rites marked much of public life (see also Montes 1998; Sanchis 2001). The advent of evangelical movements in Brazil, coinciding with other societal changes (Montero 2015), has lead different actors to question and contest the public life of a number of religious manifestations (statues, symbols, icons, sounds, etc.) in public space (Oro et  al. 2012). Instead of reducing such contestations to the question if Brazil is truly a “secular” country or not, I think it is much better to take up Giumbelli’s (2012: 60) invitation and investigate the various relations between public space and religious symbols to understand better the challenges that we are facing in our (re)thinking of democracy and (religious) pluralism (see also Oosterbaan 2017b).

Evangelical public presence and carnival Besides broadcasts, evangelical churches have also organized evangelical manifestations and mass gatherings. The IURD has been able to gather multitudes in Brazilian arenas such as the famous soccer temple Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro but in the past decade other churches have also succeeded in gathering huge crowds. One phenomenon that stands out is the so-­called Marcha para Jesus that is held yearly in various cities in Brazil. The marches, that have become a global phenomenon since the first March for Jesus was held in 1983 in Melbourne, Australia, have been held in Brazil since 1993. The Brazilian marches generally gather representatives of various evangelical churches, ranging from the Pentecostal to the Neo-Pentecostal. Strikingly, as a result of the efforts of Marcelo Crivella—a high-­ranking leader of the IURD and at present mayor of Rio de Janeiro—the Marcha para Jesus day was recognized officially as a national Brazilian celebration day in 2009. Musical performances stand at the heart of the marches and besides its urban visibility, sonic presence is extremely important (Sant’Ana 2014). The Marcha para Jesus counts many so-­called trios elétricos— trucks with loudspeakers—that amplify evangelical music and the parade generally ends at a huge stage where several acts take place. Despite this growing presence of evangelical churches, evangelical practices were and still are commonly described as alien to Brazilian “culture” (see also Mafra 2011). Characterized by a cult of abstinence, which highlights certain types of earthly enjoyment as sinful, many elements of Brazilian life have been described as profane. Besides the conservative bodily regime, Pentecostal churches are generally characterized by their iconoclastic attitude that

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enforces a break with cultural practices that are deemed unbiblical. As a result, Brazilian evangelical churches oppose many socio-­religious practices that were/are portrayed as typically Brazilian. Afro-Brazilian religious worship and popular cultural expressions related to Afro-Brazilian life in particular are heavily demonized. The Marcha para Jesus is an excellent example of an urban parade that symbolically and physically occupies urban space in order to claim a presence in nationalist schemes and representations. Nevertheless, this “national” celebration does not seem to be wholeheartedly embraced (yet) by the majority of Brazilians. This contrasts with other, more popular national urban events that also display global traces but are generally not regarded as evangelical at all. The most obvious example is the Rio de Janeiro carnival. Carnival is generally represented as one of the defining cultural characteristics of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro as one of the privileged places where this cultural trait is embodied and performed (DaMatta 1981; Pravaz 2008; Sheriff 1999). Whereas carnival can be full of religious connotations (Cavalcanti 2015; Costa 2007), it is generally not regarded as an explicit religious event, let alone a Protestant/evangelical event. Nevertheless, in Brazil, as elsewhere, it has been incorporated in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar as the festivities that precede Lent. Interestingly, in 2017, the escola de samba (samba school) Unidos de Vila Maria in São Paulo, collaborated intensively with the Roman Catholic Church, in accordance with the archbishop Odilo Pedro Scherer, to dedicate their annual parade at the São Paulo sambódromo to the patron saint of Brazil, Nossa Senhora Aparecida (Our Lady of Aparecida), in commemoration of the finding of the holy statue 300 years earlier (1717).5 Never before had the Brazilian Catholic Church participated in an annual parade. The Church did restrict the nudity that can be common at sambódromo parades and demanded pious treatment of the image of Nossa Senhora Aparecida.6 Insiders and outsiders know Brazilian carnival by the images of people parading during the televised performances in the famous sambódromo in Rio de Janeiro. However, there are also the less famous parades of so-­called blocos (street parades) downtown. Blocos by and large make samba music and they generally consist of a group of percussionists and a carro de som (sound van)7 that amplifies the sound of the cavaquinho and the voices of the samba singers. Commonly, audiences join the parades. As a result of complex entwinements between ideologies of mestiçagem and politics of authenticity, Brazilian carnival is often regarded as a collection of cultural repertoires that preserves and reproduces age-­old Afro-Brazilian

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practices and Afro-Brazilian religious conceptions. Moreover, these cultural repertoires have become important markers of Brazilian national identity. It was particularly during and after the 1930s that samba and the carioca carnaval became simultaneously identified both with images of an authenticating “blackness” (or even “Africanness”) and with those of the uniquely hybrid, “mixed” national culture of Brazil. Sheriff 1999: 14

Though I cannot describe here the complexities of this social imaginaire and the important power struggles that are part of it, recognizing carnival as having pagan and Catholic connotations and as a space to exhibit Afro-Brazilian religious traditions (see Rocha and da Conceição Silva 2013) reproduces evangelical apprehension with regard to this national cultural tradition. In general, many evangelical churches regard carnival as highly immoral and stay away as far as possible from the celebrations. Many churches organize so-­called retreats (retiros) outside the city for their members to offer them a substitute for the popular festivities in the city. However, during the past decades several evangelical churches in Brazil have gained visibility by partaking in the street carnival with evangelical blocos.

Capturing carnival Two evangelical churches—Projeto Vida Nova (PVN) and Comunidade Evangélica Internacional Zona Sul (CEIZS)—organize blocos during the Rio de Janeiro carnival. Between the beginning of the 1990s and 2014 they held these parades at symbolically significant location in Rio de Janeiro: the avenida Rio Branco in the city center of Rio de Janeiro. From 2015 to 2017 the avenue was not used for carnival parades due to the urban renovations related to the 2016 Olympics, and in the foreseeable future the blocos will probably move to another grand avenue downtown—the avenida de Chile. Nevertheless, much can be learned from the evangelical blocos held during their parades at the Rio Branco Avenue, in particular the way participants recounted the meaning of their presence in spatio-­temporal terms. Before describing and analysing this presence, let me introduce the two blocos. Two blocos that paraded through the Rio Branco were the bloco Mocidade Dependente de Deus of the CEIZS, and the bloco Cara de Leão of the PVN. My interest in the parades is related to earlier research on religious transformation

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in Brazil, particularly on the growth of Pentecostal communities in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Oosterbaan 2008, 2009). As part of this research trajectory, I witnessed the parades of CEIZS in 2011 and those of the PVN in 2011, 2014, and 2016. In 2011, I interviewed PVN participants during and after the parade and in 2014 and 2016 I interviewed PVN members and leaders before, during, and afterwards. Both churches—PVN and CEIZS—held their first blocos on the Rio Branco at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s. Since then, they have become widely known as the two evangelical churches that parade during carnival. Whereas they maintain cooperative relations, their backgrounds are different. The headquarters of the CEIZS is located at the Praia do Flamengo on the well-­ to-do south side, whereas the headquarters of the PVN is located in Irajá, a neighborhood in the peripheral northern zone of the city. The doctrines and practices of the PVN could be considered closer to Pentecostal styles of worship—with more emphasis on demonic presence than the CEIZS. I focused on the PVN because it has more churches in the metropolitan area than the CEIZS and because it regularly demonizes Afro-Brazilian religion. The two evangelical churches discussed here have gained a reputation for a music genre that other churches deem spiritually tainted (samba enredo) but also for their parades in the “worldly” carioca street carnival along Rio Branco Avenue. As I witnessed during the parades, both evangelical blocos draw many people (see also Mesquita 2012), but in comparison to “worldly” blocos less than average. Interviews held during and after the Cara de Leão parades revealed that most participants and attendants are members of the PVN and congregate in PVN churches located in the northern zone of the city. They regard the parades as important yearly evangelical events that form the specific identity of their church. Participants generally consider themselves exceptional Christians because they do not leave the city for a spiritual retreat during the carnival and they regard the presence of their blocos as the only powerful counterforce against the evil powers that rule the city during carnival. Both blocos that parade through the Rio Branco display the cultural style common to other carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro. The parades of Cara de Leão and Mocidade Dependente de Deus consist of different alas (subsections) that are headed by a mestre-­sala (master of the room—masculine) and porta-­ bandeira (flag carrier—feminine). As in regular sambódromo parades, the mestre-­ sala and the porta-­bandeira represent a couple dressed in carnivalesque gala costumes. The percussion section (bateria) of the parades precedes the carro de som that carries the cavaquinho player and the samba singer. The percussion

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section, largely made up of adolescent church members, produces the typical samba enredo sound as boys and girls hit their surdos (bass drums) and tamborins (small-­frame drums) in synchronous fashion. Despite the similarity in form, both evangelical churches stress how they differ from the non-­evangelical blocos. During the preparatory PVN church services in 2014 and 2016 where I was present, pastors of different congregations instructed the members that they were not about to parade (desfilar) to celebrate carnival but to evangelize. The pastors instructed their audience to leave the location as soon as the parade finished to demonstrate they were not there to participate in the carnival. During the parade, church members formed two long lines holding hands on each side of the parade, separating the participants from the audience. A member explained that this cordão de isolamento (cordon of isolation) signals that people are not invited to join the parade and to dance along (as in other blocos) but to witness it and hear the church’s message. The cordão thus serves as the boundary to secure the parade’s status as a spiritual intervention that critically engages with carnival as a sinful “feast of the flesh” without becoming part of it. Spatially speaking, the cordão demarcates the boundary between the blessed parade and “the city” and thus creates a ritual space-­time within a broader ritual space-­time (the Rio de Janeiro carnival) (see Schechner 2003; Turner 1982). We will return to the evangelical perception of this broader ritual space-­time below. Participants of the blocos collectively sing evangelical samba songs written especially for the parades and helpers hand out flyers with the lyrics so audiences can sing along. The flyers of the bloco Mocidade Dependente de Deus of 2011 featured the samba lyrics along with the following critique of the common understanding of carnival as a time for fun: “There is a happiness that does not depend on four days of carnival, or on costumes. It is real. Jesus Christ is the source of true happiness. To experience it, you need only to believe. Come and visit us to learn more about this happiness.” Similarly, a flyer of the bloco Cara de Leão distributed in 2011 read: If carnival’s happiness could fulfill someone, it would not end with such a sad and silent day as Ash Wednesday. What good are the 4 days of fun when the same problems continue without solution during the other 361 days? (. . .) Dear friend, don’t waste any more time, remove the mask of illusion and clothe yourself with the love of God and present your life to Jesus Christ, the fountain of genuine and eternal joy!

Elsewhere, I have analysed why CEIZS and PVN describe the appropriation of the music genre samba enredo as estratégia (strategy) and why they propose to

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sharply differentiate musical form (rhythm) and lyrical content (Oosterbaan 2017b). In another text, I analyse their employment of the “culture” concept to describe evangelical practices as part and parcel of the Brazilian nation and to counter the recurrent accusation that evangelicals are un-Brazilian. Both of these texts help to clarify how evangelicals manage to incorporate carnivalesque traditions that have been and are often described as malevolent and immoral by other evangelical groups. Here I want to emphasize the spatio-­temporal character of the evangelical parades. The evangelical blocos can be described as performative events that seek to reflect and comment on carnival while (partly) participating in it and as concrete spiritual interventions that temporarily bring “order” to a space that is (also temporarily) left over to malevolent spiritual forces. The city is thus not merely the background where these performances are played out but the symbolic, material, and sensory world where these cultural practices become meaningful in relation to power and daily life. One participant of the bloco Cara de Leão, clarified that it was very important their church did not leave the city for a spiritual retreat during the carnival but decided to hold their parade in the middle of the carnival festivities. As he explained: We do not agree with this, with the carnival. It is a disgrace. Our mayor has handed over the keys to the city to King Momo and the authorities turn their backs on the city. Instead of doing the same, we come here the show that this is merely a celebration of the flesh which only leads to death.

King Momo, a figure derived from Greek mythology, symbolically receives command over the city during the carnival, an event that marks the beginning of carnival and is broadcast widely in Rio de Janeiro. For the adherents of evangelical churches such a symbolic act is taken quite literally since it is closely tied to a general perception that the city is handed over to evil forces while the authorities and other evangelical churches do nothing. Rei Momo is not seen as a playful character whose metaphorical reign marks the ritual time of the carnival but as the personification of a malevolent spiritual entity. As a congregant said during an interview in 2014: The mayor hands over keys to this entity (entidade) and this is an evil entity, it is an entity that leads people to a life of the flesh that carnival brings. During carnival people catch diseases, people die in traffic accidents because they get drunk, people die as result of silly personal clashes; in the midst of the festivities people start arguing and one pulls a knife and kills the other.

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For PVN members handing over the keys to the city to Rei Momo means transforming a perilous city into a space of demonic presence. Consequently, the Cara de Leão parades are seen not only as a form of evangelization but also as a benevolent spatial intervention. For instance, while consecrating the bloco, a preacher of the PVN reminds the performers why their task is so important when he turns to God and prays: I ask of you Lord to glorify this place by means of the lives of your children; they are here looking at You for perfection for those days that Satan wants to take this city by assault, Lord we are there to minister your Word, to clarify that this city is not marvelous because of the carnival, that this city is not marvelous because of the beauty of her natural resources, this is a marvelous city because Jesus Christ is the Lord. Holy Spirit, we start these rehearsals, declaring that we depend on You, we are going to enter the Rio Branco depending on You Lord.8

The consecration of the bloco is to be understood in light of the idea that the presence and movement of the bloco through the Rio Branco presents a powerful counterforce against the evil forces that reign in the inner city during carnival. On one of its websites, a representative of the church explains that since 2011 they adopted a new strategy to send forth a group of thirty people to stop evil spirits along the Rio Branco from interfering with the bloco. Especially near the end of the parade, when the bloco reaches the Praça Floriano, a large square, church adherents had experienced opposition and maltreatment. According to Marcos Campos, one of the leaders of the church: To send forth members of the bloco to the Praça Floriano was a revelation of God, because that is a place of friction. Before, when the bloco arrived, the people there were listening to other kinds of music; there was a certain physical and spiritual discomfort, even physical aggression. This time we sent forth people to plow the earth, preparing the terrain by means of individual approaches. We entered the enemy’s territory, destroying the fortresses. The result was really good. When the bloco arrived there were many people waiting to participate in the prayer.9

The words of Marcos Campos display a shared notion of bodily and spiritual occupation of the city. The Praça Floriano square sits in front of the well-­known municipal theater where normally different carnivalesque groups encounter each other and dissolve into a larger crowd. For the PVN this is not yet the moment to leave the location but rather the moment to begin the grand finale of the evangelical event. After having stopped the parade, leaders of the church generally take this moment to address the crowd gathered around the carro de

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som accompanied by evangelical music of a different musical genre. Here, not samba enredo but pop ­ballads provide the melodic undertone meant to move the public emotionally and spiritually. Generally speaking, this type of gospel music sharply contrasts with the music that reverberates in the carnivalesque cityscape as it does not persuade people to dance ecstatically but rather enforces a melancholic emotional mood, characteristic of many evangelical events. In 2011, for example, pastors preached loudly with the song “Faz um Milagre em Mim” (Create a Miracle in Me) of gospel singer Regis Danese as background music. During the prayer (oraçao), one pastor invited all people present at the square—dressed up (fantasiada) or not—to receive God’s blessing. After the emotional prayer, another pastor took the microphone and vociferously requested God to make of Rio de Janeiro a peaceful city that would acquire salvation: “We declare (declaramos) that this city and our state belong to Lord Jesus!” Both the emotionally loaded evangelization and the “declaration” should be understood in relation to the political undertone of these events, I would argue. Both in 2011 and 2014, I witnessed how the pastors used the final moment of the event at the end of the parade to bless the “authorities”—ranging from the nation’s president to the mayor of Rio de Janeiro and the controversial military police of the state of Rio de Janeiro. In my view, such blessings and “declarations” should be read in relation to powerful claims that only evangelical churches can save the nation and the city from its perilous worldly and spiritual enemies, something that I frequently heard over the years. The evangelical struggles to be recognized as allied with the Brazilian authorities are reflected in the common understandings of the location of the Rio Branco parades in relation to a topography of power. The Praça Floriano is located at an arm’s length of the Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro. In an interview I held with several adherents of the church after the parade in 2011, they explained it was very important to hold the parades in the center of the city because the city center is also the center of power of Rio de Janeiro. According to one participant I interviewed in 2011, the center (Rio Branco avenue) is the heart of governmental power where decisions concerning the city and Brazilian society are made and for that reason it is important to perform the bloco “right there at the heart.” In 2014, another congregant I interviewed stated: With carnival we go to the centre of the city to demonstrate the glory of God, to propose in the heart of city that which we want for our city, which is the liberation of this malediction that we know as carnival. The majority of the protests and manifestations are held in the city centre, it is in the centre where the revolutions

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take place. When we head for the centre, where carnival takes place, we enter a spiritual battle.

Such an understanding of power and geography of the city is partly understandable from the perspective of the locations of the evangelical churches and the residence of their members. While it is not uncommon to encounter evangelical churches in the city center of Rio de Janeiro, most evangelical churches can be found in the periphery and in the favelas on the hillsides in the city. For this and other reasons, evangelical churches were considered a rather marginal phenomenon for a time, yet, during the last fifteen to twenty years, they have progressively become part of the social and political landscape of the city and the country at large. The people who perform in and support the PVN carnival performances generally live in the peripheral areas of the city and collectively come to parade in the city center. In doing so, people momentarily upset the religious majority-­ minority relations that are reflected in the urban topography and that intersect with urban class relations. It appears that people not only recognize that “power” is located in the city center but also that power has historically been associated with Roman Catholicism. Moreover, but not surprisingly, many evangelicals hold the ruling authorities co-­responsible for the evil that reigns the city during carnival, a feeling that intensifies the moment the mayor hands over the key to the city to King Momo. Strikingly, but entirely in line with current religio-­political transformations in Brazil, the current mayor of Rio de Janeiro—Marcelo Crivella, nephew of the leader of the IURD—did not perform the ritual handing over of the key to Rei Momo at the start of the 2017 carnival of Rio de Janeiro. Without giving notice why exactly he broke with the tradition—accept that his wife was having the flu—the key was handed over by the municipal secretary of culture Nilcemar Nogueira at the sambódromo instead of at the Palácio da Cidade (the mayor’s office) in the neighborhood Botafogo.10 It will remain speculation but it is highly likely that this was a conscious decision to avoid controversy within evangelical circles.

Concluding remarks The desire to take part in the street carnival of Rio de Janeiro (without becoming part of it) should be understood as part of wider incorporations of popular cultural practices and products in Brazilian evangelical culture (Cunha 2007;

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Oosterbaan 2017a; Rivers 2016), but also in relation to the socio-­economic positions of Pentecostal and evangelical groups in the city and the imagined topography of power. The layered identification of carnival as the high point of Brazilianness, displaying the Afro-Brazilian and Catholic roots of the nation, fuels the evangelical opposition to this particular depiction of carnival but simultaneously makes it a very attractive domain to wage a spiritual battle and to produce new religious subjectivities with the help of music and sound. Attention to the evangelical carnival parades shows how evangelical adherents perceive and experience the ritual space-­time of the Rio de Janeiro carnival and how they construct and experience their own parades as a powerful urban counterforce. Moreover, they regard the parades as components of a larger struggle to conquer space in representations of the Brazilian nation. This struggle should be understood in relation to the hegemonic understanding of Brazilian “culture” as firmly embedded in a Catholic/Afro-Brazilian religious past (Prandi 2008), yet in tense relation to evangelical practices that are often not pictured as part of the “uniquely hybrid, ‘mixed’ national culture of Brazil.”

7

Migration and Morality: Secular and Religious Considerations among Romanian and Bulgarian Migrants in and around London John Eade

Cities are ambivalent spaces. On the one hand many commentators have been struck by the freedom they provide for individual expression and rapid social mobility but at the same time this very freedom has often been seen as undermining collective solidarity and traditional ties. In Urban Studies this ambivalence can be traced back to its origins and the emergence of the Chicago School in the 1920s. At the same time, some Chicago School researchers were sensitive to the creation of neighborhoods where people were connected economically, socially, and culturally. The concentric zone model developed by Robert Park and Everett Burgess was applied to the analysis of settlement by migrants from Poland, Italy, and Germany, in particular, as well as black Americans from the South, in the impoverished “inner city” zone surrounding Chicago’s central business district and the process of “race relations” where initial contact between groups was followed by competition, accommodation, and assimilation (see Park, McKenzie and Burgess 1925) linked to migration from the inner city into the more prosperous suburbs. The Chicago School concentric zone model deeply influenced European urban studies but important social, cultural, and economic transformations in many Western cities have been generated by the changing balance between the industrial and service sectors during the last forty years associated with globalization and transnationalism, even if significant continuities remain. Movement around metropolitan areas and their surrounding regions has been facilitated, in particular, through virtual communication with the rapid increase in the use of mobile phone, Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and other means of global communication. Those arriving in metropolitan areas are able to network across both space and time; they can stay in close touch with relatives

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“back home” as well as “significant others” in metropolitan areas such as London and the surrounding region.

