Urbanität und Religion. Neue Perspektiven auf Religion in europäischen, süd- und westasiatischen Städten

Abstract

While urban sociology and other systematic disciplines for a long time considered it dispensable to relate religion and the city to each other due to the modernisation and secularisation narratives that underlie them, the topic of ‘religions in the city’ was actually always present in historical scholarship, especially in studies in European urban history. However, the focus was rather on the consideration of religious groups in the city. And in the discussions that formed criteria, religion as a formative factor of cities was usually not taken into account. It is only in the last two decades that insights from spatial theory have found their way into urban research, paving the way for examining the space-forming effect of religion (or its actors, practices and ideas). 

By way of introduction, using the example of the “Sun City” by the Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella, this article discusses how former political utopias and ideal city models certainly assigned an important role to the factor of religion for (here: urban) society, but that these were far from opting for religious plurality or diversity; and thus influenced the European discussion – up to and including the ‘banishment’ of the religious – for a long time.

Briefly recapitulating the state of research in urban and ecclesiastical history as well as in history of religion, the present issue also wants to go beyond this. It therefore focuses more on the creation and effect of spatial configurations and directs the consideration to the relationship between religion and urbanity (instead of city). Following the so-called spatial turn, it takes more consistent account of the fact that spaces and social groups, or their practices and ideas, are reciprocally constituted. And with the expansion of the consideration to cities in West Asia and South Asia, the view is broadened from an urban history strongly related to Christianity to completely different religious movements. This not only allows assumptions about identity and diversity to be questioned, but also does more justice to the urban present, which is determined by globalisation and pluralisation.

The contributions in this issue then present new research on mixed-denominational German cities in the early modern period, Jeddah, Mes Aynak, Ahmedabad, Amritsar and movements of “spiritual urbanism” in modern India.