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16
Assembling Global Prayers
in the City: An Attempt to
Repopulate Urban Theory
with Religion
Stephan Lanz

For decades, urban theory’s prevailing point of reference was the patterns of development
in “a few wealthy cities” (Robinson 2006: 167) in North America and Western Europe. As a
way of distancing itself from this approach, Space//Troubles (Becker and Lanz 2003), the
first volume in the metroZones series, more implicitly formulated certain programmatic
hypotheses and theories, not only providing an analytical basis for metroZones, but also
initiating observations which, ultimately, led to the identification of the issues in and the
research design of Global Prayers: Redemption and Liberation in the City. Our findings
are now presented in this book, the thirteenth volume of the metroZones series, and here
I would like to offer an overview and discuss the basic assumptions, theoretical positions,
research strategies, and results so far.

Programmatic Basis of the metroZones Series

As we noted in the metroZones series founding workshop and the first volume’s introduc-
tion (see Lanz 2003), urban developments in the cities in the Global South cannot be ana-
lyzed separately from those in the Global North, and vice versa. This has been the case, at
the latest, since the age of colonization when European city planning was forcibly global-
ized as racist urban structures, and the growing flows of people, capital, goods, and cultural
practices were linked in the cities of the colonizers and the colonized around the world.
For example, informal urban economies and the production of space or division of urban
social spaces in “feudal-like islands of governance” (ibid.: 23), where each is subject to
their own rules or affiliations, are not a special phenomenon in the allegedly chaotic cities
of the South. Instead, these can be found as characteristic features in the present forms of

17
urbanization on a global level. For this reason, cities in the Global North and South are not
incommensurable, but need to be regarded as “‘neighbors’ in a single metropolitan space”
(Simone 2010: 263) and as one element of the same analytical field.
Second, we posited that urban societies in the Global South cannot be defined, as in main-
stream approaches in urban theory, through alleged modernization deficits in comparison
to the Global North. Rather, they follow independent paths to modernization, which do
not culminate in some catch-up sense with the model of a Western or even European city.
Traditionally, urban studies analysis, based on modernization theories, focuses on issues
of governance and infrastructure deficits, poverty, and violent conflict, the dynamics of
rapid urbanization and environmental problems. Such a focus, though, constructs cities
of the South as the deficient “Other” to the normality of Western cities which, by defini-
tion, is deemed to be a worthy goal. In particular, the normative transfer of Western con-
cepts—development, modernity, state, civil society—to African cities results in an image of
an irrational urban Africa falling back from colonial modernity into pre-colonial barbarism
(Mbembe and Nutall 2004). However, as overlapping “palimpsests of colonization, de- re-
and neo-colonization” (De Boeck 2002: 244), these cities are pursuing their own paths of
modernization where seemingly contrary rationalities between “modernity” and “tradition”
are interlinked in many diverse ways. Hence, in principle, we fully subscribe to Ananya
Roy’s (2009: 828) later apodictic statement that “[t]he study of the 21st century metropolis
is inevitably a study of modernity.”
The metroZones series adopted, third, the strategic maneuver of shifting the main-
stream perspective to enable us to adequately record present global forms of moderniza-
tion, describe them, and learn to understand them. The objective was to avoid taking the
familiar conditions in a “few wealthy cities” as a basis for defining global urban normal-
ity. Rather, our urban analyses looked back to the “North” from the incomparably more
dynamic urban realities discursively bound to the Global South and which determine
the conditions of the majority of the global population. As a “tactical maneuver” (Sim-
one 2010: 279), this shift in perspective does not, of course, equate with assuming that
the urbanism of the global South exists in some ontological sense. The valid comparison
here is far closer to AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of “black urbanism” understood as
an “inventive methodology” aimed at bringing “certain dimensions of urban life from
the periphery into a clearer view.” Here, too, rather than arguing that blackness consti-
tutes “a particular kind of urbanism,” the central dimension in this conceptual approach
is “to put blackness to work as a device for affirming and engaging forms of articulation
amongst different cities and urban experiences that otherwise would have no readily
available means of conceptualization,” (ibid.). Not only are South and North just as little
essentialist categories as “blackness,” but neither should be principally understood as
geographical. Instead, following Stuart Hall’s (1992) notion of “the West and the rest,”
they should be regarded as mutually conditioning relational elements in one single dis-
course formation. Hence, starting from everyday urban life beyond the model of the
European city, metroZones set out to investigate the following questions in relation to
individual concrete urban settings: how is the city (re-)produced “on the ground” in a
continuous process? What are the forces, practices, materials, and actors interacting in

18
this process? Which rationalities, imaginations, and aspirations form the basis of this
process? And what is the framework of power relations around it? Finally, what urban con-
figurations does this produce?