Migration to London—a brief history Migration to London is not a recent phenomenon, of course. During the nineteenth century it rapidly expanded both demographically and physically. Its population increased from around one million to seven million, while the suburbs engulfed the surrounding villages and countryside through an increasingly complex network of underground and overground railways. Demographic change was driven by a rise in the number of births, declining infant mortality, and greater longevity, on the one hand, and migration from other regions as well as immigration. Irish migrants arrived in substantial numbers during the eighteenth century providing the labor force for the building of the canals which played a key role in the gathering industrial revolution, while the “potato famine” in Ireland during the 1840s also led to a substantial influx. Certain impoverished localities within London developed the classic features of the “inner city” where a densely packed population shared similar social and cultural traditions and often competed for scarce physical and economic resources. German migration was also significant, if often overlooked, and by the end of the nineteenth century those of German descent constituted one of Britain’s largest minorities. During the 1880s and 1890s the country’s ethnic diversity was strengthened by the arrival of Russian and Polish Jews, with London again attracting more than its fair share. They again settled in poor neighborhoods often cheek by jowl with earlier Irish settlers across the city’s expanding “East End.” The first half of the twentieth century saw relatively scant immigration. Dockland neighborhoods in London and other urban centers such as Cardiff, Sunderland, and Glasgow became (temporary or permanent) home for seamen who were employed on ships plying their trade across the empire as well as to the USA and South America. These neighborhoods provided a base for the migrants who arrived from Britain’s (ex)colonies after the Second World War. The influx was dominated by those arriving from South Asia (India, Pakistan), Hong Kong, Cyprus, and the Caribbean. During the second half of the twentieth century the political and social debates focused around issues of racial, ethnic, and religious difference and discrimination linked to conflicting and often confused debates concerning assimilation and integration. The character of immigration changed

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from the 1990s onwards as arrivals from the former empire diminished and newcomers came from areas of the world with no colonial connection with Britain, i.e., refugees and asylum seekers from the war-­torn Balkans, Somalia, and Sri Lanka and those from the former socialist countries after the collapse of the “Iron Curtain.” The eastward expansion of the European Union in 2004 led to the largest influx of migrants since the nineteenth century dominated by over a million Polish workers and their dependents. The numbers of migrants from south-­ eastern Europe were strengthened by the entry of Romania and Bulgaria into the EU during 2007, although the global financial crash a year later combined with visa restrictions limited this influx. Indeed, many Polish migrants returned to their homeland but their numbers have recovered since 2013 and were supplemented by those arriving from Western European countries, particularly young people from Spain and Italy and migrants from South American countries such as Brazil and Colombia. Furthermore, the lifting of restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in 2014 has resulted in a very recent significant increase in the number of their arrivals (see Table 7.1). Before the collapse of the “Iron Curtain” in 1989 migration from the Soviet bloc to Britain was largely confined to those from Poland.1 A substantial number of Poles settled there at the end of the Second World War but further migration during the socialist period was extremely limited. After 1989 a new influx developed as Poles arrived on business or tourist visas and stayed on but the entry of Poland and other “A8” countries during 2004 led to a massive influx of predominantly young, single migrant workers. By 2008 over a million had arrived from Poland alone with smaller cohorts from the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Although many came to London, a substantial proportion spread out across Britain while Poles also made their way to the Irish Republic. When Romania and Bulgaria entered the European Union in 2007, political and media criticism of this new migration wave, especially from Poland, led the British government to change its open-­door policy and impose a seven-­year restriction period through visa controls. When the period ended in 2014, immigration from these two countries rapidly increased (see Tables 7.1 and 7.2). These migrations since the Second World War have made London one of Europe’s most culturally diverse cities and this diversity has helped to strengthen its role as a leading global city, where a highly dynamic service sector has sharpened economic and social inequalities. At the national level the inter­ weaving of global and local processes has created a deep social and cultural gap

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between London and the surrounding “Home Counties” area, on the one hand, and the rest of Britain and this gap came to play a crucial role in the 2016 referendum concerning the nation’s relationship with the European Union. London’s highly globalized population voted heavily in favor of remaining in the EU, including boroughs which contained a high proportion of poor inhabitants from migrant backgrounds. The majority decision to leave the EU (“Brexit”) has raised a wide range of political, economic, and cultural issues which pose serious questions about its future position as a multicultural “global city.” Popular assumptions concerning Polish and other “A12” countries within Britain are highly contradictory. On the one hand, there is the stereotype of the hard working, “successful,” and respectable worker who could easily “integrate” because she or he shared certain common racial and cultural features (whiteness, Christianity, respectability). This stereotype has co-­existed with the image of the exploitative migrant, who allegedly comes to “take advantage of the system” by “unfairly” competing for welfare state benefits, jobs, and housing, for example (see Mintchev 2014, Cheregi 2015, Dumbravă 2015, Hoops, Thomas and Drzewiecka 2015, Taşcu-Stavre 2015, and Balch and Balabanova 2016). These accusations can extend to members of the indigenous population, of course, through other “enemies within,” such as those permanently unemployed and young single mothers. The stereotypes were even more prominently deployed in public discourse during the lead-­up to the June 2016 referendum over Britain’s membership of the EU.

Studying migration from former “Iron Curtain” countries Migration often encourages a process of reflexivity where migrants think about the norms and values of their place of origin in relation to their place of settlement. The rapid movement of people across Europe from east to west has generated a considerable volume of publications and research projects in a relatively short period of time. Attention has focused primarily on Polish migration and secular considerations concerning labor migration, transnational networks, remittances, family ties, social class, gender, media, and political discourse, for example. Religion has attracted some interest, largely in the context of London and Polish Catholics (Eade and Garbin 2007, Trzebiatowska 2010, Ryan, Sales, Tilki and Siara 2008, White 2011, Eade and Krotofil 2013, Ryan 2015). Polish migrants have helped to revive churches in areas where they have settled in substantial numbers such as Ealing. The small number of churches

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which the Polish Mission to Britain maintained after the Second World War have also benefited from this recent influx. Some Poles appear to enjoy London’s religious diversity and avoid Polish services and churches, while others were grateful to be free from pressures to observe religious practices “back home” (see Eade, Garapich and Drinkwater 2006). This chapter will focus on recent Romanian and Bulgarian migrants to London and the surrounding region through an exploration of their reflections on the secular and religious issues associated with living and working in a new social and cultural environment. Research on Romanian and Bulgarian migration to Britain has been comparatively sparse. Most studies have placed this migration within general migration from former “Iron Curtain” countries or without differentiating significantly between Romanian and Bulgarian migrants (see Pollard, Latorre and Sriskandarajah 2008, Ivancheva 2007, Rolfe et al. 2013, Balch and Balabanova 2016, Mintchev 2014, Genova 2017). A few in-­depth qualitative studies devoted to London and towns in south-­east England have been undertaken (see Markova and Black 2007, Wills et al. 2009a, 2009b, Wemyss and Cassidy 2016). While several discussions of religion in post-Communist Romania and Bulgaria have been published in English (see Pollack 2003; Voicu and Constantin 2007; Ghodsee 2010; Tarţa 2012), the religious involvement among Romanian and Bulgarian migrants to Britain has been virtually ignored. The study by Roman and Goschin (2011) appears to be the only Anglophone examination of migrants’ religious involvement but it is confined to Romanian migration and does not address Britain specifically. Moroşanu (2012) has demonstrated the importance of not overemphasizing the importance of ethnicity in the case of recent Romanian migration, which is supported by studies of Polish migration (Eade, Garapich and Drinkwater 2006; Garapich 2012). Taking advantage of religious ties may not interest some newcomers (see Eade, Garapich and Drinkwater 2006; Ryan, Sales, Tilki and Siara 2008; Ryan 2010). The low religious engagement among Romanian and Bulgarian migrants apparent in London may have been encouraged by the lack of places where services were performed. Although there may be up to seven Romanian churches in London, only one independent religious center had become publicly prominent—a Romanian Orthodox church near Romanian shops and cafés on Leytonstone High Street servicing a growing ethnic niche in the neighborhood.2 The sole Bulgarian Orthodox center available is a small chapel located in the grounds of the central London Embassy, although the much smaller and highly dispersed Bulgarian population could attend other Orthodox services provided by Greek Orthodox centers in Bayswater, Camden

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Town, and Hornsey, and by the Serbian Orthodox churches in West London and the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Knightsbridge if they wished.

Migration, respectability and morality Some insight into the Romanian and Bulgarian migration experience can be gleaned from interviews undertaken during late 2015 and early 2016 when the referendum debate about Britain’s membership of the EU was in full swing. Semi-­structured interviews were undertaken with ten Romanian migrants and five from Bulgaria by a Romanian and Bulgarian researcher respectively. According to preference the interviews were held in Romanian, Bulgarian, or English and ranged across the following issues: reasons for migrating and migration history; education; employment and family background; transnational networks; social and political involvement; use of welfare provisions; views about migration/personal and social costs and benefits; perceptions of life in Britain; and views about British political discourse concerning immigration and the EU. These migrants were still in the process of deciding what they wanted to do in the short term. In this sense they are very like the Polish migrants encountered during the 2004 study undertaken by Eade, Garapich and Drinkwater (2006). The different intentions of the Polish migrants led us to distinguish between “hamsters” and “storks,” who focused on making the most of their short stays in the city before returning, the customary settlers and the largest group whom we classified as “seekers” since they were keeping their options open. London was seen as a resource, therefore, for the realization of mainly secular, material strategies. (With the subsequent arrival of partners and dependents these strategies began to change—see Ryan, Sales, Tilki and Siara 2008, Ryan 2010.) Our Romanian and Belgian interlocutors were scattered across London and the surrounding region and had little or no contact with neighborhoods where their compatriots were concentrated, such as Leytonstone. They were a mix of middle-­class professionals and those engaged in manual work—dentist, receptionist, teaching assistant, online marketing, marketing and communications, planning and development, builder, butcher, plumber, caretaker, cleaner.3 In some cases they came to Britain because close relatives or friends were already here. NU, for example, came to stay with his sister in Croydon not far from London and continued to live there, working with his brother-­in-law in construction. Another Romanian was helped to migrate to Britain by a cousin who lived south of London in the small

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town of Maidstone. His cousin visited him in Romania and told him and his wife how much money he could earn in Britain—“We wanted to buy our own house and be able to provide better for our children so we decided that I will go and work for a few months and see how it is.” However, he stayed longer and after a year during 2010 his wife and children joined him in Maidstone. Despite the social and cultural differences between the interlocutors, they shared a keen sense of behaving as respectable newcomers. They were inspired by the familiar desire to improve their economic situation but this involved more than just earning more money—working hard was linked to integrity and self-­reliance. This sense of moral commitment usually emerged when the discussion turned to the issue of welfare benefits where they were eager to distinguish themselves from the image of the “bad” exploitative migrant. Their eagerness was deepened by media and the right-­wing UKIP criticism of “low-­ skilled East Europeans,” especially Romanians and Bulgarians, when restrictions on their movement ended in January 2014. Rhetoric about “taking back control” of immigration during the 2015 referendum debate focused on various “others” such as recent East European migrants and future migrants from Turkey. Hence, when the discussion moved towards the issue of welfare benefits, they criticized migrants, who were not as self-­reliant as themselves. One of the Romanian interlocutors accepted that the state welfare system “helps people who need it” but continued “there are many people who take advantage of it,” including her cousin, who “keeps asking me if he could come and live with me, not pay any rent, access benefits and work on the black market.” She quickly added that this approach is not just pursued by “immigrants”—“it’s the British as well.” Another commented that she did not know anyone from her country (Bulgaria) who relied on benefits but she did know: A bit about how it works because I knew some English people who live on benefits, mainly single mothers who worked in the restaurant where I used to work in Portsmouth. It was shocking for me—I saw lots of young pregnancy, those girls were also getting housing benefits.

However, she also appreciated that the issue was complicated because she had herself taken “a student loan,” which had “made my studies possible” and added reflectively, “is this a benefit?” Another Bulgarian respondent also relied for a time on state benefits: We managed to get in touch with a Bulgarian who advised us that we qualify for social benefits and we received for three months working tax credit benefit. However, since my payment increased we are not eligible anymore. (. . .) I respect

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these rules. These are good rules, they allowed us to have the minimum we needed for a start and then—you simply have to deal with your life on your own (. . .). Maybe there are some people who come to the UK because they want to exploit the system but I used it when I really needed it, it was not my plan to rely on that at all.

Religion and ethnicity: Romanian reflections This emphasis on hard work, respect for rules, and self-­reliance was usually framed in secular terms. Only five of the fifteen interlocutors (all Romanian) mentioned religion when they discussed their family backgrounds or their social and political activities. CAK kept a “holy calendar in our house” and observed “the saints’ holidays.” He was the only one to actually attend Romanian Orthodox services in London, “especially during Christmas and Easter.” RE, on the other hand, did not go to the Romanian churches in the metropolis even though he was close to his pious mother: “My mother is a deeply religious person and I feel religion is important to me but I don’t dedicate enough time to it, I must admit.” He was attracted by the city’s secular attractions rather than its religious resources: “I love being so close to London and its riches, beauty and I love living the high life.” Some were aware of the religious involvement by fellow Romanians but did not want to get drawn into ethnic activities, whether broadly cultural or religious. Hence, PK went to Protestant churches occasionally with her “more religious friends” and attended christenings and baptisms there. She associated these religious ceremonies with the cultural events held at the Romanian Cultural Centre in central London, such as the screening of Romanian films and plays, and explained that she preferred, generally, to keep to herself or hanging out and traveling with her friends. This detachment from ethnic involvement was echoed by CB, who commented that she and her husband did not participate in any ethnic organizations or clubs nor were they religious. She noted that “many Romanians were gathering in religious groups, especially Protestants,” but she and her husband were “not ‘religious’ enough to join in.”4 This weak religious involvement was in sharp contrast with the responses from three Romanian interlocutors. NU came from a deeply religious family and was closely involved in a Protestant church in Croydon on the outskirts of London. His parents had migrated to Spain around 2006 but when he decided to also leave Romania in 2014 he chose to come to Britain because of the

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better job prospects. He moved in with his sister and brother-­in-law, joined his brother-­in-law’s construction business and regularly attended their local Baptist church. He felt no need to mix with other Romanians since his sister had built up a large network through the church. He was seeking to improve his English by attending night classes and as he put it, “it’s just work, school, home and church for me.” CP was even more involved in this church since he had taken up a job there as a caretaker. Back in Romania he had worked as an evangelist for a Pentecostal group but was made redundant because of the lack of funds—“This was my dream job. I was traveling a lot, preaching in different churches, running and planning radio and TV programs.” In 2011 he came to Britain, stayed with a fellow Pentecostal who had promised him “support, lodging and work” in the construction company where he was employed himself. After several months his wife joined him but their main support came from an older British couple whom they had met at the Baptist church and who were now their next-­door neighbors. As CP explained, “it took a while for them to trust us but after a while they entrusted us their house and cars when they left to Australia for holidays.” It was through their recommendation that CP got the job as the church caretaker, while his wife had also become involved with the Sunday school. Other members of the church had also assisted him with paperwork and helped him find work before his current job—“I would not have got any of my jobs if it hadn’t been for my brothers from the church.” The third religiously active person, IR, was a thirty-­year-old woman who attended a Pentecostal church near her home in Caterham, not far from London. She had owned a shop with her husband back in Romania but they had got into debt and were forced to close the business. She had already visited Italy several times during summer holidays to work as a cook and a nanny so, in 2009, she returned to Italy for a more extended period (six months). When the family she worked for decided to move to Britain in 2010 she followed them but after the family refused to hire her legally, she moved out and found a job as a cleaner in a local police station. The first year was hard because she had “no friends, no family, language, no stability, the risk of being exploited by employers.” She was able to draw on religious connections, however, since a “brother from the church” recommended her for the police cleaning job. Her husband was also religious and when he came over from Romania in 2011 they attended the local church together. Like many of the other interlocutors she was critical of her country of origin and this included religious observance. She explained that in Britain her mind was more open:

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I am more able to appreciate the important things in life. I feel people here are more concerned with the important things, like having a pure heart, really devoted to God, while in churches in Romania people are much more concerned with how they dress up and how to abide by rules while they gossip and act in wrong ways.

Care must be taken not to read too much in these responses. They cannot be claimed to be representative of the thousands of Romanians living in and around London. They were recruited by a Romanian researcher who, understandably, drew on her own networks which included those involved in the Croydon Baptist and the Pentecostal churches. However, they do provide an insight into the range of approaches towards religion which reflected people’s experience of growing up in Romania and maintaining ties there, on the one hand, and forging a new life in Britain. For some people religion could be a support, both emotionally and existentially, and the networks between those involved in church activities could also be a resource for coping with different norms and values. Others drew on secular networks and resources and this strategy was highlighted in the discussions between the Bulgarian researcher and her contacts.

Ethnicity as a resource: Bulgarian reflections Again, the five Bulgarian interlocutors were clearly not representative statistically but they did provide diverse insights into the social and cultural resources they drew on. Three were in their twenties and so were less interested in settling down—whether in Britain, back home, or somewhere else. ID, for example, was twenty-­five and had attended universities in both Bulgaria and Britain before coming to London where she was currently working for an American firm in global digital sales planning and development. She had traveled extensively before she came to Britain since she belonged to a folklore choir and went with them on foreign tours. Through her parents she had also got to know Bulgarians who had moved abroad and all of them had learned the local language and had found professional jobs—“their decision to leave was not taken out of despair; they left for good following their ambition and searching for new opportunities.” She liked the fact that “in London you could meet people coming from all cultures and ethnicities” but she intended to move on in due course: I have no clear vision where I want to be yet (. . .) I perceive myself as a young cosmopolitan, citizen of the world (. . .) I would travel in Asia Pacific, I would work

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remotely. This is not a country where I would live [long term]. I don’t want to invest in property in London. I don’t need a home, I don’t want a mortgage; renting is fine.

IDs highly individualistic approach towards life contrasted with that outlined by PT, who was much older (43), married with two young daughters. He came to Britain in 2014 and worked in various menial and professional jobs before becoming a software trainer in a major insurance company. His wife, daughters, and mother-­in-law arrived a year later and his wife was using her skills as a journalist to write for a Bulgarian newspaper while exploring the possibility of work in a London charity set up by a Bulgarian who lived in Australia. They drew on Bulgarian social and cultural resources, therefore, but were also eager to learn about British cultural heritage by visiting National Trust properties with their Bulgarian friends, who had been living in Britain for over ten years. Clearly, PT was at a different stage of life than ID and was involved in the familiar process of settling with his family. While migration was not easy, ID commented that he had “never lost confidence that it was the right decision to come here. Step by step we are building our life here. We are helping the children to integrate; they say that they don’t want to go back to Bulgaria.” A very different approach was taken by NS who had come to England in 2010 and 2012 to earn money as a seasonal agricultural worker with the help of his brother who was already in the country. Back in Bulgaria he tried to support his partner and his baby son but the situation became impossible: I worked 12 hours per day but I was paid peanuts. I did not have time to see my new born son but it was only thanks to my brother who sent money from the UK that we were able to buy a pram and a bed for the baby. This situation was impossible to bear, I spoke to my brother. He bought me a ticket to come to London. I could stay where he lives; I still live there.

He now worked as a laborer for a Bulgarian and painted a bleak picture of his life in London—“I don’t go anywhere here apart from work and home.” He bitterly rejected the idea that his partner and son might come to Britain. My house mates are asking me: “Why don’t you bring them here?” I don’t want my child to come and live here. They [the British] will never be our friends. (. . .) I know there are positives. He would learn English, he will go to university but he will be “the cattle”; he will live on his own. They don’t know much about what family means here (crying).

NS was the only Bulgarian to refer to religion and this was only in passing—“My brother went to a church—it was about a possibility to study English there.”

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Nobody mentioned visiting the chapel at the Embassy or attending services held at non-Bulgarian Orthodox churches, which were scattered across West London. In one of the interviews, however, religion as a source of ethnic identity emerged as a key theme. FN identified herself as “Turkish from Bulgaria” and had grown up in the Black Sea port of Varna. Her parents had left her with her grandparents when they left for London in 2009 and although she was attending high school at the time, she described herself as “a bit too wild” and her grandparents refused to continue looking after her. Her parents, therefore, bought her a plane ticket to join them and her sister in London. Although she went to a local college to learn English, she dropped out since the lessons were “very boring”—“there was no fun at all.” She moved in with her boyfriend who insisted that she find work and she began a cleaning job in an agency run by a Macedonian woman. Her boyfriend was also a Bulgarian Turk and his parents were “much more religious than my parents are.” She followed this comment by immediately referring to his attempts to limit her freedom of movement—“My boyfriend does not allow me to go out much; he wants me to stay home.” Her membership of the Turkish Muslim minority inevitably drew her into the problematic relationship between this minority and the Bulgarian majority both in Bulgaria and London. She was one of the few interlocutors who appeared to be familiar with fellow Muslims at an everyday level. She seemed to see the ethnic diversity of London’s Muslim population as an advantage, noting that: “There are many Pakistani, many Muslims in London. I feel that the attitude towards me is better when I say that I am Turkish rather than Bulgarian. It is only when I am among Bulgarians and I say that I am Turkish they look very weird.”

Perceptions of British society Most interlocutors viewed their move to Britain in positive terms. The country was seen as more open and the people more rational. Those eager to settle in the new country were understandably the most appreciative. CB, for example, claimed that “people have a lot of freedom in this country to do and go wherever they want. It’s easier to travel abroad as a UK citizen” and she had recently applied for UK citizenship. At the same time, she thought that becoming “integrated” and “feeling part of a community and having friends, especially British ones, is very difficult.” Like others, CB argued that the politicians and media should focus on domestic issues rather than immigration and more global

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processes. After all, manual occupations relied on immigrants because “the British don’t want to do the work and prefer to stay on benefits.” Given the unexpected result of the EU referendum it is ironic that there was a shared belief among both Romanians and Bulgarians that most British people would vote to remain. They usually approached the issue in rational, secular material terms—British people supposedly understood the economic advantages of continued membership and traveling across the continent. Moreover, even if the majority did vote to leave their own situation would not be affected. The response by IR, one of the Romanian interlocutors, was fairly typical: The UK gives a lot of money to the EU and maybe they could use this money for their own good but there are also benefits for the UK to lose if it exits the EU. They would need visas to travel abroad as well. There are British people who have houses and businesses in other EU countries and this would affect them a lot. I don’t think the British people will vote to exit the EU.

