2. Religions and urban space in the context of super-diverse European cities - For teachers

Many European metropolitan centres are characterized by “super-diversity”, defined as the simultaneity of cultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic and other forms of diversity. An understanding of religious diversity – as containing multiple religious practices, boundaries, discourses and belongings – offers a key insight into the dynamics of super-diversity and pluralism in general in its ambiguous relationship with modernity and secularity. Religion is a part of urban culture and in one form or another addresses some of the main challenges in a society characterised by inequalities and heterogeneities.
In contemporary urban contexts, religious actors:

• occupy the urban space with different tactics and strategies: generating a problem of visibility/invisibility
• are involved in the relationship between traditional and historical religious places and the ones linked to new religions/spiritualities through the boundaries of ethnicity, gender or others.
• generate faith-based welfare and public service in response to the crisis of welfare state where religious institutions play a more public and more visible role in social service delivery
• relate to those places that cities identify as sacred places
• relate to religious activity throughout the city and to how this maps onto a contemporary urban reality of displacement and adaptation. There is a complex relationship of religious praxis, cultural identity and urban life.

According to the most recent United Nations Report, since 2008 more than 50% of the world is now living in urban areas (75% in Europe). Moreover, the United Nations Population Fund predicts that 60% of the world population – including European – will be living in cities by 2030. Along with intensive urbanization processes, globalization and re-industrialization have been carrying along increasing unemployment rates, poverty and inequalities. It is becoming urgent to elaborate an analytical framework to study these developments. Religion is a part of urban culture and in one form or another addresses some of the main challenges in a society characterized by strong inequalities and heterogeneities.
In the last 50 years, European societies have become host to large-scale migration engendering new forms of religious diversity. This is played out chiefly in European cities, transforming their identities, self-understandings and narratives. In urban research, the religious dimension of these identities, while certainly central to them, is largely overlooked. Some European cities developed and mobilized, in response to migration-driven diversification, images of the “multicultural city” promoting the idea of religious diversity as an asset to international business and tourist audiences. Other cities, in turn fashion themselves in terms of carriers of religious, mostly Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, sometimes Jewish or Islamic, heritage.
Migration-driven religious diversity calls forth questions about places of worship, the visibility of religious communities in public places (through dress and garment etc.), concerns over segregation and “religious ghettos” and the culture of neighbourhoods. These issues regard conflicts, which may play out in local politics, legal contestation in courts or urban social movements and civil society. In European cities, new religious buildings become the visible settlement of diaspora and migrant communities. They are the result of internal and legal adaptation processes as well as responses to the structural possibilities offered by the urban environment.
Parallel to this, we see rising concerns over the future of urban religious architectural landscape. These concerns emerge as a result of the accelerating secularization (or un-churching) of Christian churches, which brings with it pressures on finances, self-representation etc.: in some countries, churches deprived of their faithful by secularization are destroyed or converted in liveable housing or cultural buildings. Simultaneously, such urban Christian landscapes (churches, church building, seats of bishops etc.) are re-imagined as important cultural heritage, embraced by populations and neighbourhood groups on such terms and subject to contestation.
The changing uses of Christian buildings and their significance for urban identities, politics, and culture is certainly one of the most important issues in urban research at large. On the other hand, communities persistently seek acknowledgement through architectural or urban interventions, often with problems related to building permissions and processes of public recognition. More broadly, we find that the public display of religious symbols and rituals by minority communities faces opposition by populist discourse conjuring the so-called “crisis of multiculturalism”. In France, for example, each project of building a big mosque (particularly when a minaret is included) in a city faces the opposition of populist parties or anti-immigrants groups.
The changing uses of buildings and their significance for urban identities, politics and culture has become one important issue in urban research. for example, the accelerating secularization (or un-churching) of Christian churches or their re-imagination as a hallmark of the nationalistic aspirations harboured by local denominations – as the case of the brand new ‘Cathedral for the Salvation of the Romanian People’ in Bucharest shows- are phenomena which are changing the urban religious architectural landscape rapidly. New hybrid buildings are being imagined as future centres for city cultural and political activities: the church-mosque-synagogue building in Petriplatz-Berlin, the Columba in Colonia or the Doppelkirke in Friburg are examples of this trend, as well as the planning of the construction of a House of Religions in the city of Berne, as in other European metropolises.

Issues over the regulation of religious diversity and religious conviviality are basically urban issues while there is a great dearth in interdisciplinary studies addressing these phenomena in such terms. Religious life is subject to multiple forms of regulation that shape its visibility, public perception, and vitality. While nation-states and the regime of global human rights provide guidelines for the governance of religion, cities have a broad mandate, too, especially with regard to places of worship through zoning and planning. This gives them the power to shape religious cityscapes, to privilege some religious communities and restrict others. Cities have the status of “lenses for social theory” since they are transformed by the process of secularization and modernization and are increasingly units of analysis in their own right.