On Religion’s Alleged Disappearance in Western Industrial Cities

As we continued with the metroZones’ research and publication projects on the basis of
these analytical assumptions and strategic maneuvers, we found “religion” emerging as a
priority topic in the focus of our urban analyses. “Religion” was increasingly evident in a
variety of constellations, and a recurring theme across the most diverse cities—in the first
metroZones studies, for example, as urban forms of governance in Mumbai influenced by
Hindu nationalists (Eckert 2003), the boom in revivalist churches in the favelas of Rio de Ja-
neiro (Martins 2004), multifaceted urban Islamism in Istanbul (cf. Tugal 2005), and “street
politics” in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in Tehran (Bayat 2006). With critical urban
studies largely concentrating on the political and economic logics of urbanization in cities
in the North, such processes had hardly been considered at that time. Where critical urban
studies did deal with religion, it was usually discussed as the practice of supposedly back-
ward migrants or the urban poor and located within a conceptually contained urban space,
treated as another marginal footnote to urban processes, or considered as a specific feature
of “sacred” or “fundamentalist” cities.
At that time, though, to a certain extent in the wake of Western critical urban studies and
hardly noticed by it, various scholars interested in the agency of the “urban subaltern in the
global South” (Bayat 2000) had already highlighted the growing importance of religion in the
context of everyday urban practices in Middle Eastern cities such as Tehran or Cairo (Bayat
1997), in diverse African cities (Simone 1994, 2001) or in (Latin) American metropolises such
as New York or Rio de Janeiro (Orsi 1999a; Birman 2003). Nonetheless, it was a paper by
Mike Davis tellingly entitled Planet of Slums (2004) which brought the growing importance
of new religious movements in the cities of the global South to the attention of urban studies,
though his focus was less on them as religious, than as political and social actors. Given the
traditional assumptions in urban theory, Davis’s dramatic hypothesis of God dying in the cit-
ies of the industrial revolution and only then resurrecting in the post-industrial cities of devel-
oping countries (ibid.: 30) seemed quite cogent, as did his notion of religious groups replacing
left-wing movements in the global slums. However, Davis’s apocalyptic approach posited a
problematic causal link between the observed urban manifestations of the religious and the
politico-economic transformations of the cities of the South in the wake of global neoliberal-
ism, thus associating such manifestations with the urban poor’s ideological seduction. Hence,
ultimately, he stigmatized them as manipulated victims in the spirit of the vulgar Marxist defi-
nition of religion as opium for the people.
However, the history of early industrial cities shows that even the radical phase of modern-
ization fueled by industrialization where, according to Davis, God had “died,” was charac-
terized by a religious dynamic whose effects still have an influence today. The early indus-
trial cities in the United States and Britain, particularly, served as laboratories for religious
innovations of all possible political, cultural, and social nuances certainly comparable to
those nowadays. For example, middle-class fears in the rapidly growing migrant Unit-