Although the impending referendum was largely approached in secular material terms an interesting interpretation was advanced by CP, whom we have encountered earlier in this chapter. He believed that the Bible was a reliable guide to the present and the future and, therefore, could predict the way this particular political journey would develop: I think UK will never leave the EU. My opinion is based on a biblical fact. I studied the Bible and you gain a lot of knowledge about the world. (. . .) Most of the things [predicted in the Bible] have already come true (. . .) and one of the predictions is that towards the final days of the world the Roman Empire will be reborn. If you look at the borders of the European Union they are very much similar to the former Roman Empire. The UK was part of the former Roman Empire so based on prophecies and history the UK will not leave the European Union.

Much could be said about this statement but, suffice it to say, like many others who did not share his worldview his confidence in the future was totally misplaced.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed the reflections by Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in London and the surrounding region on the moral issues bound up with living and working in new and often alien environments. Very few of an admittedly very small cohort, which was selectively recruited through our researchers’ networks,

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associated these issues with religious discourses and practices. They emphasized their “respectable” status as people who did not exploit others or bend the local rules in the competition for scarce material resources and were self-­reliant. Their self-­presentation was understandable given the widespread attention accorded to the issue of immigration during the run-­up to the referendum over EU membership in late 2015 and early 2016. However, in general, their social and cultural backgrounds, educational attainments, and work experience suggested a close fit between image and reality. At the same time, one of the interlocutors confessed to relying on welfare benefits for a time, while another made use of the English university loan scheme to fund her studies in a new country. Too much emphasis should not be placed on their individual agency, of course. As their accounts revealed, they relied to varying degrees on the support of relatives, partners, and friends. Their social networks could widen to include members of the “indigenous” population and this was very evident among the few religiously active interlocutors. Membership of inter-­ethnic congregations encouraged them to forge ties with local residents. As we saw in the case of RP, a deep level of trust could develop to the extent that his neighbors could leave for a holiday in Australia confident in the belief that he would not abuse their trust. Here religion and access to material resources were happily combined since RP’s neighbors also helped him become the church caretaker while his wife enjoyed the opportunity of extending her social network through her involvement in the Sunday school. This journey into a wider world of work was also supported by other members of the congregation—an experience enjoyed by IR, another Romanian interlocutor, who endured the initial alienation of “no friends, no family, language, no stability, the risk of being exploited by employers.” Given the paucity of specifically Bulgarian Orthodox religious centers in London and elsewhere, it is perhaps unsurprising that the five Bulgarian interlocutors expressed little or no interest in religion. When religion was mentioned it was in the context of some residual Orthodox observances or minority (Bulgarian Turkish) identity. Only one person was pursuing the strategy of making England “home” through secular professional mobility and an engagement with British cultural heritage, while others were keeping their options open or looking forward to going back to Bulgaria. The scattering of the fifteen interlocutors across London and the surrounding region emphasized the need to look beyond the boundaries of the metropolis. Like other migrants they maintained transnational networks with their countries of origin through global communications as well as return trips of various lengths and intensity. Many were becoming settlers and engaging with local

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society but there was limited knowledge about the diverse physical and cultural character of London and its environs. They were also developing an understanding of British politics, although their beliefs about some assumed national traits such as a strong commitment to rational choice and economic interest were belied by the ensuing EU referendum. They were not alone in having their illusions shattered, of course, and the future of London and its surrounding region still faces a highly uncertain future after the June 2017 general election and the approaching negotiations with Brussels.

NINo data Table 7.1 reports the total number of Romanian, Bulgarian, and Polish nationals registering for a NINo in the UK, as well as by gender. The table reveals that migration by Bulgarians and Romanians has increased dramatically since the transitional arrangements at the start of 2014, which is particularly noticeable for Bulgarians, whilst Polish migration peaked in 2007 and then fell back in the recession before increasing again in 2013. Table 7.1  NINo registrations by gender, 2002–2014. Polish Registrations 2002 4,747 2003 9,457 2004 38,421 2005 144,806 2006 192,111 2007 242,579 2008 152,275 2009 85,855 2010 74,821 2011 84,151 2012 80,466 2013 111,450 2014 (Q1–3) 69,579 Total 1,290,718

Bulgarian

Romanian

% Registrations % Registrations % Female Female Female 50.8 46.6 44.8 40.4 42.3 43.8 46.1 46.3 46.2 46.9 46.3 45.1 44.1 44.3

3,713 4,327 5,715 3,107 1,940 12,265 15,882 13,555 12,469 14,465 9,720 9,824 29,993 136,975

48.3 51.9 41.6 46.6 55.0 38.4 40.0 44.2 45.0 45.0 46.2 49.3 41.3 43.7

1,567 2,643 3,626 3,002 2,432 19,152 23,469 20,066 18,943 25,811 16,310 17,871 100,430 255,322

46.3 46.7 48.5 50.2 55.4 31.8 34.7 44.2 46.2 43.4 46.5 52.8 37.5 40.9

Table 7.2  NINo registrations by region (% in each) in selected years. Poland 2008 North East North West Yorkshire & the Humber East Midlands West Midlands East of England London South East South West Wales Scotland Northern Ireland Total Registrations

1.3 7.3 7.2 7.6 8.1 9.4 24.0 11.8 7.1 2.6 10.0 3.6 150,880

2011 1.2 7.7 8.4 8.7 9.0 9.4 21.3 12.7 7.2 2.8 9.4 2.2 83,804

Bulgaria 2014 1.1 8.1 8.9 9.2 9.0 8.7 21.4 12.8 6.9 2.4 9.1 2.4 69,378

2008 0.4 3.7 2.3 3.0 11.1 9.4 42.9 13.4 3.7 0.8 7.6 1.6 15,706

2011 0.7 3.5 1.8 2.7 10.9 6.9 43.2 15.4 4.2 1.3 8.6 0.9 14,250

Romania 2014 0.7 4.2 2.7 2.9 6.9 6.7 47.0 13.9 4.9 1.7 6.4 1.9 29,819

2008 1.0 2.8 2.2 3.6 5.5 5.8 61.2 9.0 3.6 1.1 3.7 0.5 23,368

2011 1.1 3.2 2.3 3.8 7.5 7.9 51.6 12.1 4.0 1.3 4.3 0.8 25,647

2014 1.1 3.5 3.8 5.1 8.9 8.1 48.4 10.9 4.5 1.2 3.4 1.2 100,312

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Marketplace, Fallow Ground, and Special Pastoral Care: What Christian Churches in Germany know about the City–an Interdenominational Comparison Veronika Eufinger

“This is a top quality location, you won’t believe the monthly rent!”, was part of the self-­portrayal given by an employee of a local “church-­store” in a German city center. “ ‘Break up your Fallow Ground’ (Hos 10,12). Pastoral Departure in the City” (Lübbering 2009; translated by VE) is the title of an ecumenical anthology about church in the city. Those two empirical leads merely indicate the rough outlines of what can be known about the city by the Christian churches in Germany. A broad discourse is possible between the ostentatious “urban player” dealing with the flow of customers, key resources, and cost structures and the rural imagery sowing a religious seed in the uninvested virgin soil of the urban area. The omnipresence of church spires is still shaping skylines, even if only as the peripheric scenery of cafés and farmer’s markets. Pastoral social services by Christian institutions are available everywhere, while churches are converted, parishes are merged. “City-­church projects” are founded occasionally as alternatives, replacements, or additions. They can be defined as facilities which accommodate the urban in their aesthetics, structures, and programs. The churches’ knowledge about the city crystallizes in the religious architecture, communication, and practice of those urban spaces. The knowledge is not only present in its tangible application but also as the product of thematic theological debates, like the anthology mentioned above illustrates, and focus of church-­ internal reflections by highly specialized employees. There are institutions like the Ecumenical Network of City-Church Projects, which collect the organizations’ knowledge, relate it to the academic perspective, and support the further training of the persons involved.

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By working with explicit and implicit sources of information, this contribution deals with the question, what the Christian churches in Germany “know” about the city. In concrete terms, self-­portrayals, internal reflections, and a city-­church’s architecture are analysed using a method, which combines the sociology of knowledge and objective hermeneutics. The sequential analysis holds a broad notion of social practice’s protocols and, therefore, permits the simultaneous processing of buildings (Schmidtke 2008) and written texts. Interests, needs, and opinions contribute to the complexity and opaqueness of churches’ representation of the city. Instead of trying to retrace the multitude of subjective points of view, the objective structure of the churches’ semantic field is reconstructed (Oevermann 2002). The “objective structure of meaning” is defined as the latent meaning of a social practice, which lies beyond the subjective self-­image, reconstructs the rules of those practices, and possesses an intersubjective validity (Wernet 2009: 11ff). City-­church projects are social acts expressing the semantics of manifest relations between the church and the city, religion and modernity in general, as well as different societal processes. The semantic structures of the symbolic universe (Berger and Luckmann 2016: 102) contain ideas, concepts, and strategies concerning the deliberate relatedness of the church and the city. Based on its stance on the city, the church produces as an institution of the objective reality knowledge about the city. The generated knowledge shapes the dispositions of perception and vice versa. The knowledge assumes the shape of a subuniverse sustained by specific roles (Berger and Luckmann 2016: 76ff): It is accessible in an explicit version through the institutions’ mission statements, programs, and profiles. The concept of the city can be reconstructed from those protocols of natural communication. Talking to employees of Catholic institutions revealed from time to time an “oversaturation” of reflections concerning the urban habitat. The question, why there are no comparable research projects about the church in the rural areas, was asked repeatedly. At the same time, the representatives of Protestant city-­church projects stated, that the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) shifted its resources to focus on the rurality anew. The EKD as well as the Catholic Church in Germany each represent about 30 percent of the German population’s religious affiliations. They consist of a number of regional churches or dioceses and each possesses a central council and Synod or an episcopal conference. Therefore, this analysis chooses an indirect access to the churchly production of knowledge about the city: As the vantage point, a contrast definition in demarcation to the churches’ construction of the country is chosen. The discourse of church habitats underlines the exclusion of the concepts as well as their connection as contesting spaces of action.

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Church and country in mutual dynamic The EKD publishes its official positions on religious and societal subjects in the form of basic texts, including issues to church in the city as well as church in the country. Both texts possess parallel structures and concerns (Schwarz 2007b: 5f), they discuss the normative principles of church work and are therefore suitable to the reconstruction of the accompanying knowledge. The title about the country is “Change and Shape. Missionary Chances and Duties of the Protestant Church in Rural Areas” (Schwarz 2007a; translated by VE). “Change and Shape” illustrates the consequences of the success concerning the second part of the title: If the church uses its chances and fulfills its order, it can not only cause cosmetic but basic changes in the rural area. The nature of those changes depends on the interpretation of the mission as indicated in the title. The definition in the Protestant encyclopedia Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart ascribes the aim of the individual spreading of Christianity which can be directed at Christians as well as at non-Christians and can take place in unorganized forms (Frankemölle and Feldtkeller 2007). The title transports a decidedly spatial image of the country: It is not an abstract draft, but a concrete arrangement of people and objects with quantities, relations, and distribution qualities. The country appears as one kind of space in a rash of spaces which differ in the above mentioned arrangement categories. The relation to space is technical and analytical, less emotional, and intuitive. Comparable to the “intrinsic logic of the cities,” it is not adequate to address the country per se. Actually, there is a plurality of constellations of “doxa” and “habitus” which connect a general logic to a place’s specific features (Löw 2012: 67f). The use of terms establishes a connection to the spatial turn in the cultural and social sciences: The meaning of spatial arrangements for religious phenomena and the religious practices’ shaping effect on space are indicated at the same time. The (new) orientation towards space as a category of analysis beside the dimensions of time, social relation, etc. underlines the interrelation between social action and its spatial placement. Space can be understood as a legible text (Döring and Thielmann 2008: 16f), which discloses a semantic structure, the methods of its (re)production, and its canalized behavioral repertoire. The (Protestant) theology considers the interactions mentioned above: The concurrent addressing of “the space of religion and [the] religion of the space” (Erne and Schüz 2010: 11; translated by VE) investigates the spatial order formed by social practice as well as the channeling of behavior by material structures. The Anglican theologian Timothy Gorringe (2008: 100) dates the

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spatial turn of the theology to 1937 when Karl Barth founded the theology of the divine space: God owns an eminent spatiality; therefore, space is founded in God and everlasting in itself. The chances offered to the church by the country allow not only a variation of design but also a basic transformation. “Change” implies that the church has the duty and chance to cause a basic structural change for the purposes of its mission. The shaping is the second step: If the propagation and intensification of Christianity were successful in the rural area, the details of decoration turn up next.

God as the precarious wildcard in the city The church’s “chances and duties” depend on the spatial qualities of the country: The likelihood, possibility, and opportunity of the mission’s success, just as the problems to be solved, the duties to be done and the running of routines are based on the spatiality’s rural characteristics. The interdependency between the space and the missionary options is determined in a mutual way: On the one hand, the country constitutes the environment and condition of church intervention. On the other hand, the rural area can be changed in the process by religious practice. The religion of the space as well as the space of the religion are covered as perspectives of impact. The second EKD text implies in the title “God in the City. Perspectives of Protestant Church in the City” (Schwarz 2007b; translated by VE) a different position in this regard. The “perspectives” in the city contrast the “chances and duties” in the country: A plurality of possible aims and ways to act is given to the church at both places. Nevertheless, the “perspectives” are exceled by “chances and duties” concerning the likelihood of realization, the concreteness, and will power. While church intends to implement one of its core concerns in the country, it is still searching for the right point of view in the city. While the EKD actively intervenes according to its possibilities and mission in the change and creation of the country, it is still looking for its place in the city. The city is addressed as an ideal type in the collective singular in contrast to the country which is perceived as plural and spatial. The basic text’s title about the church in the country cited above possesses no reference to a big transcendence: God’s presence in the city must be underlined as a noteworthy fact while his attendance in the country is implied

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to be self-­evident. Against the background of God’s omnipresence and spatiality, the preposition’s meaning is not given: If space as a category of perception, a medium of communication, and a physical container is founded in God, as mentioned above, it seems paradoxical that this space can contain God at the same time. As an infinite and transcendent entity, God cannot be subjected to the laws of spatiality like distance, limitation, and relation (van den Brom 2007). Even if the presence of God is paradoxical, the statement bears significance: It refuses the notion of the city as a completely secularized place, God defends at least a spot on behalf of Christianity. The thesis of the secularized city is closely tied to the idea of urbanity as the embodiment of modernity: In the narration of Western secularity’s origin from a materialist perspective the industrialization, the emergence of industrial cities, and the accompanying workforce play a crucial role. Combined with Max Weber’s concept of the rationalization and systematization of the mental life which also reaches its culmination in the town, the European city becomes the counter-­pole of religious observance and coherence. Derived from this ideal type, urban religiousness strikes as a historical relict, an indication of backwardness in line with modernization theory, a poverty result in the global periphery or a sign of the failed integration of migrant communities (Lanz 2014: 21f). God is inserted in this narration of the modern age as a wildcard saving a place for religion in the city against all odds. The structure of the title represents a concurrent parallelization and sequentialization of God and the Protestant church’s perspectives: The sequence and equation indicate a monocausal relation as well as an identity. Just because God is in the city and has not yet resigned the place, the church can act at least in a limited and precarious way. The objective of these actions is fixed: the enlargement of God’s urban space. The conceptions’ contrasting juxtaposition reveals a rash of antitheses about country and city: On the one hand, in its safe haven church contributes to the differentiated and informed constitution and transformation of the space and can implement its divine mission by conducting structural as well as detailed world-­immanent changes. Its religious validity claim, cultural hegemony, and placement in a Christian world order are ubiquitary. On the other hand, the church’s situation is precarious, it has no natural authority as a societal stakeholder and must be protected by a transcendent wildcard. Far from the possibility of a shaping intervention the church is still searching for its place and point of view in an ideal-­typical defined environment, whose (re)production eludes its influence.

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The good news of the market’s paradoxy While the titles analysed so far belonged to publications mostly addressing in-­ house recipients, the EKD homepage operates the contact to church members, interested outsiders, the press, and so on. In the column “subjects” the article about “church in the city” can be found in the category “parishes & church services”: Church in the city—this means a special challenge. If the city appears at first sight maybe as a ‘City without God’ (H. Cox), so one can register by looking more carefully in many towns since some time an unexpected demand for religion. Though, the people are selectively religious: they choose places and times, but also the contents of religion. The church must position itself to this challenge. She goes with the Good News of the philanthropy of God to the market of the religious supplies in the city. EKD—Kirchenamt: Stabsstelle Kommunikation 2017; translated by VE

The EKD’s point of view about the problematic and uncertain nature of its urban existence is explicitly confirmed; no attempt is started to conceal the insecurity. On the contrary: the fact that church in the city is synonymous with a challenge is presented as a natural actuality, which is valid for church as a social form in general. The diagnosis of the precarious role of the church is ascribed to an academic authority by referencing the American theologian Harvey Cox. His book putatively confirms the notion of the “Secular City” (Cox 1965) as the “Stadt ohne Gott?” (City without God?) in the title’s German translation. The question mark’s omission in the quotation is symptomatic for the shortening of the view: Without going into the whole book and its reception, Cox already emphasizes in the introduction that cities are indeed a place of secular lifestyles in terms of diversity, melting traditions, and the pluralism of worldviews. Nevertheless, at the same time he admonishes to esteem the secularity and to find adequate, adult forms to express Christian traditions and God’s presence in the city (Cox 1965: 17f). The thesis of the ungodly town is still exposed in the same sentence as a superficial prejudice which was necessary, nevertheless, to underline the difficult situation of the church. The religious potential of the city is termed as a “demand” and thereby assigned to the economic sphere and to the logic of instrumental relations and profit orientations. If a demand exists and can be registered, implying a businesslike and systematic way, a suitable supply may be successful. The offer’s description refers to Thomas Luckmann’s modern, individualized, and

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commodified religiousness: The consumption habits of the autonomous individual manifest in the freedom of choice which encloses not only goods, services, and social relations, but also the creation of meaning. Religion becomes a “warehouse,” which the individual faces as the customer (Luckmann and Knoblauch 2016: 140f). The religious consumption pattern’s selectivity refers to the legitimate conditions of “places and times,” whereas the choice of religious contents is indicated to be somewhat controversial. The church’s adaptation of modern and urban consumer needs is also selective. The consumer’s description takes up the “spiritual wanderer,” who is open for elements of all religious traditions, freely combines them, and holds an indifferent position towards the church (Gebhardt 2014). The thesis of the city as the church’s challenge takes shape: The problem consists in the mode of the people’s religious needs, which are deduced from the urban lifestyle. According to Georg Simmel, this style arises from the way people meet the city as part of the anthroposphere: Density, size, and plurality allow the disengagement of all kinds of relations from the requirement of spatial proximity by enhanced mobility. Hence, this process results in the city dweller’s freedom of choice which produces a differentiated structure of demand and supply, an increased competition, and a pressure to innovate (Simmel 1903: 124f). The equalization of (post)modern age and the city as a (post)secular space, whose inhabitants hold individualized and selective consumption pattern, provides the framework for the EKD’s appraisal of urban religiousness. The motive can be found in a prominent position in the work of Émile Durkheim (1992: 362): The society in its entirety modernizes itself to the city. While urbanization is the engine of social change, the village becomes the symbol of the premodern age. In accordance with the economic metaphors, church carries its product to the “market of religious supplies” and meets the competitors, which are raised by the city as a place of plurality and mobility. This idea can be found as a transfer of the rational choice theory to the sociology of religion by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge: The competition of the preferably equal suppliers results in an innovative assortment of goods, the offer’s derived desirability takes effect as a counterbalance to secularization (Stark and Bainbrige 1987). The EKD’s status as a non-­federal public body constitutes a contrast to the ideal of competition in equal conditions. The product, which is offered at the market, is neither a magic service with a practical use nor an immanent or otherworldly promise of salvation, but a piece of information about the nature of the Christian god. The idea of the market is broken by the manner of this offer: The picture of

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a bazaar with foretellers, yoga teachers, and magic amulets is drawn. It contains a range of products which promise practical values like coping with contingency by fortune tells, physical and spiritual health, or protection from evil spirits. The church is placed alongside offering the statement, that God is charitable, a piece of information without any market-­shaped value. The activation of the metaphor of the religious market dissociaties it from commercialization and from the commodified offers of the competitors. The “Good News” represents the Christian Gospel; the formulation refers to an ecumenical Bible which is geared to the maxim of a communicative, functional, and generally understandable translation. To be able to stand the test of the religious market a comprehensible, contemporary, and adapted up-­to-date choice of speech is necessary. The offered piece of information is announced as “news” and is therefore supposed to offer a formerly unknown content, but the actual topic contrasts this expectation. The passage’s hermeneutic circle is closing: To master the challenge, the church does not need to be successful by establishing its product using the right advertising strategies, producing a positive balance of income and expenditure, and prevailing in the competition. Rather the church’s recipe for success in the economically structured urban space distinguishes itself by opposing the function logic of economy, profit maximization, and customer orientation. In the context of the EKD-website, the text’s connection to “parishes & church services” must be examined. After rejecting the social form of the market as a manner of exchange, the religious product’s way of communication and the consumer’s possibilities of access are not discussed any further. Therefore, the hypothesis can be put up that the communitarization and the collective religious practice suitable for the urban space are geared to the traditional forms. The EKD produces the knowledge, that the city is the embodiment of the modern age in a secular shape; its function logic is assigned to the economic sphere. The church’s precarious role arises from the fixed and unswayable environment it has no hold on. This effect is mediated by the inhabitants’ urban lifestyle as autonomous consumers, which includes, according to Simmel, the estimation of the variety of supplies and the freedom of choice. The implied approach of the city exhibits connections to an external perspective on religion and to a variety of theories from the sociology of religion. Moreover, the city is regarded as a space of religious pluralism, which is not limited to a mere coexistence of closed communities. To be successful in the competition, must adapt its the church communication skills to plural, modern, and technological standards. In reference to the previous section, the transcendent occupation of

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the city is underlined again: God is in the city. Therefore, the church has the chance of a share in the market in this habitat. It defines its situation in a paradoxical manner. On the one hand, it presents itself as one of many religious suppliers acting in a free competition. On the other hand, the EKD breaks the market metaphor and expresses its refusal of the economic function logic by offering a product without marketable value.

