Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations (UrbRel)

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Religion and urbanity are subject to a reciprocal formation. In the first project phase, the work of the research group Religion and Urbanity confirmed this hypothesis clearly and in detail. A differentiated heuristic for developments in the history of religion and urbanity was applied to diverse case studies from Europe, the circum-Mediterranean region and South Asia, thus laying the foundation for further differentiating the initial hypothesis during a second project phase. In order to capture the complexity of the interactions between religion and urbanity, the concepts of heterarchy (with regard to actors) and co-spatiality (cospatialité, with regard to the entanglement of overlapping spatial constitutions) were defined more precisely. This enabled the research group to investigate momentary and long-term constellations and interactions of religious and/or urban actors and how they reciprocally constituted and perceived each other in a more comprehensive manner and to link this to enquiries in other disciplines. With its focus on practices and discourses of urbanity and religion, the research group has gained a clear profile within the field of urban religion and historical urban and spatial research. It has also established itself internationally as a co-operation partner and research infrastructure for fellows working in this growing field of research. The second project phase is dedicated to examining in how far long-term processes of differentiation, embedding and disembedding can be identified in this reciprocal formation. The complexity of the interaction between religion and urbanity which has been captured by the concepts of heterarchy and co-spatiality, suggests that both religion and urbanity are characterised by ambivalences. These are not limited to oppositional constellations such as maintaining power and protest or homogenisation and pluralisation. Rather, these ambivalences establish connections between the different facets of religion and urbanity, setting out from long-term polarisations and tensions. In a second funding phase (2023-26), the research group aims to follow this line of inquiry by applying its terminological and methodological tools to three areas of research which are complementary to the work done so far: group formations and fragmentations, mercantilisations and demarcations of limits. Each area is characterised by specific processes. Similar to those general processes identified during the first project phase (ritualisations, textualisations, spatialisations, temporalisations, interconnections), these allow us to work out commonalities and differences between cities and urban networks studied by our fellows in a comparative, transepochal and transcultural manner.