19
ed States cities in the nineteenth century generated the reactionary “charity movement,”
which set out to discipline the supposedly dangerous proletarian masses through the power
of religion. On the other hand, religious idealists became involved in the progressive “social
gospel” movement, active in calling for structural improvements in the catastrophic condi-
tions in the overcrowded working-class districts. The “black churches,” in turn, developed
into a location for religiously motivated political activism in the struggle against the racist
exclusion of Afro-American communities from public spaces (Brooks-Higginbotham 1993).
Two Christian organizations which still exist today were also founded in mid-nineteenth
century London, and quickly spread in the United States. The Young Men’s Christian As-
sociation (YMCA) was established to create a moral bastion protecting young men from
the temptations of the cities, and even today remains a model for connecting religion and
business, since it set up and derived an income from a variety of businesses (such as ho-
tels) (Goh 2011: 56). In contrast, the Salvation Army’s theology sought to sacralize all as-
pects of everyday life. In order to conduct missionary work among the non-churchgoing
masses on the city streets and in public spaces, the Salvation Army, with its spectacular
parades and popular music, explicitly competed with the attractions of urban consumer
culture (Winston 1999).
Nowadays, this practice of sacralizing urban consumer culture has been adopted especial-
ly by Pentecostalism, which is presently growing faster globally than any other religious
movement. Originating in the early twentieth century in Los Angeles, Pentecostalism goes
back to a three-year-long prayer marathon known as the Azusa Street Revival, which start-
ed in 1906 when an Afro-American evangelist first spoke in tongues in a poor church com-
munity. The faithful interpreted this as a sign of the influence of the Holy Spirit, and the
advent of the Second Pentecost as prophesied in the Bible. A few years later, the first Pen-
tecostal churches were already engaging in missionary work in Latin American and African
cities, where Pentecostalism experienced a dramatic growth in the 1980s. Today, to a cer-
tain extent as a result of re-conversions through missionary work, this growth has flowed
back into the Global North. From the outset, the Pentecostal faithful and preachers were
drawn from all ethnicities. In Los Angeles especially, Pentecostalism became a spiritual
home for the black and poorer urban migrants marginalized by the racism of traditional
“white” churches (Cox 1995: 45ff.).
Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ assumption that urbanization would secularize the work-
ing class (see Davis op. cit.) could best be applied to Berlin, which grew dramatically to be-
come the third largest industrial city and, as early as the 1880s, was regarded as the world’s
most a-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, dominat-
ed by social democratic and communist beliefs, enmity to the churches was part of every-
day political culture (see McLeod 1996). Berlin, then, proves to be a special case of urban
irreligiosity in the early Western industrial city.
As the above shows, in the course of urban industrialization, rather than religion disappear-
ing from Western industrial cities, it has undergone a transformation process which has
reacted creatively to new forms of urban life and, in times of radical deep-rooted change,
produced innovative religious movements and practices: “The world of the modern city

20
has necessitated, encouraged, or simply made possible a tremendous explosion of religious
innovation and experimentation” (Orsi 1999b: 45). In a certain sense, this development
seems to be repeated in the major change from the industrial to post-industrial city starting
from the last third of the twentieth century (see Beaumont and Baker 2011a).

Blind Spots in Urban Theory

Urban theory, then, considers that modern urbanity, as the end product of the city’s long
spiritual decline, can be equated with secularity. However, this general assumption is less
the result of empirical analyses, and more the product of the two formative “theoretical
maneuvers” (Robinson 2006) in this field. The first of these maneuvers has established,
since the urban theories of Georg Simmel or Louis Wirth, a selective association between
the city and modernity; the second maneuver, dubbed “developmentalism” by Jennifer
Robinson (2006: 4), conceptualizes cities outside the North as underdeveloped and defi-
cient. Within these “theoretical maneuvers,” first, only particular cities in advanced indus-
trial countries were considered to be privileged locations of innovation and the “cultural
experiences of modernity” (Robinson 2010: 3). Second, urbanity was, in some way, equat-
ed with modernization so that cities “elsewhere” in the world, where traditions and the
allegedly “primitive” continued to exist, were regarded as “un-modern places” (ibid.), and
thus ultimately non-urban.

The Secularist Gaze of Western Urban Research Similarly to urban theory, sociology is also
generally founded on the theory of secularization. For example, Stuart Hall (in MacCabe
2008: 38) notes: “we forgot about [religion]. We thought—and sociology told us—that sec-
ularization is an unstoppable process. All our notions of modernity and of progress are har-
nessed to secularization, the secular. … With the defeat of secular alternatives, it became
the focal point of resistance in some of the less developed parts of the world.”
The secularization theory, following Max Weber, assumed that religion in the rational mod-
ern world epitomized by the large city could only 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 ever since the establishment of industrial cities
in the nineteenth century, the prevailing social discourse also regarded the large city as
the antipode of the religious. For conservative and religiously motivated urban critics es-
pecially, industrial cities were amoral sinks of iniquity. Even in Berlin during the Weimar
Republic, one radical criticism of the large city frequently had recourse to the biblical topos
of the whore of Babylon. In the United States, too, the dominant idea was that religion had
disappeared from the city, or even that religion as such was alien to the nature of the city.
For Roberto Orsi (1999b: 42–3), this was not only why urban religion has hardly been re-
searched, but also why it is regarded as a contradiction in terms.
As concerns the (Islamic) city of the caliphs or the sultan as well as the medieval (Chris-
tian) cities in Europe, scholars are agreed that religious rulers “wielded policing and ad-
ministrative powers,” and the entire “idea of citizenship, of civitas, was synonymous with
religious rule” (AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 4). In contrast, a nexus between the modern
city and religion has only been granted for special cases such as Jerusalem, already de-

21
scribed as the urban utopia of “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 seen as a social reminiscence, a sign
of urban backwardness, linked to (poverty) zones in “Third World cities” captive to their
traditions, or to migrant milieus not yet fully urbanized. Even here, urban theory over-
looked, for example, the major importance of liberation theology on the intellectual level,
as well as for their grassroots congregations, as religious, social, and political actors in
Latin America’s poor urban districts. As a “theology of revolutionary social change” (Cox
1990: 95), liberation theory, which condemned the “misuse of religion by ruling elites to
sacralize their privileges” (ibid.: xv), was a significant influence in intellectual and po-
litical post-colonialism. At the same time, under the military regimes, their grassroots
congregations offered a safe space for militant resistance movements in cities such as Rio
de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, or Santiago de Chile, fostering the poor’s self-organization and
“liberation” in their struggle for better living conditions and the right to the city.