The city dweller’s triple lack of attachment To reconstruct the interconfessional difference to the Catholic knowledge about the city, the presentation of “city-­pastoral” on katholisch.de is suitable: City-­pastoral. The life of the modern age has strongly accelerated. Lasting bonds to the place of residence, parishes, and lasting relations decrease. Many people do not directly search the contact to a parish anymore or are enrooted and dedicated there. This is exactly where the concept city-­pastoral joins in: Since about for the last 60 years new places of pastoral care have originated in German cities, in particular for those people, who are no longer reached by parishes and what the church offers. katholisch.de 2015; translated by VE

On the official web presence of the Catholic Church in Germany, the text about church in the city can be found in the category “guidance” with the keyword “pastoral care from A to Z.” This classification of city-­pastoral facilities corresponds to the subsumption in the section “special pastoral care” in the statistics of the Catholic Church (Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz 2016: 47) which also encompasses prisons, hospitals, and airports. Therefore, the city center is part of a number of situations which distinguish themselves by a transitional character, a high likelihood of contingency-­experiences, and a lack of everyday occurrence on the one hand. On the other hand, each case concerns a space which either activates a special psychic state channels and certain experiences in its visitors or draws people who already hold a disposition to specific states or experiences. This set of experiences is presented as a mental need the church meets with a fitting pastoral offer. According to the Lexicon of Theology and the Church, pastoral care encloses all aspects of church acts, in particular the proliferation of God’s presence, the Christian transformation of the world, and the building of parishes for those purposes (Müller 2006). Based on this definition, the creation of a special church-­ social form for the urban area is an imperative task if the parish is not working as

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the normal case of religious communitarization for the city dwellers. The Protestant church answers the question of the adequate social form in a paradoxical manner: The market is assigned to the city as a consumption- and service-­shaped relation, which the church declines, while the parish appears to be the universal Protestant organization of the meso level. While city-­pastoral raises the claim to design all dimensions of the church in adaptation to the city center as a social space, the EKD addresses the city as a whole and focuses upon the cognitive dimension of the religious. The connotation of pastoral care shifts the Catholic emphasis in a charitable and communicative direction: The structural properties of the city are synonymous with a lack of attachment and, hence, the foundation of certain (mental) problems. The church offers help to solve those problems by means of consultation. The problems’ causal reason is the city, however, not in itself, but as a symptom of modern age comparable to the Protestant point of view mentioned above. Modernity appears to be a development withdrawn and estranged from the people. The epoch of industrialization, enlightenment, and secularization has developed a life of its own which is characterized by an increased subjective speed of the technical, societal, and social dimensions of development. Durkheim and Simmel identified the breaking of traditional boundaries to be an ambivalent development causing anomy and anonymity but also the liberation from the spatially conditioned compulsive community: The human phylogeny evolves from segmentary societies implying a mechanical solidarity to modern societies with organic solidarity. In the course of those changes, freedom and individuality grow, the division of labor as a foundation of the urban lifestyle occurs, and the collective consciousness decreases (Durkheim 1992: 128f). Urbanity distinguishes itself by the dissolution of social bonds, every kind of exchange relation is decoupled from the criterion of spatial proximity. A second property is the distance and indifference towards the mass of accidental meetings with strangers when personal spaces unintentionally overlap (Simmel 1908: 482ff). Those developments are emotionally charged in the Catholic representation by the parallelization of local, religious, and interpersonal ties. The lasting local rootess, the organic parish-­affiliation, and marriage as the longest lasting interpersonal binding, constitute a unity in shape of a tight network, whose stability is diminished by the epoch of modernity. The result is the triple unattached and therefore emotional and social destitute city dweller. Similar to the Protestant concept, the city and there is a close relationship between the modern age: Within the societal transformation the city serves as a magnifying glass which reveals the resultant phenomena in compressed and

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accented form. The Catholic perspective focuses on the loss and deficiency: the absence of social ties, obligation for the purposes of solidarity, and unity of people and place. The Protestant perspective also emphasizes individualization, however, complements the economization. The fields of responsibility of city-­ pastoral facilities and parishes are clearly separated: The city-­pastoral’s primary purpose is to offer a spiritual consultation to the triple unattached people. It is the last choice in the enumeration after the municipalities in the first and “other church offers” in the second place. The spiritual care’s task in the city center is a contradiction in terms: City-­pastoral is supposed to produce the conditions of a local identity, social cohesion, and religious community in a social structure which distinguishes itself primarily by the nullification of all bindings. The religious work of the Catholic Church in the urban area perceives the space, just as the Protestant point of view, as an unchangeable phenomenon which was generated by unintelligible processes. On both sides, the knowledge about the city contains common sociological everyday theories which postulate a vague connection between the psychological, social, and habitual constitution of the people and the conditions of their environment. The urban lifestyle plays a vital part in their strategies. On the one hand, the EKD reaches the conclusion, that the city is an economic, service-­shaped, and consumption-­oriented sphere, which displays a competition pressure and a function logic that demands adaptation. Nevertheless, the adaptation is only ostensible, because the church refuses the commodification of its message. On the other hand, the Catholic Church experiences the city as a place of social defect. It identifies the need for an adjusted social form, which might be service-shaped and anonymous to fit the urban life style. However, the Catholic objective for the urban church is, just as the EKD’s, straightened against the city’s operating mode: The triple absence of bonds is not a state the church can permanently accept, given that the central pastoral goal is the parishes’ advancement. The adaptation to the city remains superficial on both sides, from both denominations’ points of view urbanity is not their natural, organically grown habitat.

Visible inclusion and religious latency The exterior view of the Ökumenisches Forum HafenCity (Ecumenical Forum HafenCity) as an aesthetic manifestation of knowledge serves as the last case to shed light on church’s concept of the city. The ecumenical project is carried by 20 different Christian churches of the Committee of Christian Churches in Hamburg.

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The HafenCity is a quarter recently designed anew, adjoining Hamburg’s Speicherstadt to the south. The part of town exhibits an enormous tourist potential by containing the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, various museums, and spectacular pieces of architecture. At the same time, it is one of the wealthiest parts of Hamburg. In 2012 the Ecumenical Forum received the building-­of-the-­ year-award of the architect and engineer association of Hamburg. Up to now, it is the only planned or already established religious building in this quarter of the city. The forum’s macro-­architecture integrates itself exactly in its immediate neighborhood (cf. Figure 8.1): Size, number of the floors, design, and form of the windows as well as the building materials fit in the fashionable townscape. The facade creates a seamless connection to the secular neighboring building and is part of a compact row of fronts. The two special features of the outer wall unfold their effect from the distance and the right angle. The facade possesses two indentations which give the impression that the building was gently caved in. The recess in the upper-­right edge contains a bell with a caliber of about one

Figure 8.1  Front of the Ökumenisches Forum HafenCity. (Photo courtesy Veronika Eufinger)

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meter, which is rung at the beginning of the prayers. The placement and bracing of the bell recall the look of the load hooks at the historical buildings in the adjoining Speicherstadt. In the lower-­left corner in the second indentation at ground level, an unadorned, equilateral cross with a height of about six meters made of glazed dark gray stones contrasts the red brick wall. The buildings rear side exhibits the fitting convexity. The cross’s vertical axis points to the center of the “chapel” lying behind at the ground floor. The anteroom of the chapel is visible from the street through four big glass doors (cf. Figure 8.2): The space is rectangular, the floor is made of gray stone, the golden ceiling contains indirect lighting devices, a wooden partition wall opens to the interior room, and a baptistery is shifted to the left of the facade-­ cross’s axis. The dividing wall consists of four double doors which admit the combination of both room segments. Though, in the daily routine they remain closed except for one door by which at all hours a yellow light beam falls into the anteroom. An engraving is visible on the wood: In different European languages, the text of the Charta Oecumenica is readable, a declaration of intent for the

Figure 8.2  Vista of the chapel’s anteroom at night. (Photo courtesy Veronika Eufinger)

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intensification of cooperation written in 2001 by the Christian churches of Europe. The anteroom is adjoined by a passageway to the toilets and to the café Elbfaire. A spacious seminar room borders on the café. Besides; the door panel indicates, that the first to the sixth floors contain offices of different church institutions, apartments, and a convent. The facade expresses the interplay of religious visibility and invisibility in the shape of the resemblance and differentness in relation to the secular and urban environment. The case of the Ökumenisches Forum exhibits one of the central characteristics of religious places in European cities, which were identified in the course of the project Urban Sacred: The striving of religious presences for public visibility and the canalization of extraordinary experiences contrasts the invisibility as a result of mixing the sacred and profane (Lanwerd 2016). The forum’s exterior design is the result of the figurative process of the “impression” of the cross, the chapel, and the bell into the building. The sacred space and the religious symbols own a gravity which deforms the otherwise neutral building and causes ripples. The facade displays a rectangular, secular, “normal” house with straight edges which is not set apart from its neighborhood, but was subtly stamped by a “superhuman power.” The result is that the building still fits aesthetically in its surroundings and causes no strong irritation, however, possesses religious marks at the same time. The waves take up the motive of the water which is omnipresent in the cityscape of the HafenCity and Speicherstadt. The architecture of the Elbe Philharmonic Hall applies the same motive and can be considered as one of the most formative buildings of the HafenCity. In addition to the architectural quotation of the Speicherstadt described above, the imbedding in the urban environment and the close connection to the neighborhood meet another condition of urban sacrality (Lanwerd 2016). FaÇade styles with asymmetrical wave patterns are also found in contemporary buildings of the constructivist style as for example in the Neuen Zollhof of the architect and designer Frank Gehry in the Düsseldorf Medienhafen. The chapel’s composition, which is visible from outside, is determined by the division in brightness and darkness and communicates the differentiation of inclusion and exclusion: The segmentation in anteroom and interior space underlines the initiation-­character of baptism and the significance of the ecumene. The door in the dividing wall depicts by the incidence of the light beam an attraction pole and suggests to cross the anteroom towards it: The division in the bright main space and dark anteroom canalizes the wish to cross the threshold. Doing so gives consent and approval to the engraved message. The Justizforum Hamburg can be considered as an analog case: Above the main

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entrance the words “ius est ars boni et aequi,” the normative basis for the administration of justice, oblige every visitor to admit them. The subject ecumene activates the ideas of reconciliation, tolerance, and unity. Ecumene depicts the reasonable, democratic-­value oriented antithesis to a fanatical, dogmatic, and solitary religious communitarization. The transparent ground level, and unobstructed access to the anteroom displays no physical hurdles and promises no social or other kinds of entry fees. Nevertheless, at the same time the baptismal font, placed discreetly beyond the direct line of sight, is a reminder that the membership of Christianity is exclusive, everlasting, and bound to the observance of rituals. In pre-Reformation the baptistery was placed regularly in the entrance area, as in the present case, to emphasize the initiation to the parish (Neijenhuis 2007). The faÇade of the Ökumenisches Forum deals with the latent structure of meaning in the connection between the church and the city: Christianity’s right to exist in a modern, urban, and sophisticated neighborhood, which was recently founded and has no “traditional” place reserved for religion, is far from natural. The elegant architectural integration with a latent religious accent and high aesthetic value, which implements a current architectural style and which also lives up to the special character and history of the district, displays a sharp contrast to the freestanding church buildings in the customary styles. Church fits in instead of being the center, it refers to the city instead of correlating the city to itself. The semantics of its aesthetic design do not separately signify themselves but unfold their meaning only in reference to the urban environment. The condition of the high cultural capital, which is necessary to read the spatial coding, coincides with the social-­structural properties of the neighborhood. In the form of the café and the seminar room, the church offers an “added value” which exceeds the religious core business and utilizes the building for secular purposes. Beside the consequent fruition of the “big” ecumene as a churchy implementation of the democratic value system, which enables minorities to participate equally, the forum extends the inclusion thereby to the non-­religious area. The identity as a mere “subuniverse” in a pluralistic society is accepted by the recognition of competing life plans and constructions of meaning (Berger and Luckmann 2016: 134) as well as by the inter-­denominational cooperation, even if it’s limited to the Christian tradition. The Ökumenisches Forum Hafencity solves the problem of the church’s right to exist by dealing with the subjects of visibility/invisibility as well as inclusion/exclusion of religious presence in the urban space in a balanced manner. The city appears to be a living space of plural religious affiliations; the potential competition which defines the EKD’s cityscape

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is pragmatically limited by a Christian alliance. The strong connection to the city, which is displayed in the adaptation of current visual habits and quotations of local specifics, seems to carry no inner contradictions in contrast to the city-­ concepts of the EKD and the Catholic Church. The HafenCity’s redesign and the resulting absence of hereditary religious places have created an opportunity for the church to invent a new place in the city. Following the approach of the space of religion, the construction of the Ökumenisches Forum exhibits an option, how the co-­creation of the city is achievable by the varied adaptation to the urban’s aesthetic codes. Service orientation and low thresholds are applied as adaptations to urban consumption patterns, are also subject, to a variation: The religion of the space evokes the experience of the sacred by fashioning a shop window which does not present the whole offer but canalizes the wish to investigate a hidden space. Nevertheless, the impression of the low-­threshold-access to this experience is limited by the room’s segmentation and the baptismal font in three ways: Firstly, it is uncertain who or what exactly is expecting the visitor in the interior room, secondly, the crossing of the door obliges to consent to a textual commitment, and thirdly, the baptismal font reminds of the fact that membership is bound to initiation. It functions as a liturgical device and at the same time as a “mnemotechnical tool” (Berger and Luckmann 2016: 75) and symbol for the ritualized exclusivity and durability of the church community. The low threshold represents a dominant motive in the city-­churches’ discourse of its accessibility: The path from the secular outside to the religious inside requires the transcending of a border, the required effort is defined by factors like transparency, expectable costs, etc. The analysis of Protestant city-­churches has revealed that they constitute tendentially independent church rooms, which provide a lasting spiritual home instead of functioning as thresholds implying a temporary selection phase (Schlamelcher 2013: 208ff). However, the anteroom of the ecumenical chapel accurately implies this function: The room literally provides the space, in which the behavior-­canalization can unfold within the three limitations described above.

Results Unequivocal indicators for the recognition of an independent function logic of urban life are the founding of subject-­specific institutions, the production of explicit knowledge to solve adjacent problems, and the thematization in central

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programmatic texts as well as public relations. Contrasting the anthology title’s imperative cited at the beginning of this text, the churches’ knowledge about the city neither implies that the urban area is an easily developable field of action nor a space in whose formation and creation the churches are actively involved. The city faces the Catholic and Protestant church as a fixed entity whose properties are an expression of the second nature. It is a reified product and at the same time a crystallization point of modern age, a natural power which is faced by a powerless church. The city is shaped as a space of religion by social practices; however, the shaping of the city by religious practices is not an imaginable position in the discourses of the churches. The motive of the city as a market, expressing the subjection to an economic function logic, coincides with the city-­church employee’s quotation in the introduction. The proud underlining of the advantageous position in the computable competition, which can be quantified by store rents, numbers of visitors, and shop-­window surface suggests the adaptation of the social form of the customer and service relation between religious supply and demand. While a preceding study of Protestant city-­churches draws the diagnosis of the commodification of religious communication and the structural customer orientation by the dismantling of consumption obstacles (Schlamelcher 2013: 265f), the EKD rejects the market’s functionality in its central self-­portrayal of city-­church work. However, the ecumenical case approaches the structural customer orientation uses a space with threshold function; this combines openness and exclusivity in terms of a religion of the space. The city as a religiously densely populated and plural area exhibits competition which can be received from the church’s perspective as representing a conscious subuniverse of meaning and knowledge as a serious legitimization problem. It becomes especially virulent in places where religion is not traditionally localized, but is an optional element. The wide Christian ecumene is an attempted solution, which nevertheless, automatically creates a new exterior for religious affiliation and competition. The idea of the secular city accentuates the options of the visibility or invisibility of urban religion. In the ecumenical example, the answer to the complicated relationship between the church and the city is the latency of religion and the careful aesthetic integration into the neighborhood. The city as a space of distinctive individuality, and therefore also a symptom of modern age, is not just included as an element in the EKD’s market metaphor: From the Catholic perspective, individualism exhibits its negative consequence: the deprivation of bonds. While the EKD’s individual is presented as an autonomous consumer, from the Catholic point of view the city dweller, is a

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lonesome “beneficiary.” Hypotheses about the adequate social forms can be derived from those conceptions of man: While for the Catholics side communality as the objective of a service-­shaped pastoral care has priority, the Protestant church offers the parish and collective religious practices as an alternative to the market.

Part Four

Changing Urban Imaginaries

9

Worlds within Worlds: Vernacular Pluralism, Publics of Belonging, and the Making of Modern Bangalore Tulasi Srinivas

At Richards Square A year ago, in January, I was in my home town of Bangalore in south India. The sun was sharp and warm. I found myself at Richards Square, a market square in the old British colonial part of Bangalore which is called the Cantonment. The square, a large public open space, previously car-­free but now acting as parking lot, sits on the edge of an eighteenth-­century bazaar built by a British city administrator, O. T. Russel, in 1889. Eponymously called Russell Market the long British-­style white-­colonnaded building dominates the square, topped by distinctive Indo-Saracenic domes and minarets.

Figure 9.1a/b  Russell Market (left) and St. Mary’s Basilica (right). (Photos courtesy Tulasi Srinivas)

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On this day big eagles flew around the minarets, attracted by the open-­air meat market below, whirling and eddying on the winter winds. Turning my back on the market I faced the open gates of an enormous Catholic shrine, the St. Mary’s basilica, the only church in south India that has the right to call itself a basilica, one of the largest and most significant churches in Bangalore that anchored the northern side of the square. The basilica had a symmetrical stone front with two bell towers. In the distance was its elongated dome painted a deep cream topped by a deep-­red cross that was illuminated at night. The metal gates to the church, adorned with a sculpture of angels flying against the sun, were open and streams of humanity flowed in and out. The streets leading to and from the square are a dense labyrinth, a higgledy-­ piggledy mass of small buildings; tiny old homes with antique village doors stand next to tottering concrete towers of shops painted a virulent yellow or green. Billboards, flags, pennants, are all covered in advertisements, from face cream to biscuits. No single aesthetic dominates; the neighborhood is an exuberant yet casual mix of old and new. Handcarts, bullock-­carts, tempos, two and three-­ wheelers, all clog the streets. On the sidewalks hawkers stand in front heaps of colorful goods, metal and plastic, clothes and toys, on the sidewalks, making passage almost impossible. This maelstrom of humanity—a jostling crowd of burkha- and hijab-­covered Muslim women with children, Hindu women with nose studs and colorful saris accompanied by men carrying bags and baskets of groceries, and Christian women wearing small gold crosses around their necks, emerging from the church—expertly navigated this urban puzzle.

Figure 9.2a/b  Hawkers in the Square. (Photos courtesy Tulasi Srinivas)

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Figure 9.3  Temple in the street leading to the Square. (Photo courtesy Tulasi Srinivas)

As I stood in the middle of the square to avoid being pushed, I could spy the minarets of a small neighborhood mosque, painted a sharp green. And yet further beyond, on the narrow streets that fed into the square, lie the wind towers of two Hindu temples covered with their iconic painted sculptures of mythical beasts, gods, and goddesses. The soundscape of the square was raucous. I could hear church bells tolling, the mid-­day call of muezzin, amplified by megaphones, calling the faithful to prayer, and the rival chants of the Hindu temple, slightly softer by virtue of their distance. Adding to the cacophony were the repeated shouts of hawkers, “Madame, look! Look!” “Pyjamas, two for one, two for one!” or simply, “Beans! Beans! Beans!” This wall of sound overlaid an olfactory-­scape that was robust. The tantalizing smell of biryani and fried onions from a famous Muslim restaurant in the square, was muddied by the pungent smell of urine, of dung, and rotting vegetable matter from the market nearby. On the breeze one could smell the heady jasmine loops that most of the women wore in their hair, the rose and geranium bouquets from the flower market, and the smell of green leafy vegetables. This sensory mapping that brings home the robust sense of living with the Other.

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There is no way to get a sense of Richards Square in its entirety. Every aspect of the Square is a world unto itself, a world within a world, densely layered and richly engrossing. In the following chapter I will use Richards Square as a pivot point to unearth the genealogy of what I term a “vernacular pluralism”—by which I mean an indigenous, taken-­for-granted, lived, everyday encounter of the Other—that makes a place like Richards Square emblematic of social urban space in the Indian city. Emergent from this question is this extended meditation on pluralism in urban centers and how a landscape of belonging is constructed. Unearthing the genealogy and geometries of Bangalore allows us to open the joints of this vernacular pluralism and scrutinize it for its capacity to create a sense of belonging, not only to understand how it is different to the European notion of the socially plural metropolis, but also, how a vernacular pluralism may contribute to defining living in the contemporary city where the adjacency of the Other is a fact of living. Living with the Other is the central ethical trouble of the contemporary age. Can public space, like Richards Square in Bangalore, articulate and sustain a sense of diverse belonging? In past incarnations of the concept, as F. G. Bailey has done, pluralism has rested upon a “civility of indifference” and so in its present incarnation we can discern an ominous injunction to separate and domesticate the Other (Bailey 1996). So the key question for Bangalore is not if city spaces encourage plurality for that is the question that Western planers and theorists have engaged given the relative safety, homogeneity, and uniformity of their cities. Does our inherited concept of plurality rest unsteadily and awkwardly on a domestication of Otherness? If so, what becomes of the Other that cannot be ignored? I will argue that our evidence allows for a reformulation of the very criteria for a non-Western pluralism, founded not on the prescriptive model of a Western civil society but on the historically descriptive account of the role of religion in public space and public discourse. To me, pluralism is largely a doctrine, and a set of porous, often misunderstood, practices whose problematics stretch far beyond its shallow conceptualizations (Woodhead and Heelas 2000; Held 1999). Pluralism is best seen in operation in micro-­politics where its rituals and beliefs cultivate certain virtues, such as generosity and tolerance to other peoples, to make for a robust and diverse public culture the problems of a lived and living religion (Orsi 2002). But while the plural city has been seen as a utopic dream, in reality contemporary cities (most of which are plural) are theaters of uneasiness, of hostilities and ambivalences. William Connolly has cleverly suggested that one must therefore see pluralism not as an end point but as a shifting goal, which may not lead to consensus but

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may, in fact, be located in agonistic competition for the public domain, for resources, for acknowledgment of belonging. In the following pages I take up Ann G. Gold’s (2014) suggestion to study pluralism both as “shared imaginaries and grammars rooted in the everyday perception of being in the world” and as “conditions of settings in which diversity is accorded legitimacy” (cf. Peletz 2009), highlighting the disparate, dis-­articulated, and often contesting parts of Bangalore society as it came into being. The clamorous sensory landscape of Richards Square not only brings the requirements of a genealogy of pluralism to the forefront of our vision, it also brings the troubled complexities of lived religion, of pluralism, of publics, and of belonging to vivid life, an echo of Robert Orsi’s focus on lived experiences of religion, situated “among the ordinary concerns of life, at the junctures of self and culture, family and social world” (Orsi 2005: 172). In her recent work, Elaine Fisher (2017) charts how early modern Hindu India of the thirteenth century had a strong notion of a religious public that was essentially a heterogeneous, plural, public realm. I argue that this pluralism has endured, and as evidenced in Richards Square I suggest that the modern Indian urban public is accommodative of a variety of religious life. Further, I argue that unlike its European counterpart, and despite its constitutional formulation as a secular republic, the Indian urban public has remained thoroughly and unapologetically inflected by religious concerns, causing a reinterpretation of what it means to be secular. In spending a few minutes in Richards Square plunging into the urban lived religion of South Asian metropolis, it is clear that the question for countries like India is not how to encourage religious pluralism, but rather, the reverse—how do we manage the public presence of many religions in an urban fabric? This question is an important one for it speaks to the many problems that liberal democracies find themselves in today, about how to govern plural societies and still allow for spaces of expression. It speaks to how we value different cultures within the city, and asks, is there an ethics of expression of urban pluralism? What if we look to spaces like Richards Square in Bangalore as emblematic of another kind of plurality, an indigenous plurality, from which the Euro-American city can learn and profit? I suggest that the vernacular pluralism of Bangalore is didactic in that it can teach us about how to be inclusive, to construct and sustain a sense of belonging, and the ethics of living in the everyday. So in this work, the plural publics of Bangalore city act as a metaphor to “re-­envision and re-­describe” the social worlds we inhabit as well as the normative ways in which we inhabit them. It acts as a heuristic tool that enables a critical rethinking of the role of the experience and knowledge of religion as lived in the everyday.

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Figure 9.4  Businesses that front the Square. (Photo courtesy Tulasi Srinivas)

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Bangalore today Richards Square is fairly typical of bazaars in the city of Bangalore, an active physical site where the religious and ethno-­linguistic pluralism endemic of the city, is demonstrably visible and tangible. Indeed, Richards Square reminds me strongly of Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the morphology of a city that gets beyond our understanding of urban pluralism as an abstraction: As concrete abstractions, however they attain a “real” existence by virtue of networks and pathways, by virtue of bunches or clusters of relationships: but it is important to note that these newly developed networks do not eradicate from their social context those earlier ones, superimposed upon one another over the years, which constitute the various markets; local, regional, national and international; the market in commodities, the money or capital markets, the labor market, the market in works, symbols and signs—and lastly and the most recently created—the market in spaces themselves. Lefebvre [1974]/1991: 86; emphasis mine

Today Bangalore is part of the global market where labor, land, capital, and knowledge collide. As the nation’s leading Information Technology exporter1 Bangalore’s eminence is secured with a GDP of $83 billion, mostly in foreign exchange. The Information Technology industry in Bangalore (hereafter IT) is well known as the biggest in Asia and it includes hardware development, software creation, and the global services industry, that in turn includes “back office” services for the financial, technological, and infrastructural industries all over the globe. Engineers in Bangalore create patents for software functionality while college graduates walk customers through technological and infrastructural glitches. The IT industry attracted qualified engineers to the city, serendipitously creating, what is known in development circles as an “innovation cluster,” and with them a whole host of in-­migrants to develop an entrepreneurial service infrastructure for this industry, from waiters in restaurants and pubs to construction labor. The growing demographics of the city, and the rapid and often illegal building activities by land developers in cahoots with global criminal networks, have made the city the second fastest growing in India with an estimated population of 9.8 million that grows by approximately 8,000 undocumented in-­migrants every day. The most significant difference between twentieth-­century city-­ making and those of the twenty-­first century is the large-­scale involvement of

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private enterprise. In both the colonial era fashioning of a new imperial capital, and the postcolonial construction of special enterprise zones (SEZs), post-­ industrial technology based mini cities that gird Bangalore, the state was the key actor.2

The secular Indian state and religious plurality Scholars of the Indian state (Bhargava et al. 1999) have largely focused on the notion of civil religion and the unique Indian formation of secularism as the governments’ indifference3 towards religion4 rooted in the colonial understanding of every man’s right to his religion5 and to not be oppressed by another’s beliefs. In colonial times the mandate of the Indian state was one of containment of religions, their institutions, their expressions, and their practices, that spilled into the public sphere—a custodial problem—which has continued, by virtue of the constitutionality of the Indian secular state,6 into the present day. This custodial position forces the state to “keep a principled distance from all public or private, individual-­oriented or community-­oriented religious institution.” Indian secularism, then, is an ethically sensitive, negotiated settlement between diverse groups and divergent values7 very different form its Western counterpart (Bhargava 2010). While the dominant self-­understanding of Western secularism is that it is a universal doctrine requiring the strict separation (exclusion) of church/religion, in contrast in India secularism refers to the governmental practice of an “indifference towards religion,” implying that all religions have the right to the public realm. So India provides an alternative model of secularism that is different from the French “laïcité” model and the American “wall of separation” model by allowing for the vibrant and religiously plural public realm. Specifically, the Indian urban public is a space for performance of the religiosity. Unlike the European case, then, we are obliged to speak not of a public sphere in the singular as Habermas does, but of publics in the plural (cf. Warner 2002). The Indian model is in contradistinction to the European one and the vernacular publics of India provide a social space for the cultivation and performance of religious identities that may, and often do, conflict with the dominant cultural order, articulating a robust example of a lived vernacular pluralism. I suggest that Indian cities are the sites of a robust vernacular ethnic, religious, and linguistic pluralism that is organic, multi-­layered, and differently ethical.

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The history of plurality in the metropolis Mathur and da Cunha (2006: 7) in their beautifully illustrated work on Bangalore, perceptively note that “Bangalore cannot be merely written about. Nor can it just be photographed or mapped. Its representation has to be devised.” Through a close reading of the history of Bangalore city I will demonstrate that as each ethno-­linguistic group that occupied the city, they layered over each other’s culture and geometries of urban form, erasing some forms and establishing others, remaking the city a social and urban palimpsest and creating, a vibrant plural public where belonging can take many different forms.

The medieval depot city Some 500 years ago, the region of Bangalore was dominated by a series of erratic warrior kings and feudatory warlords called Palegars,8 local Hindu chieftains who established the city as a horticultural center, an inland trade depot, and a market for textiles and produce. The first “king” and founder of Bangalore, Kempe Gowda I9 (1513–1559) and then his son Immadi Kempe Gowda (1569– 1623) (Nair 2005: 30) ruled the region, building a mud fort in its center.10 Both rulers created a network of local tutelary deities and local Hindu Shiva temples11 within the fortified city of Bangalore. Kempe Gowda and his chieftains were also very interested, for obvious reasons of military might, in upping their food supply. They persuaded and then forcibly brought a caste of agriculturists and gardeners, called Tigalas to the city (Nagendra 2015). They were housed to the south of the fort along with their dairy cows. The city became an organized center of trade and a defense fortress in the southern peninsula, a military mercantile complex which housed peoples of different castes, religions, and ethnicities. Bangalore became known in the following century as a depot city—a military, manufacturing, and mercantile complex created an urban magnet for medieval labor. “Bangalore was an important entrepot with an export trade in betel, pepper and sandalwood” (Srinivas 2001:40–1). Although much of the manufacturing activity centered around textile production, which continued into the twentieth century, there were weaving castes (such as the Devangas and Patagaras), independent merchant castes in commodities (such as the Banajigas) and the agriculturalists (Tigalas) and tanners (Madigas) (Srinivas 2001: 41). The city or pete was built along a rough grid with axes running north-­south and east-­west12 that divided the city into four quadrants that housed

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manufacturing castes associated by guilds, with the fort in the center, surrounded by gardening plots, tanks, and hillocks. Within the city all the cotton traders and agricultural traders, who used to come to the local market in the Bangalore region, created neighborhoods of caste-­based guilds; Akkipete for those trading in rice or akki, Bale pete for those trading in bangles or bale and jewelry, Tharagupet for those trading in iron and metals, and so on. Each one of these trades was pursued by a different caste and ethnic group; for example, the bangle dealers came from as far away as Gujarat in the north near the Pakistan border. They spoke different languages, ate different foods, and often worshipped different folk gods, though all, in today’s’ parlance, could be considered broadly Hindu. As we know from archival sources the city also held a small group of Muslim Arab horse traders who brought Arabian stallions from the central Arabian Peninsula for Kempe Gowda and his men to ride when they went out to survey their lands. These horse traders were nomads often walking between the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, but when they arrived in Bangalore, they lived in a community east of the city, which until the mid–1990s, still was called “Arab lane” and held a range of stables and a mosque. Today the mosque has grown as has the neighborhood. The city was held from the mid–1600s until 1687 by the military militant Hindus Marathas from Bijapur, and Venkoji, the brother of the famous military ruler Shivaji (1668). The Marathas brought water technologies to grow more food and tailors to sew uniforms. Many of the Maratha tailors known by the surname Rao Bahadur (the brave one) still live in Bangalore today. But the Marathas were defeated by the Muslim Mughals who wanted to control south India, and arrived in the city under the commandership of Khasim Khan in 1686. On July 10 1687 the Mughal Army from Delhi invaded and took over the city of Bangalore which was by this point more than just a strategic location in the Deccan (Nair 2005: 38). The Mughals had little interest in governance so they handed the Jagir (landholding) of Bangalore over to the ruling house of Wodeyars in Mysore; Hindu kings, who took the city and state in exchange for 4,000 ashrafis (gold coins). The Mysore Wodeyar kings prized Bangalore for its location and they added to the infrastructure and amenities of the city and they allotted its running to their Muslim general Haider Ali who became de facto king of Bangalore. The city grew larger and more immigrants came to the city from neighboring Tamil country and from the Marathi-­speaking areas to the north and the Muslim population in the city also increased significantly at this time. The settlement was believed to have between 10,000 and 15,000 people (Srinivas

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2001: 3). In the reign of Tipu Sultan, the son of Haider Ali, Bangalore became a military center with weapons and armory manufacture (Srinivas 2001:46–7; Nair 2005: 44–50). Tipu Sultan and Haider Ali built more temples and worshiped in them, and built more parks and other public promenades establishing and solidifying the reputation of the city as a plural metropolis (Srinivas 2001:44).

The colonial twinned city While doing fieldwork in the city from 1999–2014 I would awaken before dawn in my home in the British colonial Cantonment (from the French “canton” meaning corner) section of the city, and I would “catch” a gaily painted three-­ wheeler “autorickshaw” to cross the two-­and-a-­half miles of the city to Malleswaram. But though it took a mere twenty minutes, I was made aware that I drilled through sediments of Bangalore’s colonial history as I did so, through the emblematic liberation of space as we came out of the confines of the Cantonment surrounded as it still is by a zone of public buildings and parkland. In crossing from one cultural part of the city to another I crossed worlds of time and space, of meaning and value, of imperium and liberation that no contemporary map brought alive. By 1750 the British colonial administration in the lowlands had decided that the Mysore kingdom with all its wealth had to come under British rule and under the purview of the East India Company. They launched a series of attacks on Tipu Sultan known in history as the Anglo Mysore wars. Cornwallis’ army stormed the fort on March 7 1791 and laid siege to the city within. They then built a separate military encampment city to the east of the old city known as the Bangalore cantonment. Founded in 1809, it was separated from the old city by a thick “bounded hedge” (Mathur and da Cunha 2006: 21), to denote and substantiate the separation between the indigenous city and the colonial city. When the British took over the city of Bangalore it was reputed to have 44 temples in its four quadrants “each patronized by a manufacturing caste of trade group” (Nair 2005: 34). The cantonment was a foreign military outpost in “hostile” territory—a true “subaltern city.” Rev. William Arthur in 1847 writes of how he was struck by the “military air” of the Bangalore cantonment. His picturesque description; “the scarlet of the line, the blue of the artillery, the glitter of the hussar, or the bright blue sky colour of the native horse” (Arthur 1847: 143). In 1850 the population of Bangalore swelled to 132,000 of which 79,000

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lived in the Cantonment and 53,000 in the old city. In the wake of the British takeover of Bangalore the cantonment was developed as a separate city with wide roads, military barracks, parade grounds, a central officers’ mess and club, a gymkhana, and churches. The British, too, imported necessary labor. They built a railhead from the coast to Bangalore from the nearby fort St. George in Madras (now Chennai) and brought Tamil labor, both Muslim Hindu and Christian converts, from the low coastal plains to service the Cantonment to act as cooks, butlers, ayahs for children, gardeners, and grooms. Between 1792 and 1810 Bangalore grew from some estimates of 80,000 people to 151,000. The Tamil population lived in the area outside the cantonment in a settlement called Blackpally, thought by some to refer to the color of the inhabitants; it is this informal settlement of servants and other labor that supported the British military settlements. In 1809 Bangalore became the seat of British Governance for the whole region. A engineer from Edinburgh named John Blakiston built the British cantonment in Bangalore, including the main church of St. Mark’s Cathedral in 1808 and the main hospital in 1809 (later named Victoria hospital). By 1850 Bangalore was a thriving military cantonment with land for racing, theaters, cafes, military encampments, industry, suburban housing around the cantonment, etc. Blackpally (some said named after Blakiston) became a mixed encampment which slowly was regularized, housing a mixed religious population with Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all rubbing shoulders. The pete was largely Hindu and Muslim but traders, administrators, soldiers, subalterns, shopkeepers, barbers, grooms, and dressmakers all went back and forth across the boundary between the two cities in the daytime, though at night curfew was observed. In 1889 the British built a market in the center of Blackpally to cater to the needs of the large military subaltern housing in the city and called it Russell Market.

The modern global city The separation of the cantonment and the city that I crossed and recrossed was not just spatial but imaginative as well. The focus of the city shifted to the cantonment as the early British Commissioners focused on developing the cantonment as the new administrative and military center. The colonial legacy is also visible, though now hidden behind the façades of the new imperium of neoliberalism, but present in the accents of some of the elderly residents, the charming statue of Queen Victoria13 at the entrance to Cubbon Park, and the

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public gardens and libraries that the city was famous for. Indeed these traces of imperium are part of the palimpsest nature of the city. Stallmeyer (2011: 29) pertinently states, “Bangalore’s history cannot be seen as a series of monolithic eras punctuated by moments of transformation or defined by any single economic, social or political paradigm.” So while certain episodes were transformational in the history of the city and for purposes of conciseness and clarity we are forced to focus on them, this does not mean that “the end of erasure from memory, practice or the physical environment of what came before” (Stallmeyer 2011: 29). The city is thus a palimpsest where multiple and overlapping histories bleed into one another as a continuum which shapes the urban terrain and the regimes of value within it: the local moral worlds of its inhabitants, largely as Stallmeyer (2011: 30) notes, “in complex and unplanned ways.” Post-Independence Bangalore, because of its central defensible position in the Deccan, its history as a military center, and its resident technological and engineering expertise became the chosen site for many of the new Indian government’s large-­scale public industries and research centers in the 1980s— the Indian Telephone Industries, the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, the Indian Institute of Science, the Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, the Bharat Electronics Limited, and so on—the list of large-­scale public industries was endless and by 1990s these public-­private partnerships employed about 365,000 people in 350 industries (cf. Nair 2005: 83) expanding the opportunities for both skilled and unskilled labor in the city. This in turn led to a greater concentration of colleges and higher education institutions in Bangalore to act as feeder schools for the intellectual capital required, as well as creating a crucible of innovation—a pool of world-­class engineering talent located in these large insulated industries that worked independently of the world marketplace creating new and innovative products purely for Indian achievement (Nair 2005: 79). And this new influx changed the shape and meaning of the city in significant ways. Though Bangalore bypassed “the smokestack stage of industrialization” (Nair 2005: 83) nonetheless it was a working-­class city with an enormous number of industrial workers and still houses a global workforce. The insulated and innovative population of world-­accredited engineers and high-­tech workers that worked silently and invisibly, is the engine for India’s sudden leap onto the world’s neoliberal technological stage. When doing a Google search for “Cities of the Future,” Bangalore frequently pops up as the city of future technological innovation. Bangalore is the center of Asia’s Silicon Valley and host to more multi-­national high-­tech companies than

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any other city. Its roster includes AT&T, HP, DEC, IBM, Texas Instruments, Apple, and Motorola. With some of the country’s finest technology institutes, the city has a deep pool of tech-­based talent. Bangalore is an iconic city in the Indian imagination—where a glorious fusing of the high-­tech future of India meets a pleasant tree-­lined urbanscape. IT workers are a “highly visible segment of the new middle class that emerged in liberalizing India: with their high salaries and opportunities for travel abroad they can afford fairly luxurious lifestyles at relatively young ages, thus forming a new elite professional class” in Bangalore (Upadhya and Vasavi 2008:10). The direct employment figures are roughly 1.3 million which translates into several million other jobs, what Aneesh (2006: 9) has referred as the “liquefaction of labor.” Since Bangalore is one of the biggest and oldest centers of IT the numbers of potential workers pouring into the city every day is dramatic and some estimate it at about 8,000 new in-­migrants daily creating a “silicon valley imaginary” of both physical spaces of freedom and economic opportunities of wonder to take hold (Stallmeyer 2011: 22) through a “re-­creating or re-­inventing” of the city’s history or tradition in ways that help fulfill the aspirations of its contemporary citizens. The cityscape both instantiates and simultaneously express the abstract power of global capitalist flows and instruments of control and closure as the built form become progressively unmanageable due to the breakdown of the urban form, and clear distinctions of public and private, sacred and profane, and authentic and copy become less relevant.

The palimpsest city In discussing Bangalore in the shadow of the shift in the millennium I give the impression that it is one cohesive city. While it is deemed to be one conurbation area,14 as with many colonial cities, spatially, culturally, and historically, it has been a divided city for the past 600 years or so. Rarely are cities constructed as one complete monolithic unit, rather they are layered showing the effects of different political regimes, of cross-cultural influences, and of economic transformations. The city is formed and reformed as builders respond to the need of the moment, as buildings are added, modified, torn down, and replaced. One can read the city as a continuous text uncovering previous influences and changes as they come together in the built form to create a new and perhaps more appropriate spatialized identity for the inhabitants. I chart the unstable territory of the history of the city and while such cartography is suspect, provisional, and

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incomplete, it is nonetheless crucial to our understanding of the habits, the histories, the modes of attention as well as the regimes, theaters, discourses, and performances from which our understandings of the complexity of global cityscapes can profit. Richards Square is thus part of a continuous fabric of plurality, an endemic and vernacular notion of diversity endemic to India. It is a rooted diversity and vernacular inclusiveness that is unimaginable in most Western cities.