The Orientalist Idea of the Islamic 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 re-
ligion. 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, 2008) show that, in comparison to the European city, the supposed
“Islamic city” is always defined by a lack. The prevailing theories regard the Islamic reli-
gious system’s dominance over the urban as responsible for the continuing decay in these
cities, their chaotic spatial structure, and their lack of effective institutions. Such sweeping
descriptions ignore the fact that the cities under Islamic rule have very different forms,
span a historical period of over 1,300 years, are found in the geographical space of three
continents, have a basic urban spatial design that precedes Islam, or that cities such as Cai-
ro or Damascus have always been home to considerable religious diversity.
This clearly 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 the
qualities of 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 to back-
wardness and labels it as the antithesis of modern urbanity.
The revitalization of the orientalist notion of the Islamic city from the early 1980s not only
illustrates the persistence of colonial concepts, but also their complex patterns of reciprocal
appropriation and adaption. During an Islamic renewal, for example, Arab urban planners
and Turkish Islamists sought to re-establish the model of the Islamic city (Abu Lughod
op. cit.)—not least with the aim of countering the defamatory image of Islam as a relic of

22
a tribal society propounded by Western orientalists and Turkish modernists, and proving
that Islam is indeed an urban religion (Tugal 2005). This was even more significant given
that since the 1980s, partially as the result of a massive rural exodus, the social basis and
the production of meaning of Islamism had shifted from the rural areas to the informal mi-
grant settlements within large cities (see Schiffauer in this volume). Since then, opposing
notions of the Islamic city have been competing with one another. In the municipal ad-
ministrations newly created from the informal Gecekondu settlements on the periphery
of Istanbul where the Islamists enjoyed their first election victories, local policies were
initially informed by religiously motivated ideas of a modest urban structure and society
submissive to God. In contrast, today in Istanbul as well as elsewhere one finds a pre-
vailing notion of the city as an Islamic “expression of imperial power and splendor,” with
elements borrowed from the Western-modernist “ideals of a planned, functional and ef-
ficient city” (Tugal ibid: 336; see contributions by Ayşe Çavdar; and Özge Aktaş and Eda
Ünlü-Yücesoy in this volume).
On the other hand, according to Sofia Shwayri (2012), the Islamic-city model is still taken,
even nowadays, as the “dominant framework” for studies on contemporary cities in the
Middle East. Finally, in the context of the “war on terror,” “the Islamic city model is again
used by imperial powers to define Middle Eastern societies and as the justification for war
and destruction” (ibid.: 271). Hence, for instance, the “ersatz cities in the American heart-
land” constructed for exercises in military urban warfare are based on a model of the Islam-
ic city as “chaotic, lawless and underdeveloped” (ibid.: 272).

Blind Spots in Post-Marxist Urban Analyses If one focuses on the religious as an element
of the urban, Aihwa Ong’s (2011: 2) argument that both the prevailing social science ap-
proaches to urban analysis “bear a Marxist pedigree and are thus overdetermined in their
privileging of capitalism as the only mechanism and class struggle as the only resolution to
urban problems” has a particular validity. “The political economy of globalization,” one of
the dominating approaches, postulates global capitalism as the “singular causality” in the
production of the city as a “site of capital accumulation.” In turn, urban analyses informed
by “the postcolonial focus on the subaltern,” the other prevailing approach, limit them-
selves to “- agents” as a “special category of actors.”
The emphasis on capitalist mechanisms of urbanization and the narrowed focus on Eu-
ro-North American cities, especially evident in critical “Western-centric urban theory”
(Edensor and Jayne 2012), subsumed their “heterogeneity, flux and uncertainty” under
a “minimal set of explanatory conditions” (Ong op. cit.: 6). In doing so, the non-tangi-
ble elements in the production of the urban were ignored—and this applies especially
to religion. In relation to religion, the bias among (post-)Marxist urban theorists also
supported a normative secularism (cf. Beaumont and Baker 2011b) through their ten-
dency, as a rule, to discuss issues in urban diversity and justice without even mentioning
aspects of the religious. In general, the politico-economic reductionism in critical urban
studies evident in the analytical subordination of urbanization processes to the logics
and operations of a planetary capitalism provokes the question of what the specifically
urban represents in such analyses (cf. McFarlane 2011a: 205; Farías 2011: 367). In such