Troubling plurality However, in the past two decades or so as the city has been absorbed into global circuits of commerce and knowledgeware it has also become a local site for global conflicts over religious and ethnic identity. Repeated violence is the separation of global-­style terror, usually associated with Islamic terror groups, and homegrown nationalism associated with a rising muscular Hinduism have played out their civilizational battle in the streets of the city. Newspapers report increasing terrorism-­style violence on both sides, of threats, arson, burglary, rape, and land grabs by force. This global weaponization of religion has led to repeated and escalating violence between Muslims and Hindus in the city, and the nation as a whole has become a chicken-­and-egg-­problem with each religious group inciting violence and laying blame for increasing cycles of retributive violence upon each other. For the intelligentsia where stands on the violence— “whose side are you on?”-style interrogations—became signs in the larger society of belief in India, as a secular plural nation, that many of the middle class seem as weak in the face of violence or as a muscular defensive Hindutva ideal. Evidence of this troubling bleeds through the processions that pass through Richards Square. When the festival of Our Lady of the Basilica passes through the square Bangalore City Police flood the square in combat attire in anticipation of religious and communal violence. The soundscape has become louder as each religious group tries to outshout the other and claim the public space. Reflections on the politicized usage of the notion of neighborhood point to yet another problem, namely, the perception of religion as a force that enters into play only in moments of conflict—a factor that hardens divisions within a community and exacerbates differences expressed in ethnic or cultural terms— while “normal” conditions of neighborly interactions supposedly set religion aside. Depicting religion as a cause of conflict and its absence as a condition of civility reinforces the view of a secularized, religion-­free world as the only truly

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civil, nonviolent, and democratic one (Casanova 2009).15 Engaging critically with such an approach means shifting our attention to the role of religion in everyday life, not just during moments of crisis. The power of religion is manifested in the fact that it both unites and divides, undermines and consolidates difference, generates dispositions, embodies knowledge, and intentionally and unintentionally informs action. Fisher (2017) argues that this plurality is not new; that historically unity, primarily Hindu unity in early modern India, was qualified at its core by plurality. Alterity in India is not something unnatural and fearful but is inherent (though perhaps annoying to the point of outbursts of real violence). As Ramachandra Guha (2012) points out, the real surprise with India is not the periodic violence that erupts but that it can be governed at all given its innate pluralism. Pluralism is accepted as endemic. That one’s neighbors will occasionally slaughter or worship animals in their home, sing songs at dawn, drink and eat what might be “forbidden” foods, practice deeply disturbing religious worship, burn or inter their dead, let their women and men behave in appalling ways, or in short, engage oppositional worldviews to oneself, are an accepted trope of daily life in the subcontinent. Indians accept this anachronistic and often iconoclastic behavior as something one must deal with as Indians living in India particularly in the dense cheek-­by-jowl living of the Indian city. Only by exploring these different facets of religion and studying neighborhood as a setting of “ordinary pluralism” (Gold 2014) is it possible to comprehend how the dynamics of differences and commonalities may trigger a shift from tolerance into xenophobia, and to grasp the ambiguous nature of multireligious conviviality. As such, the recognition of others’ right to celebrate and one’s obligation to duly acknowledge this fact serves as a shared grammar of conviviality and a local means of legitimizing pluralism (cf. Gold 2014: 133).

The ethics of pluralism In sum then, though unusual in its growth and industry, Bangalore is emblematic of the natural plural social world that is the Indian city. The persistence of this uninterrupted tradition in the Indian imagination offers other possibilities for defining the self and Other, and for being-­in-the-­world. This sense of society sits beyond the singular identities enforced by hypermodernity and globalization. Asian and global trade and religious proselytization, both to and from India, increased its diversity. This idea of India as a porous matrix that allows for the

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irregular, strange, and different, has been a severe bruised in the evocations of nationalism of the right-­wing Hindu fundamentalisms which emerged in India in the twentieth century. I have discussed how a vigorous and vernacular pluralism exists in Bangalore city both due to the history of the city as a mercantile, industrial, and military city as well as the particular unique understandings of information and law that abide in the city. As I have shown that a history of continued conquest and great migrations for the past 500 years has etched its traces on the city of Bangalore both socially and spatially. Gujaratis, Punjabis, Tamilians, Bengalis, Kannadigas, Christians, Parsis, Muslims, and others all live within the confines of the city in simple neighborliness. This philosophy of neighborliness manifests in everyday practices of social conviviality that reach across religious boundaries and transform “religious others” into neighbors, friends, and partners in locally undertaken activities. An awareness of diversity, which is respected and safeguarded, simultaneously facilitates the recognition of similarities and the development of ecumenical activities at the grassroots level—be it a common celebration of the harvest in the village or neighbors inviting each other over for Christmas. It is this dynamic interplay of differences and commonalities that constitutes the system of “living together” and provides a means of legitimizing diversity. Religious boundaries are maintained and religion continues to serve as a marker of difference, but this does not preclude a continuous process that might be described as “blurring” boundaries. Blurred boundaries are both a product and a condition of everyday, collaborative activities that constitute local ways of “making do,” developed and pursued over decades by the inhabitants of this peripheral region. Crucially, the process of making the boundaries less “bright”— highlighting what is common in neighbors instead of what is different—blurs difference, but does not dispel it. Everyday practices of boundary crossing are characterized by tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies, which cut across villages, parishes, families, and individuals. The local conceptualization of pluralism, expressed in the notion of ecumenism, comes in many different shades, so to speak. It can be understood as an affirmation of good social relations and respect for others’ beliefs and practices, but also as a cover for inequalities and dominance. In short, ecumenism, as understood and experienced locally embraces both positive and negative experiences. As I have said elsewhere, it is a social science truism that identity at any level (individual, communitarian, tribal, familial, national, and trans-­national) is

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constructed through narratives and performances of difference. Therefore identity, even religious identity, is never just created ex situ but instead develops through a set of relations with others, in relationships with an alterity, real or imagined. This plenitude of alterity is particularly established in the popular religious traditions of the subcontinent that regularly transgress the boundaries of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, caste, and class. This polyphonic quality of Indian society, its vernacular pluralism, is a whole way of relating to the world, individually and collectively; it is offered, in the absence of modern administrative and legal institutions, as a set of ethical parameters for everyday life, creating and sustaining many worlds of imagined possibilities and realities.

10

Jerusalem’s Imaginaries in the Neo-Liberal City: Re-Visiting Visual Representations in the “Holy City” Tovi Fenster

This chapter re-­visits the visual and sound representations of the religious-­ secular Jewish conflict in West Jerusalem identified back in 2004 (Fenster 2004, 2005, 2007) and 2011 (Fenster 2011). Then, I interpreted those representations as part of the right to the city battle of each of the groups to “appropriate” public spaces (Lefebvre 1991, Fenster 2011). Using this concept, I discussed the situation in Jerusalem as “post secular” especially as related to those clear representations of the religious-­secular protest, which have been very present in public spaces in those days, especially in 2008 just before the municipal elections. In this chapter, I focus on re-­visiting the same sites again in order to find out if those representations are still present and dominant or if they vanished or have been replaced by other representations. I will start with a brief background on Jerusalem followed by an elaboration of my 2016 walk to the same sites I visited in 2004 and 2008. I will than suggest my understanding to the changes of visual representations I observed in 2016.

Jerusalem Throughout modern history, three major monotheistic religions have considered Jerusalem to be a holy city. For Jews, Jerusalem is the city of King David and King Solomon. For Christians, Jerusalem is the site of Christ’s crucifixion. And for Muslims, Jerusalem is the city where Muhammad miraculously arrived from Mecca before continuing his journey to heaven. This religious symbolism has dominated Jerusalem throughout its long history, giving the city its global reputation. For the past decades, this has also been the religious-­political context

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for the nationalistic struggle over Jerusalem between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs. Today, Jerusalem is the largest municipality in Israel, with nearly 800,000 inhabitants (63 percent Jewish, 35 percent Muslim, 2 percent Christian) plus a rapidly growing number of tourists. It is currently an ethnically diverse city, troubled by internal conflicts and contradictions between Jews and Palestinians as well as between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews which is the focus of this chapter; but, at the same time, it offers unparalleled religious attractions and draws a large number of tourists whenever the level of violence is acceptable. Most of Jerusalem’s inhabitants do not benefit from the economic globalization of Israel. The large ultra-Orthodox Jewish community exhibits extremely low rates of participation in the civilian workforce, because its male adherents are engaged in studying the Torah/Bible while its women work in menial, unskilled occupations although this trend is changing. In addition, due to the ongoing geopolitical conflict, the Palestinian Arab population is essentially remote from the national economy, and is largely limited to lower-­ranking occupations (Hasson 1996; Fenster 2005).

2004 and 2011: Visual representations in Jerusalem In this section I go back to previous works on visual representations taken place in 2004 and 2011 (Fenster 2004, 2007, 2011). I relate here to three types of representations: First, representations expressing secular-­religious conflicts that appeared in various public spaces in Jerusalem especially referring to the municipal elections back in 2008. Second, modesty representations especially appear in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Sharim; and third, the location and presence of the Shabbat barriers in the city marking an informal border between the secular and religious neighborhoods. All those visual representations were interpreted back in 2011 as visual expressions of the right to the city (Fenster 2011).

2008 Municipal elections’ visual representations 2008 has been a harsh year in Jerusalem, especially towards November 11 when the municipal elections took place. It was after five years of ultra-Orthodox mayorship and two leading candidates run for the new mayorship: an ultraOrthodox candidate Meir Porush and a secular candidate Nir Barkat. The latter has been eventually elected and serves as a mayor until today. Perhaps these are

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Figure 10.1a/b  Before 2008 election graffiti (left 2008; right 2016). (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster)

the reasons for the harsh graffiti that appeared in the streets of Jerusalem especially in its secular part (see Figure 10.1a). Why these representations signify the right to the city conflict? Because they expressed the fear of the secular people of a denial of their right in case an ultra-Orthodox mayor is elected especially with regards to the opening of cinemas, theaters, and restaurants on the Shabbat.

Modesty wall visual representations in 2004 and 2011 However, it is not only this anecdotal event of elections which usually causes visual representations to appear in the streets, there are also some other visual representations which are more permanent and I would like to elaborate slightly on these; these are the modesty signs in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods that serve as “modesty walls”; they contain specific instructions as to how women should be dressed when they cross their neighborhoods.

Figure 10.2a/b  Modesty signs in Mea Shearim neighborhood (left 2002; right 2016). (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster)

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These signs have been there since the 1967 war when a large number of tourists fled to Jerusalem and crossed their neighborhoods on their way to the old city of Jerusalem. The ultra-Orthodox felt threatened and thus placed those signs (see elaboration on Fenster 2004 and 2011).

The Shabbat barriers 2008 and 2016 The third visual representations are the Sabbath barriers. These are put out on the Sabbath to block access to streets where the majority of residents are religious and prevent cars from driving in those parts of the city. I went to visit the one near the place where live, because I wanted to find out whether there is a change in their location and whether the barriers were moved towards the secular part of the neighborhood but it seems that the status quo is kept at least from this respect. As already mentioned, the aim back of my 2011 paper was to analyse those visual representations as fulfilling the right to the city—as right to appropriate and right to participate—of the ultra-Orthodox and of the secular Jewish people and to connect those religious-­cultural constructions of urban spaces to the politics of urban governance. That is, I asked what is the role of the municipality in that visual conflict of graffiti and street signs representations. I then elaborated on the interpretation of those “bottom up” activities in Mea Shearim as reflecting the ultra-Orthodox struggle to establish its politics of identity and community by challenging the sovereignty of the municipality by using these street signs without a permit. I also suggested that the “secular” graffiti played a significant role in constructing cultural and sociological notions of places through evoking reactive public discourse which then motivated further the social constructions of cultural and ideological landscapes by disclosing the “urban other” (the ultraOrthodox) and stimulating an ambivalent public discourse. I have also indicated the “top down” municipality’s helpless or non-­responsive attitude to both graffiti and street signs as acts of what I called: “ambivalent urban polities” which is probably the opposite of “religious pluralism.” I now move to illustrate what I found in the same sites in 2016.

The 2016 walk—from religious-­secular to neo-­liberal representations In this section I argue that Jerusalem today as reflected from the visual representations which appear in the same locations investigated in 2004 and

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2011 expresses less of a secular–ultra-Orthodox conflict for fulfilling the right to the city but more of a “neo-­liberal tolerance.” This is not to say that the religious-­ secular visual representations of the conflict have vanished completely but they have been “softened” by the development of Jerusalem as a “neo-­liberal global locality” city in the last decade as elaborated below.

Comparing visual representations One of the locations I visited back in 2004, 2008, and now in 2016 is the secular area of Jerusalem. The changes of graffiti between 2008 and 2016 appear in Figure 10.3a/b. Not only is there no graffiti on the walls the coffee shop has also enlarged its space as part of a growing consumerism in the city center especially in this area which is inhabited by the Bzalel School of Architecture whose students are regular costumers of this café. Those harsh signs of 2004 disappeared and the look of the café is white and clean. Figure 10.1a/b shows the graffiti that appeared nearby the café with a specific sign to the date of the election 11.11 and a symbol of ultra-Orthodox with the word ‫ םהלשורי‬which is a smart Hebrew connection of two words meaning “Jerusalem is theirs” (if you elect for the ultraOrthodox candidate). Today it is absent. The wall is clean. A graffiti of the same symbols appeared back in 2008 in secular neighborhoods near my home but, again, they vanished a long time ago. The next stop in my walk is the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. I already presented my analysis on the street signs in Mea Shearim back in 2004 (Fenster 2004). I then indicated that this area has been mentioned in interviews of secular women as the area where they felt the most uncomfortable and lack of belonging. This is because the street signs pose a clear request in

Figure 10.3a/b  Graffiti on the café wall (left 2008; right 2016). (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster)

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Hebrew and English of how women should be dressed when they walk in the neighborhood: Please do not pass our neighborhood in immodest clothes. Modest clothes include: closed blouse, with long sleeves, long skirt, no trousers, no tight-­ fitting clothes. Back in 2004 such signs were spread all over the streets and alleys of Mea Shearim neighborhood. So I wanted to find out what has changed in the neighborhood. The signs are still there today on the main western entrance to the main road and the main entrance to the eastern side of the street, but they are somewhat less prominent, old, and torn apart. However, the big surprise for me has been the part of the walk in Mea Shearim which exposed the strong economic neo-­liberal changes in this neighborhood. This made me think of a new situation of a “softening” secular-­religious conflict in this area. I noticed that from the western entrance to the main street which is closer to the city center and up to the middle of the street there are many new and/or renovated shops which were opened in the last few years, a situation that indicates a change in consumerism of the ultra-Orthodox community. Thus, side-by-side to the traditional shops of holy books and objects, there are new shops such as cafés, jewelry shops, bicycles shops, etc. Figure 10.4a/b shows this part of the road which is more modernized and better maintained. It is also important to note that on this side there are no signs of modest dressing either in the street or at entrances to shops. Modesty signs at the entrance to shops which were common back in 2002 appear only on the other part of the road. One can notice that these signs indicating that women should enter the shops with modest clothing have the same printed appearance and probably are put by the same organization. So, this specific street (the high street of Mea Shearim) has changed dramatically—economically as well as

Figure 10.4a/b  New shops and maintenance in Mea Shearim main road (2016). (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster)

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Figure 10.5a/b  Neo-­liberal housing in ultra-Orthodox neighborhood (2016). (Photos courtesy Tovi Fenster)

religiously and the two are connected! Related to this issue I want to present two new and current changes.

New neo-­liberal representations Besides the changes I have observed in the high street of Mea Shearim, the most significant and interesting change I have noticed is an advertisement for a posh building built nearby the neighborhood with a clear indication to the ultraOrthodox community. The sign in Figure 10.5a says: “In the middle of the city the second stage of this complex is being built. Its unique location is an asset. In proximity to big synagogues, the centers of the important rabbi in proximity to ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, the city market, city centers . . .” This sign shows of a change in the ultra-Orthodox housing market, from small, old, deteriorating flats in Mea Shearim to new, big, posh flats at the outskirts of the neighborhood (see Figure 10.5b), which is another example of the two discourses developed among the ultra-Orthodox community; the religious discourse and the neo-­liberal one.

Discussion and conclusions What I suggest here is that the neo-­liberal economic market (especially in housing and consumption) is now much more developed than in 2004 and 2011 both in secular and religious areas of the city. This creates a more tolerant atmosphere which

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is expressed in the absence of the past signs in the secular side of the city and also in the appearance of new shops in Mea Shearim street and new housing developments nearby the neighborhood. I suggest that these transformations are part of a “neo-­ liberal tolerance” developed in the city, meaning that there are now more common economic interests than before that soften religious conflicts and interests. This neo-­ liberal trend in Jerusalem is compatible with Harvey’s (1989, 1990) observation that city development focuses in the last decade or so on capital accumulation in a highly competitive global market and it is based on mega-­gentrification projects, giant malls, and luxurious high-­rises. Indeed, in Jerusalem, city development has been taken by the global capital and private developers (cf. Alfasi and Fenster 2005; Alfasi and Fenster 2009) and its secular mayor sees it as its major goal—to transform Jerusalem into an entrepreneurial neo-­liberal city. Thus, I have observed a shift from explicit visual secular-­religious conflict into representations of urban neo-­liberal activities, whereby urban capitalist spaces consist mainly of consumption and business activities, leading to what David Harvey calls a new form of urbanity. This new form is managed by urban players keen to generate more capital by becoming increasingly active in the global competitive urban network (Berger 2015). This new form of urbanity has been identified elsewhere (Alfasi and Fenster 2009) as global locality challenging the traditional binary division between global/local. This term suggests that each city can be located in a range between global and local activities. Three parameters that reflect global-­local processes were suggested (Alfasi and Fenster 2009): the spread and functioning of the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector in a city; the spatial distribution of “creative” professions and the location of “creative classes” within cities and the city’s attractiveness for tourists and foreign investors. Following that, Jerusalem represents unique local significance that is recognized and valued on the global scale. This globality is not economic but it affects the global interactions of individuals, institutions, and businesses in these cities and thus it is termed a global locality city.1 Thus, this new form of urbanity—the global locality expressed in ICT activities, creative class, tourism, and foreign investment “softens” the religious-­ secular tensions in the city and this is expressed in visual representations, signs, and graffiti in the city. This is because of the mutual capitalistic neo-­liberal interests of the municipality together with foreign and local investors creating a “neo-­liberal tolerance” in the city. To sum, I suggest two observations: Neo-­liberalization “softens” identity struggles that appeared in 2004 and 2011. Of course, neo-­liberalism didn’t start in the last few years but it has become more

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apparent in Jerusalem in the last five years especially with the dominancy of private developers in the city’s development and the municipal encouragement of private involvement in the city’s economies. I see the disappearance of the graffiti and the expansion of the café and more so, the renovation, re-­building in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood as part of this visible neo-­liberal growing economy as much as of the promotion of consumerism—jewelry, bicycles, etc. or in general “secular products” in ultra-Orthodox areas side-by-side to the posh housing projects to both ultra-Orthodox and secular areas. This shows that the secular-­religious struggle in Jerusalem is now less extreme, less clear, and is more disoriented because neo-­liberal consumerism is common to all. There is a continuous, ongoing ultra-Orthodox conflict versus municipality and state. The above observation is of course not to say that the ultra-Orthodox stopped their fights against the municipality and the state as seen in the streets notices that they put. The issues raised relate to the closure on Shabbat of cafés and of the drafting to the army of the ultra-Orthodox young men—a national issue in Israel. So the fight against the municipality and the state is still present for specific matters but it is beginning to soften on economic matters.

11

“The Sumerian Tempelstadt”: The Modern Making of an Ancient Urban Concept Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum

This chapter will exemplify the change of urban imaginaries in historical perspective by looking into the concept of Tempelstadt. In the early twentieth century ce, scholars studying the cultural and economic history of third millennium Mesopotamia generated the model of the “temple” as the leading institution of the Sumerian city-­states during the third millennium bce. The concept of Tempelstadt suggests a particular close association of religion and the city. Moreover, it seems to attest to the central role of political theology and religion in the process of the so-­called Urban Revolution.

The twentieth century ce Some two centuries ago, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the rediscovery of what is nowadays called ancient Mesopotamia gained momentum: curiosity, scientific interest and, last but certainly not least, Christian faith in the historicity of biblical accounts triggered a series of expeditions into the land between the two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris. Some expeditions were set up as a quest for the garden of Eden, the remnants of the ark, others were sent to search for tokens of more recent history such as the city of Babel, with its legendary tower and the palace where king Belshazzar was confronted with the famous writing on the wall. Furthermore, a craving for exotic antiquities meant people invested money in these costly undertakings. Private financiers, scientific societies, and royal houses wanted to adorn palaces and fill prestigious collections for public display. Thus, besides scientific interests, Western approaches towards the history of Southwest Asia also involved the exploitation of cultural heritage. Clandestine diggings and systematic scientific excavations

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brought to light the ruins of large cities, artifacts of all kind, and thousands of texts in cuneiform script. Whereas the nineteenth century was by and large dedicated to discovery, to a fierce exploration of early man and the cradle of civilization all over the Fertile Crescent, the twentieth century saw the formation of scientific disciplines, including chairs at universities, theological seminars, and divinity schools, as well as the implementation of a quadrivium of methodological approaches— linguistic, philological, historical, and archeological. The decipherment of the various cuneiform scripts and the languages hidden therein opened up more than three millennia of history, from the invention of writing, the configuration of the early state to scientific mathematics and astronomy in Hellenistic times. The oldest known written language appears to be Sumerian, a language of hitherto unknown linguistic affiliation attested for the first time in economic texts and textual repositories of various kind starting around 3300 bce. When the Ancient Near East made its appearance in the arena of Western scholarship, it became immediately entangled in a longstanding debate about the role of religion in the history of mankind and its impact on the process of civilization. The beginnings of this debate in Europe can be traced back not only to the period of Enlightenment, but even further back into classical antiquity, when the fatal decline of human faith and religious attitude was already lamented. In historical retrospective, the alleged process of continuous secularization

Figure 11.1  Major cities of ancient Mesopotamia (not all contemporaneous). (Graphic courtesy Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum)

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would imply the existence of a period of truly pious men and women, a golden age when the gods visited earth on a regular basis and were in close contact to mankind. Traces of that period were still extant in the mythologies of archaic societies, such as ancient Greek mythology. Yet, scholars got the impression that the Greek gods had already lost much of their divine authority. Thus, when in Mesopotamia much older civilizations were unearthed, scholars were pretty sure that here religion had still a place of pride and the shadow of the divine supposedly was to be encountered everywhere. Having figured out how the cuneiform scripts and the languages transmitted thereby operated, scholars studied texts and came to the conclusion that ancient Mesopotamia wasn’t an exception to the rule: religion was the prime mover of civilization, the inhabitants of the lands between the two rivers were deeply religious people, so much so that all basic societal concepts were understood and enacted in terms of religious service. As a more-­or-less general conviction this idea infuses many presentations on history, society, and culture of the Ancient Near East, especially from the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century ce. Most prominently this concept was brought forward in 1954 by the Sumerologist Adam Falkenstein in an article entitled La Cité-Temple Sumérienne published in the first issue of Cahiers d’histoire mondiale (cf. Falkenstein 1954). Falkenstein, born in 1906 in Planegg in Bavaria had been educated in a Catholic monastery. Instead of becoming a priest as intended by his father, he turned towards history and Semitic languages and became a most influential scholar in the field of Ancient Near Eastern Studies. As a field epigrapher Falkenstein spent many years with the German expedition on the ancient site of Uruk in southern Iraq working on the so-­called archaic texts. These texts, hundreds of clay tablets,

Figure 11.2  Developmental stages of the cuneiform script. (Graphic courtesy Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum. Representation based on A. Wolf on the basis of Nissen 1990: Fig. 20)

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and fragments of clay tablets inscribed in an early form of the cuneiform script, were mainly economic in nature. Figure  11.2 shows different developmental stages of the cuneiform script during the second half of the fourth millennium and beginning of the third millennium bce: from administrative devices such as three-­dimensional tokens representing goods, objects, and animals (1); to clay tablets showing numerical information (2); in combination with signs for goods, objects, and individuals (3). Obviously, they had been discarded and used as filling for a monumental building. It seems fairly probable that the texts were functionally related somehow to an earlier phase of the building, and that in terms of cultic continuity the complex itself represented an older stage of what was known from later periods as the sanctuary of the goddess Inanna of Uruk. Indeed, the graphic symbol of the goddess Inanna as well as a sign cluster meaning “temple of goddess Inanna” is present in quite a number of texts. Consequently, the complex was identified by the excavators as the main Urukean sanctuary of Inanna in later periods named Eanna “House of Heaven” (see Figure  11.3), a denomination not attested in the archaic texts so far. In

Figure 11.3  The sacred precinct in the center of Uruk. (Graphic courtesy Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum. Representation based on A. Wolf on the basis of Yoffee 2005/9: 84.)

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his seminal article Falkenstein gave the following characterization of the Mesopotamian civilization: The development of civilization is most closely connected with the temples of the country. All architectural production was concentrated on the sanctuaries, art was by preference, in their service. And writing was created exclusively for the requirements of the temple administrations which could no longer do without this aid. Consequently, prehistoric developments culminated—if not without interruption—in the Sumerian temple city which was the bearer of Babylonian culture for a long time from 3000 B.C. onward. (. . .) The periods of Babylonian history which carry the characteristic stamp of the ‘temple city’ are the protohistoric period (about 3000—2750 B.C.) and the Early Dynastic period (2750–2340 B.C.). The Dynasty of Akkad (2340–2159 B.C.) was an important interruption (. . .) The temple city was finally superseded by the static system of the Third Dynasty of Ur [i.e., in the twenty-­first century bce], in which the Akkadian idea of the state joined with the fundamentals of the Sumerian temple city to form a new order. Falkenstein 1974: 5f; italics added

According to Falkenstein (1974: 7) the temple was “not only the center of the religious life of the city or city quarter, but also the nucleus of the state.” Religion appears as the all-­encompassing dynamism of human civilization and the Sumerian Tempelstadt as its incarnation in mudbrick. However, according to Falkenstein, already ancient Mesopotamia saw a turn towards “secularization”: from the pristine religious concept of Tempelstadt into a “new order,” the state based on the idea of a nation, framed by bureaucratic institutions, religion being part of the system, no longer its center nor its prime mover. The narrative follows a well-­known Western script, without making use of the term “secularization.” However, Falkenstein was not the initiator of the concept of Tempelstadt. Its roots can be traced back to the 1920s to a book published by Anna Schneider, a specialist in economic history entitled Die Anfänge der Kulturwirtschaft: Die sumerische Tempelstadt and published in 1920 (see Figure 11.4). Schneider based her ideas on a series of publications by the Jesuit Anton Deimel who discussed the textual evidence from the archives found in the ruins of ancient Lagash. On the basis of economic and legal texts Schneider argued that in the beginning the temples were the true owners of all the land and (thus) in control of the major economic resources. Based on its position as religious institution and economic core facility the temple was the center of power. The ruler acted as the earthly representative of the city god, he administered the temples and in that way legitimized his rule (Schrakamp

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Figure 11.4  Book cover of Anna Schneider’s The Sumerian Temple City (1920). (Source: https://archive.org)

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2013: 445). The argument is founded on much more than that: the city ruler is at the same time the high-­priest, he “was to be the priestly servant and the business representative of the chief god of the city state” (Falkenstein 1974: 10) and as such he was owner of all the landed resources as well the humans. He even presupposes that There must have been a time when the residence of the leader of the state was still situated in the temple district of the chief deity, whose priest the ruler was. A memory of that is preserved in the Sumerian epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. There the place of residence of the ‘lord (en) of Uruk’ is given as the gi6-pàr within the Eanna-­sanctuary of the chief goddess of Uruk, which in historical times is known as the residence of the en-­priest located within the temple district. Falkenstein 1974: 12

Since in historical times this no longer seems to be the case, Falkenstein has to account for a spatial separation of the rulers living quarters—that is the emergence of the palace, which seems to take place in the first half of the third millennium—a first step into secularization, which led then to a delegation to some of the priestly duties to a priest. Schneider’s field was economic history; she understood the Sumerian temple city as a most striking example of what she called Stadtwirtschaft that is, a city-­ based economic system. Was sich zeigt [i.e., in Sumer, E.C.-K.], sind selbständige Stadtwirtschaften. Nicht den Handwerkerstädten des Mittelalters gleich. Ebensowenig „Despotenstädte”, als welche Bücher zu verallgemeinernd alle Städte des Altertums sieht. Die Tempelstädte Sumers sind ganz urwüchsige Bildungen, aus der wegen des Bewässerungswesens notwendigen Zusammensiedlung der ersten Kolonisten des Landes entstanden. Stadtwirtschaften, die eben wegen dieser Urwüchsigkeit mit Resten der Stammesgemeinschaft, die durch den Kanalbau und die Sakralwirtschaft erhalten und vermehrt werden, noch stark durchsetzt sind. In diesen Tempelstädten liegen auch die Anfänge kapitalistischer Wirtschaft, durch die Notwendigkeit des Tauschverkehrs mit dem Ausland entstanden. Schneider 1920: 106

The terms Sakralwirtschaft and Tempelstadt are essential for Schneider’s argument: they antagonize sociopolitical terms as Despotenstadt or Handwerkerstadt and characterize Stadtwirtschaft in its Sumerian manifestation as the socio-­economic side of theocratic models of governance. Schneider wasn’t so much interested in the historical details of the Lagash city-­state. She was

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focused on a long-­term perspective of economic systems, and here the Sumerian temple city seemed to furnish the earliest evidence for the evolution of capitalist economy. Deimel, the Jesuit expert who had provided the translations of the texts Anna Schneider had used, wasn’t very much interested in the origins of capitalism, but rather in the role of religion for the organization of economy.1 Not least because of Falkenstein’s authority temple city became more of a general historical concept—making urban society in early Mesopotamia a sacred community. However, from further study of the Lagashite documentation and comparison with the evidence from other major Sumerian cities of the south it became apparent that the model of temple city was heavily biased.2 Obviously, not only economically, but also with regard to political and strategic decision-­ making the king and the “palace” were at the head of the state, reducing the “temple” in the early city-­state of Lagash (and contemporary places) to an important institutional player but clearly second in rank.3 Yet, religion is to be considered a most important, even dominant societal segment throughout the entire history of ancient Mesopotamia and its neighbors. There is, on the one hand, clear first-­rate evidence, such as: temples, shrines, and holy places; gods, goddesses, and demons; mythology, cultic literature, and ritual texts; priests, temple officials, and cultic personal; liturgies, prayers, and festivities; cultic calendars, sacrifices, and the maintenance of the divine household; ideas about creation, divine interest and intervention in human life, reward, counsel, and punishment by the gods—and many other phenomena that yield the impact of religious beliefs implicitly or explicitly. Beyond that, it becomes easily apparent that religious convictions were at the core of most, if not all, belief systems extant in ancient Mesopotamia, and they governed cultural production and history of ideas on all levels—from private life to the legitimation of the state. What then, do we know about the role of religion at the city’s beginnings?

Urbanization and the role of religion The term Urban revolution4 emphasizes the process of urbanization as a significant change of societal organization. Although there is still much debate about terminology, chronological details, and regional differences the generally accepted pattern is that, somehow, from the seventh millennium bce onwards, settlements in favored regions of the Fertile Crescent became larger and ever more differentiated. Around 5000 bce, groups moved down into the alluvial plain between the Euphrates and the Tigris south of modern Baghdad. Access to

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this region became possible as a result of overall climatic changes. The fifth, and especially the fourth, millennium bce saw the emergence of rather large cities in Southern Iraq—such as the city of Uruk, which is considered a prime example for the process of state formation and the effects of the so-­called Urban Revolution in Southern Mesopotamia. Taming the rivers by means of hydraulic installations, i.e., systems of drainage, building of dams and dykes, and the control of the water in canals, allowed for two to three harvests per year. The rivers, the riverbanks, the marshes, and the Persian Gulf itself not only provided the population with a manifold fauna and flora but could also serve as communication routes. It is here where the first urban revolution took place, leading from local to regional and supraregional networks, summarized by Norman Yoffee (2005/9: 54) as follows: The process of urbanization can be traced quite accurately: initially small sites were dispersed along watercourses, with a few larger sites as centers of clusters. Over a period of about 500 years—towards the middle of the fourth millennium— the big sites became even bigger and the countryside became relatively depopulated and ‘ruralized’; lower Mesopotamia had become a region of urban enclaves with nearly eighty percent of the population living in cities. This demographic implosion was occasioned by a number of factors: cities became nodal points for military protection from neighbors, for leaders to co-­ordinate labor that traveled to a patchwork of fields, and for the construction of branching canals that irrigated the fields. Emerging city-­states were also the locations of regionally important temples evolving from earlier shrines that were also centers of exchange.

A most instructive example is provided by the ancient city of Uruk—biblical Erech—modern Warka, in the south of ancient Mesopotamia. It is the only one of the late Uruk period city-­states that has been extensively excavated. Already in its initial phase, the city housed an estimated population of about 20,000 people within an area of 2.5 square kilometers. The monumental architecture of both the so-­called Eanna district and the Anu-­precinct exhibit an unprecedented scale. In Mesopotamia, building is traditionally done in mudbrick, stone being a rare and expensive resource. The Eanna district, an area of about 9 hectares, included several buildings and at least some of them could have served for cultic purposes. The Anu-­precinct housed the so-­called White Temple a huge building on an elevated terrace, most probably devoted to cultic practices: the interpretation of the complex as a religious building relies on both the principle of cultic continuity observed rather strictly in Mesopotamia, and the

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pattern of religious architecture as such, known from later periods. Most Mesopotamian cities of the time look very much alike—perhaps not on the same scale, but in terms of architectural configuration: step towers were dominating the cityscape, extensive sanctuaries were located in the center near the palace, smaller shrines in the city-­quarters and neighborhoods. When during the 1930s, Adam Falkenstein participated in the excavations in Uruk he saw the remnants of these huge buildings emerge from the tells (as the eroded formation of settlements are called). He was present when the oldest pieces of human writing mentioned above were found in the foundation trenches of the sanctuaries—and these impressions obviously paved the way for the step he took in 1954: to revive the likewise buried concept of Tempelstadt. Hence, with Fleckenstein’s authority, the concept underwent the transformation from scientific model to historical reality; it entered the encyclopedias and general histories.5 One can only speculate for the reasons that led early man to settle in the Mesopotamian alluvial plain and cultivate the land thereby inventing amongst others new forms of societal organization. Discussing the role of temples for the origin of civilization Michael Roaf (2013: 430f) draws attention to the interesting fact that religion is absent from Childe’s “ten rather abstract criteria” that mark the distinction between village and city. He continues to point out that among the more recent explanations for the emergence of the urban mind such as population growth, environmental changes, warfare, etc., religions don’t play a role, too.6 Indeed, there seems to be some reluctance to place religion within the formative process of the urban landscape of early Mesopotamia.

Religion and the city Studying the role of religion and the city in ancient Mesopotamia from a nowadays perspective means to account for a huge temporal and cultural gap of several thousand years. Far from any kind of embedded research we have to make do with highly fragmented data. The available evidence has passed through many filters such as the choice of excavation sites, the casualties of preservation, contingency, and intentionality of ancient man as well as of modern research activities. Thus, we have to reckon with a sheer insurmountable distance between us and them. Even diligently taking into account the implications of emic vs. etic perspectives will not prevent us from operating under the conditions of heteronomy, since it is already present in the use of our own language. To give

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but one example: none of the languages from ancient Mesopotamia—neither Sumerian, nor Akkadian—has a lexical equivalent for the word religion, let alone for religious pluralism. But this doesn’t mean that religion was alien to the societies of that region. On the contrary, religious belief systems were omnipresent and played a strong role for the organization of society. Actually, the situation we are facing here—and elsewhere—is aptly described by Jonathan Smith’s (1982: xi) assessment in his book Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown: While there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious—there is no data for religion. Religions is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholars analytical purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization.

Indeed, there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, and expressions that qualify as part of a religious belief system, or even multiple religious belief systems. However, belief systems, values, and ideas cannot exist on their own. They are, as Gebhard Selz has pointed out, embedded in the “empirical totality” (Berger 1986) meaning they are part of the living environment (“Lebenswelt”) as such: “Economic institutions do not exist in a vacuum but rather in a context of social and political structures, cultural patterns, and indeed, structures of consciousness (values, ideas, belief systems). An economic culture then contains a number of elements linked together in an empirical totality” (Berger 1986: 24 cited by Selz 2010: 73). In an important article on the situation of research in ancient Near Eastern religions Selz (2010) drew attention to the problems of instrumentalization and the perseverance of paradigms when discussing the role of religions in past societies.7 Obviously, the presence of monumental building complexes with cultic functions within the cities, the phenomenon of cultic continuity of shrines and places of veneration, but also the presence of cultic professionals in the earliest texts attest to the importance of religious beliefs within early society. The graphic representations of some of the oldest city-­names from the middle of the third millennium bce seem to contain the element AB or UNUG (= AB x ÁŠ). AB represents a sanctuary or “temple,” resembling in its shape to a step tower or high-­mound with a shrine on top (Matthews 1993, but see Steinkeller 2002). Eventually, according to some traditions in Mesopotamia the primeval city was a divine foundation and as such the blueprint for every other city to come.8 We cannot simply ignore the overall presence of religiously framed belief systems in Mesopotamian society. On the other hand, one has to be careful as to the role

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assigning religion. Like the explanations referred to above, also religion might not do as a monocausal explanation for the process of civilization. From a present-­day point of view, the idea of a religious system as the single driving force as modeled in the concept of Tempelstadt does not stand up to scrutiny, though it has been taken up recently by William H. McNeill in his book, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. On the contrary: the economic documents from the Temple at Lagash, that had served as proof for the sacred economic community, constitute just one out of a great many examples that illustrate the temple as a large institutional household. Similar documents have been found in other places as well. From an economic perspective, great temples in Mesopotamia are best understood as big companies, run by members of the ruling elite, with a special social responsibility: i.e., the care for the gods. The examples given, i.e., the making of the concept of temple city and the problems of interpreting the evidence from ancient Uruk, have shown how a series of misunderstandings and premature assumptions, even individual belief systems of scholars, helped the model of temple city to prosper. A hundred years or so later, a less homogeneous perspective is in place: religion played an important role in ancient cities—this can be seen from the huge investment in material and intellectual resources. However, it is society as a whole that allows belief systems to shape their social and physical environments, such as urban landscapes for instance. A Mesopotamian city-­state housed a number of temples, more-­or-less wealthy socio-­economic institutions that provided—apart from other things—a theological framework for part of the belief systems involved. Although polytheistic systems supposedly are more likely to allow for religious pluralism, even here the city is a contested space: a variety of practices and habits, public vs. private interests compete against each other making use of a highly metaphorical “religious” language. The void of the Sumerian city-­state is filled by a polyphonic concert of religious claims and practices.

Conclusion The concept of the Sumerian Tempelstadt was based on two major sets of data: by a seemingly overwhelming monumental presence of sacred buildings within the early cities of ancient Mesopotamia; and, second, by a lot of economic and legal documents whose agency was understood as referring to a most powerful societal position of the temple. In the wake of early twentieth-­century intellectual history, e.g., influential works such as Frazer’s The Golden Bough and others, the

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archeological as well as the textual documentation from the Ancient Near East came in handy. Actually, the concept of temple city answered two concepts at the same time: the religious character of the primeval urban concept and the idea of early economic communities in the service of the divine—the sacred household as the incarnation of the heavenly oikos. When the concept was recycled and enhanced by Falkenstein in the 1950s, the model of a temple city underwent a rapid transformation from a historical hypothesis framed in a striking catch-­word to what was taken as historical reality. Fleckenstein’s essay convinced scholars not only in Ancient Near Eastern Studies but also had a strong impact in other disciplines concerned with historical anthropology. The consequences were manifold: l

l

l

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The civilizations of the Near East became part of the universal rhythm of secularization and desecularization. The earliest cities provided the precursor for the holy cities of the monotheistic traditions of the Abrahamic religions—all formed within the traditions of the Fertile Crescent. The idea of religion being the nucleus and the fountain of culture, of human civilization, got another piece of evidence. And, last but not least, the concept of temple city added a new specimen to the project of urban typologies.

Falkenstein’s model came up just in time—the city became a favorite interdisciplinary research topic. The most influential Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago organized a conference in 1958 entitled: City Invincible: A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East (Kraeling and Adams 1960). The purpose of the symposium was—as the conveners announced to explore the circumstances under which in the Near East man for the first time in human history attained those higher levels of cultural life that we associate with the word ‘civilized’. In Mesopotamia, at least, the great upward surge of the cultural process that continued the momentum gained in the technological revolution of the Neolithic period coincided with the appearance of man’s first great urban centers. What ecological and other factors led to the growth of cities? How does the life of the concentrated urban society affect culture?

The conference volume was published in 1960 and as a motto the editors chose the first lines from Walt Whitman’s poem “The city of friends.”9 I will conclude by quoting from the editor’s preface:

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We have chosen as the ‘short title’ of this report two words from a poem of Walt Whitman because the adjective ‘invincible’ describes so graphically the dominant, commanding role of the city in the development of culture and because we believe that without the vision of the ‘new city of Friends’ the eternal struggle to make this powerful force serve its highest purposes must fail, especially now when under attack cities are the most vulnerable of all human institutions.

Notes Chapter 2 1 Much of the material for this chapter is drawn from several pieces that I have published earlier including the introductory chapter in my co-­edited volume, The Fundamentalist City?, Routledge, 2011; a co-­authored article with Ananya Roy entitled “Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Era,” Space and Polity, Vol. 10, No 1, (2006) and my article “The Fundamentalist City and the Arab Spring” Space and Polity, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2013): 261–9. 2 “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910–1915) was a series of twelve pamphlets that attacked modernist theories of biblical criticism. Their central theme was that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and should be taken literally. But, as a writer in the May 19 1923 issue of Time Magazine discovered, there are earlier sources for such viewpoint. For example, the Westminster Confession of 1643, which provides the constitution of Presbyterianism, substituted the authority of the Bible for the authority of the Roman Pope, and held the Bible to be “the only infallible rule of faith and practice” (AlSayyad 2011: 23, n. 2).

Chapter 3 1 Other definitions of regeneration that emerged from this research included:

An acceptance that there is considerable and strong emotion experienced and

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expressed when working for healthy communities (for example, anger, frustration, cynicism, weariness, fragility) and an acknowledgement of the importance and significance of “feelings”;

An introduction to the values of self-­emptying, forgiveness, transformation,

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risk-­taking, and openness to learning; Begins with the intention of accepting those who have been rejected elsewhere;

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Values people’s inner resources and their capacity to create their own solutions to their problems, ones that constitute a form of liquid capital relating to intangibles such as ideas and visions, not exclusively claimed by a specific religious tradition (Baker and Skinner 2006: 11).