23
an approach, “the attempt to grapple with notions of urban life itself” (Simone 2011:
355) falls through the cracks.
On the other hand, “subaltern urbanism” (Roy 2011a) has made important attempts to
postcolonize Western-centric urban theory by elaborating independent paths and moder-
nities in post-colonial urban developments as well as subaltern agency. However, in terms
of apprehending urban complexities, this approach similarly proves to have its limits due
to a perspective that is too narrow. Ananya Roy (ibid.: 235), for example, critically exam-
ined “ontological and topological readings of subalternity” in urban analyses that essential-
ize the supposedly subaltern identities in the “slum” of the “megacity” or celebrate the hab-
itus of the urban poor’s entrepreneurial drive and self-organization (see also Lanz 2008).
Aihwa Ong (2011: 9), in turn, points out how these two orientations in post-colonial urban
studies, with one underlining the continuities of the colonial past in the urban present and
the other focusing on the political agency of subaltern groups, seem “to privilege postcolo-
nial subjectivity and agency as the primary driving force in vastly different global sites that
have been greatly transformed, through heterogeneous processes, colonial encounters and
postcolonial histories, in infrastructure, politics, and culture.”
In contrast to a politico-economic approach, “subaltern urbanism” has paid close attention
to the significance of urban religion for a long time, though as a rule, only in the geograph-
ical Global South. Admittedly, here too, connections between, for example, urban poverty
and religious community-formation were privileged over the religious practices of the ur-
ban middle class or transnational connective processes between the city, religion, politics,
the economy, and culture. Here, Asef Bayat (2007) has provided key theoretical concepts
for investigating religious urbanity. His approach, based on many years of empirical stud-
ies, stands out from reductionist theses à la Mike Davis (2004). In particular, he not only
rejects the standard urban-studies assumption of a causal link between the boom in fun-
damentalist variants of religion and the “slum” or urban poverty, but equally disputes the
supposedly altered ideologies of poverty. Taking Cairo and Tehran as examples, he shows
that the key Islamic actors come from the educated middle classes, and their missionary
ambitions lead them to utilize the ignorance of corrupt state apparatuses for the needs
of the poor. As Bayat notes, the poor cannot afford to be ideologically choosy, but attach
themselves to groups which offer effective support for their everyday needs—spiritual, so-
cial, and material. Over the past decades, Bayat points out such groups have often been
radical religious movements.
Bayat’s notions of the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (2000) and “street politics”
(1997, 2006) are important in analyzing the religious in urban everyday life. The former
offers a reading of the activism of marginalized groups in cities in post-colonial society as
a non-collective and often illegal agency (e.g., occupying land), which is initially directed
toward improving the individual person’s own life rather than having any political aim.
However, Bayat also shows how, in the long term, such a “quiet encroachment” can have
a significant political impact on redistribution and democratization processes. When state
measures threaten what has been achieved (for example, an irregular settlement), en-
croachment frequently transforms into a collective political struggle to defend the gains
made. The location of such struggles is in the physical and social space of the street insofar

24
as, understood as forms of “immediate communication between atomized individuals,” it
facilitates “passive networks” (2012: 76). Asef Bayat has coined the term “street politics”
to describe the conflicts and connected dynamic of power relations between the encroach-
ing “ordinary people” and the authorities. In this book, we have dedicated a chapter to this
concept to consider it in terms of the religious variants of such conflicts and power shifts.