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Notes

2 See www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/curate2 (accessed April 4 2017).

Chapter 5 1 Following the suggestion of Meissner and Vertovec (2015) we shall use superdiversity here without a hyphen “in order to emphasize the multidimensionality of the notion.” The “hyphen may tend to promote the skewed or limited understanding of the term as ‘more’ (ethnic) diversity” (Meissner and Vertovec 2015: 545). 2 For a critical discussion of religious diversity in sociology see Beckford (2003). 3 See the International Festival on Religions and Spiritualities taking place yearly since 2003 in Turin (Torino Spiritualità: www.torinospiritualita.org) and Barcelona’s fair of spirituality (http://www.feriaespiritualmente.com [accessed December 15 2015]). 4 See Barómetre sobre la Religiositat i la gestió de la seva diversitat (2014: 34), http://governacio.gencat.cat/web/.content/afers_religiosos/documents/Mapa_2014/ Barometre2014_resultats.pdf (accessed March 5 2016). 5 Data collection occurred in the context of Marian Burchardt’s project “Religious Diversity and Governmentality in Immigrant Societies,” which was financed by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity as well the German Academic Exchange Service, and the project “Religious Minority Expression in Urban Space,” led by Mar Griera (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona) and financed by the Generalitat de Catalunya. 6 See Ajuntament de Barcelona “The foreign population in Barcelona. January 2015”, p. 11. Available at: www.bcn.cat/estadistica/catala/dades/inf/pobest/pobest15/ pobest15.pdf (accessed July 27 2017). 7 See the Immigration Report: Rapporto 2013 dell’Osservatorio Interistituzionale sugli stranieri in provincia di Torino. Available at: www.prefettura.it/torino/contenuti/ 162346.htm (accessed November 19 2015). 8 Interview with Luigi Berzano. Available at: www.pluralismoreligioso.it (accessed November 19 2015). 9 Most of the residents’ protests against mosque constructions in Catalonia, however, happened outside Barcelona (Astor 2012). 10 See www.pluralismoreligioso.it/gruppi-­di-origine-­giudaico-cristiana/chiese-­ pentecostali-dellimmigrazione–2/ (accessed November 24 2015). 11 Cf. the report by students of Turin University and researchers of the Foundation Benvenuti in Italia, Available at: http://benvenutiinitalia.it/7-islam-­a-torino-­ilnuovo-­quaderno-di-­benvenuti-in-­italia/ (accessed November 24 2015). 12 Available at: www.islamtorino.it/firma-­del-patto-­di-condivisione-­tra-citta-­di-torino-­ e-centri-­islamici/ (accessed November 24 2015).

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13 We kindly thank Mar Griera and Anna Clot for supporting us with insights from their fieldwork for this section.

Chapter 6 1 When writing about evangelical movements in Brazil, I refer to the cluster of Pentecostal, Protestant Charismatic and Born-­again Christian groups. The common Brazilian Portuguese term for people in this cluster is os evangélicos (the evangelicals). In the Brazilian census of 2010, 22 percent of the population described themselves as such, and the majority of Brazil’s 42.3 million evangélicos can be identified as Pentecostal. See Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). Available at: www.ibge.gov.br/home/ estatistica/populacao/censo2010/caracteristicas_religiao_deficiencia/caracteristicas_ religiao_deficiencia_tab_pdf.shtm (accessed August 5 2015). 2 Research done in 1994, (Fernandes et al. 1998) showed that of all the people who frequent Protestant Churches in Rio de Janeiro, those who attend the Pentecostal Churches Assembleia de Deus and the Igreja Universal generally have the lowest incomes in the city. Both of them attracted around 62 percent people whose families generally have up to twice the minimum income and who have jobs with lower incomes, for example domestic workers. 3 Known in English-­speaking countries as the “Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.” 4 In the past twenty years, the number of Brazilians that identify themselves as Roman Catholics has declined. The Brazilian census of 2010 showed that the number of Roman Catholics in Brazil had declined from 125 million in 2000 to 123.3 million in 2010. In relation to the population growth this decline is significant. In 2000, the Roman Catholic population represented 73.6 percent of Brazil’s total population but in 2010 that percentage had dropped to 64.6 percent. In 2000, approximately 12.5 million people said they had “no religion” and in 2010 approximately 15 million. See Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). Available at: www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/populacao/censo2010/ caracteristicas_religiao_deficiencia/caracteristicas_religiao_deficiencia_tab_pdf. shtm and http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/populacao/censo2000/populacao/ religiao_Censo2000.pdf (accessed August 5 2015). 5 See the online Globo article: Unidos de Vila Maria junta religião a carnaval e exalta Nossa Senhora Aparecida: http://g1.globo.com/sao-­paulo/carnaval/2017/noticia/ unidos-­de-vila-­maria-junta-­religiao-a-­carnaval-e-­exalta-nossa-­senhora-aparecida. ghtml (accessed July 27 2017). 6 See the letter of archbishop Odilo Pedro Scherer published on the Catholic website A12, affiliated to the National Sanctuary. Available at: www.a12.com/formacao/

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detalhes/nossa-­senhora-aparecida-­no-carnaval-­por-dom-­odilo-scherer (accessed July 27 2017). 7 A carro de som is basically the same as a trio elétrico—a truck with loudspeakers. 8 DVD “Todos Devem Conhecer”, 2010. Directed by Antonio JR and Rafael Mazza. Coordination Apostolo Ezequiel Texeira. Production: Aroma Soluções. Distribution: Cara de Leão. 9 Marcos Campos of the PVN/bloco Cara de Leão. “Evangelismo de Carnaval do Projeto Vida Nova”. Available at: http://missoespvnvt.blogspot.nl/2012/01/ evangelismo-­de-carnaval-­do-projeto-­vida.html (accessed April 13 2017). 10 Available at: http://g1.globo.com/rio-­de-janeiro/carnaval/2017/noticia/chaves-­dorio-­sao-entregues-­ao-rei-­momo-na-­sapucai.ghtml and http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/ crivella-­sera–1-prefeito-­nao-passar-­carnaval-no-­rio-no-­inicio-da-­gestao–20936769 (both accessed July 27 2017).

Chapter 7 1 The Hungarian “uprising” in 1956 led to the arrival of around 22,000 refugees Available at: www.ce-­review.org/99/19/nemes19.html, accessed 8 June 2017. 2 St. Dunstans on the Strand provided space for Romanian Orthodox. 3 The researchers built up their interview network primarily through the global communications referred to above, i.e., mobile phones, email, Skype and WhatsApp. 4 Researcher’s notes.

Chapter 9 1 Sat November 3 2012, 8:24 PM IST—India Markets closed (2012–09–28). “India’s top 15 cities with the highest GDP Photos|Pictures—Yahoo! India Finance”. In. finance.yahoo.com (accessed July 13 2013). 2 Srivastava, Sanjay. Available at: www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-­ed/behind-­indiasurbanism/article4982499.ece (accessed August 15 2013). 3 The political theorist Rajeev Bhargava notes, “the dominant self-­understanding of Western secularism is that it is a universal doctrine requiring the strict separation (exclusion) of church/religion and state for the sake of individualistically conceived moral or ethical values” (Bhargava 2010). In India, according to Indian law theorists, secularism refers to the governmental practice of “indifference towards religion” implying that all religions have the right to the public realm. 4 According to Bhargava, India provides an alternative model of secularism that is different from the French “laïcité” model and the American “wall of separation”

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model by allowing for the vibrant and religiously plural public realm (Bhargava in Srinivasan 2006: 21). 5 Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in his Minute on Indian Religion in 1898, “the Principle on which this chapter has been framed is a principle on which it would be desirable that all governments should act, but from which the British Government in India cannot depart without risking dissolution of society,: it is this, that every man should be suffered to profess his own religion, and that no man should be suffered to insult the religion of another” (Macauley 1898:105). 6 Several features of the Indian custodial model of statehood are striking and relevant to wider discussion. First, multiple religions are not extras, added on as an afterthought but present at its starting point, as part of its foundation. Indian secularism is inextricably tied to deep religious diversity. Second, it has a commitment to multiple values—liberty and equality—not conceived narrowly as pertaining to individuals but interpreted broadly to cover the relative autonomy of religious communities and equality of status in society, as well as other more basic values such as peace and tolerance between communities. It has a place not only for the right of individuals to profess their religious beliefs but also for the right of religious communities to establish and maintain educational institutions crucial for the survival and sustenance of their distinctive religious traditions. 7 The principled distance model accepts that in some contexts and cultures religion may be significant, but also accepts that, at least in theory, religion may not have special public significance antecedently written into and defining the very character of the state or nation. 8 Bangalore is believed to have been founded by a warrior chieftain Kempe Gowda I(1510–1570), one of the most powerful feudatory lords of the Vijayanagar kings, who raised a mud fort in what is now the center of the city (Srinivas 2001:39–41). 9 Kempe Gowda I is known to have referred to Bangalore as gandu bhoomi “land of heroes.” 10 Under Kempe Gowda the city flourished. He brought together local chiefs, called Palegars and Nayaks—who controlled various towns and centers, into the urban networked economy of inland trade linking the villages of Domlur, Halsur, and Yelahanka (all suburbs and exurbs of the contemporary city). Kempe Gowda was succeeded by his son Kempe Gowda II who also believed in the development and enrichment of his lands. He undertook large-­scale building works while he was in Bangalore, including the aforementioned fort, markets, tanks, and water sources and a network of shrines across the city. 11 Beera devaru and Kempamma temples were given support. 12 Chickpete Street (small market) and Doddapete Street (big market). 13 This statue, ironically enough, became the gathering point for protestors of the nativist linguistic sons of the soil movement as Nair (2005) notes.

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14 The British cantonment and the indigenous pete were unified into one city by contentious legislation in 1949 under the Bangalore City Corporation (Srinivas 2001: 47). 15 In her cogent discussion on anthropology of secularism, Fenella Cannell (2010) demonstrates a continuous reproduction of uncritical oppositions between religion and secularism and the perception of the political as being “more real” than the religious.

Chapter 10 1 The second mode is a city like Tel Aviv Jaffa that serves as a local cultural and economic gateway to its region. Whether located higher or lower on the World Cities roster, at the local and regional scale it serves as both business center and cultural hub.

Chapter 11 1 Deimel summarized the results of his earlier studies in Deimel 1931. 2 For differing approaches that criticize the historicity of Tempelstadt and its application to other, younger periods of Mesopotamian history at large see e.g., Diakonoff 1969; Foster 1981; Nissen 1982; Postgate 1972. 3 For a detailed study of the situation in pre-­sargonic Lagash as reflected in the texts see Schrakamp 2013 with further literature. 4 For the introduction of the term see Childe 1950. A short overview is given by Liverani 2011–2013 (§ 3.3 “The Urban revolution”; primary and secondary urbanization). For a more substantial discussion of the concept and its usage as regards the ancient Near East see Nissen 1987. 5 See for instance the following entry sub “Gesellschaft” in the standard encyclopedia for the study of the Ancient Near East: “Schon in frühdynastischer Zeit wurde die Regierungsform der Tempelstadt abgelöst durch die absolute Monarchie, die für alle Zeit die einzig denkbare Staatsform in Vorderasien blieb.” (Röllig 1957–1971: 234 § 2). 6 Roaf 2013: 431, listed a number of prominent “monocausal explanations” in Fig. 11.3. 7 See, as an example, Bernbeck 2013 on the role of premediated concepts for the interpretation of Neolithic buildings as “temples.” 8 See e.g., Cancik-Kirschbaum 2005. Various examples for the religious frame of oriental cities can be easily found in Wilhelm 1997. 9 “I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; / I dream’d that was the new city of Friends”.

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Chapter 1 Berger, Peter L. (2014), The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter. Cadge, Wendy (2012), Paging God: Religion in the halls of medicine, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Davids, T. W. Rhys (1890), The Questions of King Milinda, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Luhrmann, Tanya M. (2012), When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Simmel, Georg (1903/1984), “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben”, in G. Simmel (ed.), Das Individuum und die Freiheit, 192–204, Stuttgart: Wagenbach. Taylor, Charles (2007), A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, William Isaac and Znaniecki, Florian (1918), The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an immigrant group, Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max (1921/1958), The City, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Wuthnow, Robert (2012), The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Chapter 9 Aneesh, A. (2006), Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization, Durham: Duke University Press. Arthur, William (1847), A Mission to the Mysore, London. Bailey, Frederick G. (1996), The Civility of Indifference: On Domesticating Ethnicity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bhargava, Rajeev (2010), The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bhargava, Rajeev, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and R. Sudarshan (1999), Multiculturalism, Liberalism, and Democracy, New Delhi/New York: Oxford. Cannell, Fenella (2010), “The Anthropology of Secularism”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 35: 85–100. Casanova, José; Anne Phillips; United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (2009), A Debate on the Public Role of Religion and Its Social and Gender Implications [in Summaries in English, French and Spanish.], Gender and Development Paper, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Fisher, Elaine M. (2017), Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India, South Asia across the Disciplines, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

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Chapter 10 Alfasi, Nurit and Fenster, Tovi (2005), “A Tale of Two Cities: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the Age of Globalization”, Cities, 22(5): 351–63.

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Chapter 11 Berger, Peter L. (1986), The Capitalist Revolution. Fifty prospects about prosperity, equality and liberty, New York: Basic Books. Bernbeck, Reinhard (2013), “Religious Revolutions in the Neolithic? ‘Temples’ in Present Discourse and Past Practice”, in K. Kaniuth (ed.), Tempel im Alten Orient, 7. Internationales Colloquium der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 11–13. Oktober 2009, München, Colloquien der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 7, 33–47, Wiesbaden. Cancik-Kirschbaum, Eva (2005), “Babylon. Die vielen Wirklichkeiten einer Stadt”, in H. Berking and M. Löw (eds.), Die Wirklichkeit der Städte, 227–40, Baden-Baden: Nomos (Soziale Welt, Sonderband, 16). Childe, Vere Gordon (1950), “The Urban Revolution”, The Town Planning Review, 21(1): 3–17. Deimel, Anton (1931), Šumerische Tempelwirtschaft zur Zeit Urukaginas und seiner Vorgänger. Abschluss der Einzelstudien und Zusammenfassung der Hauptresultate, Rome: Pont. Inst. Biblicum. Diakonoff, Igor M. (1969), “The Rise of the Despotic State in Ancient Mesopotamia”, in I. M. Diakonoff (ed.), Ancient Mesopotamia: Socio-­economic History, 173–203, Moscow: Nauka Pub. House.

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Index Anglicanism 92 Atheism 34 Bangalore 16, 22, 157–8, 160–1, 163–73 Barcelona 20, 83–4, 87–90, 93–8, 100–2 Berlin 16, 20, 23, 66–7, 73–4, 77–9 Buddhism 27, 32, 42, 84, 90 capital 77, 91, 163–4, 182 cultural 10, 151 religious 60 social 51, 60–1 spiritual 52, 59–62 carnival 21, 105–6, 108, 110–19 Christianity 1, 6, 27, 42, 53, 84, 88–9, 109, 124, 139–41, 151 Catholic 21–2, 29, 32–4, 64, 72–3, 80, 87–97, 99, 106–9, 111–12, 118–19, 124, 138, 145–7, 152–4, 158, 187 Evangelical 40, 78, 106, 108–19, 138 Protestant 6, 22, 29, 88–90, 92, 96, 98, 111, 128, 138–41, 146–7, 152, 153–4 city American 14, 33, 161 European 13, 20, 33, 67, 79, 83–6, 88, 92, 96, 141, 150 fundamentalist 7–8, 11, 19–20, 39, 43–9, 68–71 global 59, 91, 123–4, 168, 171 ordinary 6, 16 parochial 43, 88–9 postsecular 7–8, 20, 64, 69–71 primeval 195 secular 53, 64–5, 142, 153 Sumerian temple 23, 191–2 cognitive contamination 9, 17, 30, 32 comparison (methodology) 6, 16, 29, 43–4, 67, 88, 113, 137, 192, 195 conflicts 1, 7, 9, 13–14, 17, 20, 23, 45, 171, 178 class 15, 54–5, 67, 76, 78–9, 86, 89, 95, 100, 118, 124, 170–1, 174, 182 ethnic 14, 122

religious 5, 8, 11–12, 18, 31, 40, 42, 49, 93, 95, 108, 122, 171, 175–6, 179–80, 182–3 Confucianism 90 diversity 7–13, 19, 21, 59, 61, 67, 70–1, 83–91, 93–6, 102–3, 105–6, 108, 122–3, 125, 132, 142, 161, 171–3 enlightenment 32, 41, 54, 146, 186 ethnicity 8, 11, 15, 21, 83, 107, 125, 128, 130, 174 Evangelicalism 29, 90, 98 formulas of peace legal 9 urban 9, 13–15, 17–18 fundamentalism 18–19, 39–40, 42–7, 49–50, 55, 173 gender 8, 10–11, 19, 45–7, 72, 83–4, 86, 107, 124, 135, 174 Global Risk Society 54 globalization 39, 41, 54–5, 79, 85, 121, 172, 176 Hamburg 22, 147–8, 150 Heritage 93–6, 107, 131, 134, 185 Hinduism 42, 84, 90, 171 identity 18–19, 21, 41, 43, 55, 60–1, 72, 74, 94–6, 103, 107, 112–13, 132, 134, 141, 147, 151, 170–1, 173–4 politics of 10–13, 178 struggles 182 Islam 1, 6, 27, 39, 42, 44, 47–9, 67, 75, 77, 80, 84, 90, 93, 99 Istanbul 20, 66, 73–4, 76–7 Jerusalem 22–3, 27, 65, 76, 175–9, 182–3 Judaism 29, 42, 84, 92 ultra–Orthodox 23, 45, 176–81, 183

232

Index

London 16, 21–2, 28, 57, 63, 87, 107, 121–36 Mesopotamia 23, 185–7, 189, 192–7 Metropolis 2, 13–14, 19, 27–8, 35, 67–8, 74, 76, 79, 128, 134, 160–1, 165, 167 migration, migrant 13, 21–2, 63, 65–6, 68, 73–5, 83–5, 87–8, 90–3, 96–7, 100, 102, 107–8, 121–7, 131, 133–5, 141, 163, 170, 173 modernity, modernities 2–6, 18–19, 28–31, 39, 42–3, 54–5, 66, 68–70, 76, 138, 141, 146, 172 medieval 39, 48–9 multiple 3, 7, 15 non–western 39 reflexive 11 secular 6, 53 modernization 1–6, 16, 66, 71, 141 and pluralization 4–6, 28–9 and secularization 2–6 nation, nationality 11, 21, 41, 43, 45–7, 50, 54–5, 84, 105–8, 115, 117, 119, 124, 163, 171, 189 national churches 87 neoliberalism 40, 49, 168, neoliberal capitalism 19, 51 neoliberal urban environments 23, 97 Pentecostalism, Pentecostals 6, 35, 67, 72, 98, 109 place 9, 14–16, 20–2, 30, 33, 35, 39, 41–3, 45, 47, 49–52, 58, 62, 64–5, 68, 74, 76, 84–5, 87–8, 90–9, 101–2, 105–6, 111, 116, 124–5, 139–43, 145, 147, 150–3, 160, 178, 187, 191–2, 195–6 place–keeping 85, 93–6, 99, 101–2 place–making 6, 14, 85, 88, 91, 96–9, 101–2 place–seeking 85, 99, 100–2 pluralism 1, 4, 6–7, 9, 14, 17–19, 27–30, 34, 99, 110, 142, 160–1, 163–4, 172–3 and the city 1, 12 non–western 160 religious 1, 6–7, 11–13, 17–18, 20, 28, 30, 110, 144, 161, 178, 195–6 vernacular 22, 157, 160–1, 164, 173–4

pluralization 1, 4, 10–12, 14, 17–18 postsecular, postsecularity 51–2, 55–8, 60–1, 63–4, 69–71, 175 power structures 21, 102 race 53, 121 rationalism 54, 66, 141 reflexivity 124 religion cosmopolitan 52, 54 global 55 lived 5, 161 prosperity 75–8 urban 5, 15, 20, 65, 68, 71, 79–80, 83, 92, 105, 153 religious marketplace 20, 80 secular, secularity, secularities 1–4, 6–9, 12–19, 22–3, 32–4, 43, 53–4, 56–7, 59, 61–2, 64–70, 73, 76–8, 80, 83, 85–7, 90, 92, 94, 105, 107–10, 121, 124–6, 128, 130, 133–4, 141–2, 144, 148, 150–3, 161, 164, 171, 175–83 multiple 3, 15–16 secularism 3–4, 15, 40, 42, 55–6, 87, 164 secularization 2–5, 11, 15, 18, 32, 53, 66, 85, 93–5, 143, 146, 186, 189, 191, 197 as a process 31, 70, 90 theory 2–4, 16, 19, 28–9, 66 Sikhism 42, 90 sociability, modes of 6, 13–14, 22 conviviality 22, 99, 172–3 indifference 8, 13, 15, 146, 160, 164 interculture 14, 17 spatial segregation 8, 14, 17 sociology of religion 1–3, 6, 12, 143–4 space public 5, 20–1, 23, 33, 47–8, 57, 63–4, 66, 72, 88, 95, 99, 102–3, 105, 107, 109–10, 160, 171, 175–6 sacred 78, 150 secular 2, 14, 33–4, 78, 85, 143 and symbolic demarcation 23 state 2–4, 9, 15, 19, 23, 33, 40–2, 45–6, 48–50, 54–5, 59, 69–70, 74, 78, 94, 102, 109, 117, 124, 127, 164, 166, 183, 186, 189, 191–3 city 185, 191–3, 196 national 9

Index super-diversity, superdiversity 83–8, 90–1, 93, 95–6, 102–3 Turin 20, 83–4, 87–8, 91, 93, 95, 98–9, 101–2 universalism 41, 55 urban imaginary 22, 83 public 108, 161, 164 religion 5, 15, 20, 65, 68, 71, 79–80, 83, 92, 105, 153

233

religious configurations 65 spaces 7–8, 19–20, 29, 51, 56, 58, 76, 84, 88, 137, 178 theory 1, 6, 9, 15–17, 23, 65–8, 70 urbanism 9, 15–16, 40, 46, 49, 51, 53, 69, 73, 97 urbanity, urbanities 19, 27, 66, 68, 71, 75–7, 105, 141, 146–7, 182 multiple 7, 16 violence 1, 39, 41, 45, 49–50, 55, 106, 171–2, 176