The Global Prayers Research Project: Theoretical Maneuvers

There are presently extensive ongoing debates over the “return of the religious” in a num-
ber of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Over the past decade, though with
a notable delay, there have also been numerous research studies investigating, on the glob-
al level, religious practices in cities. However, although the majority of these studies con-
sider religion in the city, they do not consider the city itself—and this was a key motivation
in initiating the Global Prayers project. In general, they focus neither on the question of
how the urban impacts the formation and character of new forms of religion, nor on how
the new religious communities and practices affect the urban. The studies that exist are
also widely dispersed, distributed across a range of area studies, or limited to individual
disciplines, in particular religious studies and anthropology and their journals. Most pre-
vious research has also been directed to individual cities, global regions or religions—ded-
icated solely, for example, to urban developments in Islam (Desplat and Schulz 2012), the
United States (Orsi 1999a) or Asia and Africa (Hancock and Srinivas 2008). As a result, it
was hardly in a position to notice remarkable parallel-developments across religions, pat-
terns of urbanization, and world religions. Other research has only focused on particular
issues relating to the presence of the religious in the city (e.g., “faith based organizations,”
Beaumont 2008, or “the sacred” (Gómez and Van Herck 2012).
In contrast, the theoretical approaches to urban analyses with the largest reach, which
overcome some of the blind spots ingrained in urban theory and examine the heteroge-
neous interconnections between the religious and the urban, subordinate these to homog-
enizing concepts such as the “post-secular city” (Beaumont and Baker 20011a) or “fun-
damentalist city” (AlSayyad and Massoumi 2010). The former is particularly problematic
in its normative content, “linear temporality” (Leezenberg 2010), and ethnocentric basis.
The latter focuses exclusively on the aspects of religious urbanisms which political and
academic discourse has most problematized and 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/back-
wardness, order/disorder, and secular/fundamentalist.
For this reason, Global Prayers, simultaneously building on and distancing itself from
such research, initially adopted a very open heuristic concept to focus on the question of
the religion of the city. As a result, we are investigating urban religion in its diverse forms
as a specific element of urbanization and urban everyday life insofar as it is intertwined
with other elements from urban fields—urban lifestyles and imaginaries, infrastructures
and materialities, cultures, politics and economies, forms of living and working, commu-
nity formation, festivals and celebrations, and so on—and together with these, incessantly
generates and (re-)produces the city. Hence, we understand the production of urban reli-

25
gion and religious urbanity as two sides of a continual process in which the urban and the
religious reciprocally interact, mutually interlace, producing, defining, and transforming
each other. In other words, Global Prayers critically explores the theory that religion rep-
resents an integral element of material, social, and symbolic production of the urban on
all levels, and thus needs to be integrated in urban theories (see Kong 2001). The Global
Prayers project is designed as transdisciplinary and transinstitutional on the global level,
and generates its knowledge by leveraging a diversity of case studies in many different cit-
ies across the world where these studies have initially been designed as “deep explorative
drilling” in the religion-urban field.
The conceptual framework we constructed to research into the diverse manifestations of
religion and religious urbanity in the contemporary city was created on the basis of the the-
oretical positions outlined above, which provided the foundation for metroZones, the de-
construction of problematic urban-theory traditions as well as the most recent innovations.
Yet in constructing that framework, what theoretical and methodological “maneuvers” did
we adopt?

“The art of being global” (Aihwa Ong) Global Prayers’ first theoretical maneuver responds
to the concepts needed to investigate urban configurations on the global level as parts of
the same analytical framework without recourse to reductionist explanatory patterns. In
her search for “another route through postcolonial urbanism” (Roy 2011b: 307), with the
aim of overcoming the limitations of a subaltern urbanism as described above, Ananja Roy
puts forward a “new way of doing global metropolitan studies” founded on a shift “from the
postcolonial as an urban condition to the postcolonial as a critical deconstructive method-
ology” (ibid.: 308). To avoid the standard approach of linking modernity with the West-
ern city and facilitate research into metropolitan modernities on the global level, Aihwa
Ong (2011: 9) argues for an analytical framework capable of elaborating “how an urban
situation can be at once heterogeneously particular and yet irreducibly global,” but one
that does not attempt to do so on the basis of a unique explanatory concept. In their book
Worlding Cities, Roy and Ong (2011) develop a specific idea of “worlding” for this pur-
pose, which builds on Gayatri Spivak’s original concept. In contrast to Marxist versions of
worlding, which are subordinated to capitalist logics and, for instance, dominate global city
research, the analytical framework proposed by Roy and Ong breaks with the mainstream
“core-periphery model of globalization” (Roy 2009: 824).
Worlding alludes, on the one hand, to urban knowledge production itself, and requires
the deconstruction of global “regimes of truth” (Roy 2011b: 314), in particular (though not
only) with regard to the production of traditional Western-centric urban theory. One chap-
ter of this book takes up precisely this task, offering a “deconstruction of the fundamen-
talist city” and, in this approach influenced by Nezar AlSayyad, pointing to other possible
readings of the encounter between the city and religious fundamentalism. AlSayyad him-
self not only deconstructed the traditional links between fundamentalism and Islamism,
but also the Western-centric theory that can only locate the advance of urban-religious
fundamentalism, together with its associated “medieval modernity,” in the supposedly
un-modern cities outside the West. In this context, in contrast to a religious-urban con-

26
cept of fundamentalism reduced to a repressive form of government, AbdouMaliq Simone
offers a reading interpreting “urban fundamentalism as opening up a space and a time of
the miraculous.” Fundamentalism understood in this way, which, as it were, resonates with
the fundaments of the urban, can re-empower the city to fulfill its most important “task”
which he describes elsewhere, following Ranciere, as “the possibility of those who have ‘no
part in anything’ to become ‘anyone at all’—that is, to come to the stage, to be visible as
an ordinary life in the city” (Simone 2011: 356). The Global Prayers case studies—which,
in the field between these two conceptual poles, address the urban variety of the religious
commonly regarded as fundamentalism—approach these issues from an actor-centered
perspective, thus avoiding a homogenizing explanatory approach within a conceptual re-
duction.
Beyond these methodological aspects, worlding is also understood, on the other hand, as
heterogeneous spatializing practices, not only collecting the elements and practices com-
ing from the world into the city, but also releasing them, in an altered form, back into the
world again. In this way, they invoke potential worlds transcending the current conditions
of urban living: “a non-ideological formulation of worlding as situated everyday practices
identifies ambitious practices that creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions
and configurations—that is ‘worlds’.… Worlding in this sense is linked to the idea of emer-
gence, to the claims that global situations are always in formation” (Ong 2011: 12). World-
ing in such a reading is generally viewed as unstable and incomplete. “Worlding practices
of centering, of harnessing global regimes of value” (Roy 2011b: 313) can be regarded as
including global modeling and inter-referencing practices (related, for example, to such
spatial variations as gated communities as well as megaprojects, world-class aesthetic dis-
courses, and forms and processes of religious urbanism) just as much as those “anticipa-
tory politics of residents and transients, citizens and migrants” (ibid.) which AbdouMaliq
Simone (2001), drawing on the example of African cities, has termed “worlding from be-
low.” Simone expands on the example of the forms of renewal of the traditional Sufi insti-
tution of the zawiya, which has branches in many towns and cities serving both as a lodge
and a place of prayer for travelling “brothers,” to discuss the translocal networks, economic
options, and forms of solidarity which facilitate the extension of urban Africa outside the
continent. Frequently a survival strategy, over the last decades this form of worlding has
not least been a “by-product of the implosion of urban Africa” (2001: 17).
In this sense, Global Prayers explores the manifestations of urban religion and religious
urbanity as practices of worlding, whereby here it is especially true that “the art of be-
ing global ignores conventional borders of class, race, city and country. There are promis-
cuous borrowings, shameless juxtapositions, and strategic enrollments of disparate ideas,
actors and practices from many sources circulating in the developing world, and beyond”
(Ong 2011: 23). In this context, worlding refers, on the one hand, to those aspirations and
imaginations informing religiously motivated attempts to create alternative urban worlds
transcending the city as it exists in reality and which, in essence, are common to all ur-
ban religious practices and communities. On the other hand, worlding also comprises the
(imaginary or real) extension of the particular practices to the translocal and global lev-
els—whether as urban-religious forms of circulation and community building, modeling

27
practices (for instance, of “cities of God”), borrowing and appropriating (for example, in
the course of sacralizing urban cultural practices), identities (e.g., as in the form of be-
longing to global Ummah or Pentecostalism), or as the expansion of religious-political and
economic power.
As a rule, the phenomena at the heart of Global Prayers’ research are revealed as glob-
al phenomena in the sense that their validity is not conventional, “only intelligible in re-
lation to a common set of meanings, understandings or societal structures” (Collier and
Ong 2005: 11). According to Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong, global phenomena are char-
acterized instead—and this applies to a significant extent to the forms of interwovenness
between the urban and religion investigated here—by their “distinctive capacity for decon-
textualisation and recontextualisation, abstractability and movement, across diverse social
and cultural situations and spheres of life. Global forms are able to assimilate themselves
to new environments, to code heterogeneous contexts and objects” (ibid.).

Assembling Urban-Religious Configurations Global Prayers’ second theoretical maneuver

reflects the concern with evolving a conceptual approach capable of understanding the en-
counters and interactions between the religious and the urban without subordinating them
to one-dimensional explanatory models.
On the one hand, this maneuver develops from the realization that the secularist and Marx-
ist genealogy of urban studies has marginalized “attempts to grapple the notions of urban
life itself” (Simone 2011: 355). In particular, in view of the way that approaches in tradi-
tional urban theory fail to grasp the everyday production of the city through the agency of
its residents, including their religious agency, a different method is needed—one that is
able to apprehend the “diversity of urbanisms” (McFarlane 2011c: 652), and hence address
the urban’s complexity and multidimensionality, its generic and process character, and the
way it is generated from the most diverse connections between extremely heterogeneous
actors and materials, discourses, aspirations, and imaginations.
On the other hand, this theoretical maneuver reflects new approaches in religious studies
critiquing very similar limitations in the traditional approaches to religion to those cur-
rently challenged by urban studies. In this respect, they call for comparable changes, em-
phasizing on various levels the significance of religion’s materiality and underscoring the
need to postcolonialize religious studies. In this process, the aspects of materiality in reli-
gious practices are considered in a contrasting way to the traditional “mentalistic approach”
(Meyer 2012: 14) which, based on a modern dualism between external form and internal
self, has placed the significance of belief and mind above practices and experiences, dema-
terialized the understanding of religion and neglected the “reality effects” (Meyer 2009: 7)
of cultural forms. Taking a “material approach to religion” (Meyer 2012; cf. Vásquez 2011;
Garbin 2012) not only allows religion to be understood as a “practice of mediation” (Meyer
2009: 11) between the idea and experience of supernatural powers and everyday life, but
also places the material forms and their affective powers in the focus of research.
In relation to the city, religious practice may then be, on the one hand, analyzed as a “pre-
scriptive regime” (Marshall 2009: 11), where technologies of power and technologies of the
self intermesh in its practice of governmentality, in Foucault’s sense. On the other, it can

28
be researched as a “sensational form” (Meyer 2009, 2012), whose sensory, material, social,
and symbolic practices not only manifest themselves in the urban, but are also generated
by it and play a part in creating it: “Urban Religion is the site of converging and conflict-
ing visions and voices, practices and orientations, which arise out of the complex desires,
needs and fears of many different people who have come to the cities by choice or com-
pulsion (or both), and who find themselves intersecting with unexpected others (and with
unexpected experiences of their own subjectivities) on a complex social field” (Orsi 1999b:
44f). Hence, rather than the city’s characteristic features only providing the context for re-
ligious experiences and its forms of expression, they belong to the basic constituents from
which such experiences and forms of expression are generated.
The concrete forms of religion’s contextualization and territorialization in the urban en-
vironment do not occur as a unidirectional incorporation or assimilation, solely either as
the religious form adapting to the environment or vice versa, but as manifold interactions,
references, and intersections, as dynamic processes of appropriation and borrowing. Here,
we build on “assemblage urbanism” to allow our analysis to include the configurations be-
tween religion and urbanity crystalizing from such processes.
Assemblage urbanism enables us to research the city’s constitution as a multiple, dynam-
ic, contingent object—and not as an “entirety,” a “fixed locality, but as a particular nexus
of situated and transnational ideas, institutions, actors and practices” (Ong 2011: 4); in
other words, as a nexus of spaces, objects, bodies, subjectivities, and symbols with diverse
and various reciprocal connections and which “assemble the city in multiple ways” (Farías
2010: 14). If one reads assemblage as the constantly emerging “product of multiple deter-
minations that are not reducible to a single logic” (Collier and Ong 2005: 12), we can grasp
the city as a permanently regenerating assemblage of assemblages. Hence, rather than
analysis focusing on spatial categories or formations, it concentrates on a dense descrip-
tion of the agency apparent in urban everyday life and on the mutually interlacing practices,
processes, and materialities which generate urbanism. In this way, the question (of power)
arises of “who and what has the capacity to assemble the city” (McFarlane 2011c: 668). In
contrast to the urban political economy, assemblage does not posit power as power over
but, following Deleuze and Foucault, as power to (Dovey 2011: 349). Rather than resorting
to structural or contextual explanations to read domination, injustices, or exclusions in
urban assemblages, they are investigated by concretely considering how asymmetries and
unequal relations of power develop in their origination processes, and the ruling effects
they produce. Hence, analyzing the urban from an assemblage perspective does not mean
disregarding capitalist logics and effects on urban life. Here, too, the principle applies that
today on the global level “urban life cannot be understood external to variegated capital-
isms” (McFarlane 2011b: 733). However, these are viewed from a different perspective: “By
looking at cities, we can learn more about capitalism as a form of life;” in other words, cap-
italism is not understood as an abstract global logic which, as it were, subjugates cities, but
investigated “as a concrete process assuming multiple forms” (Farías 2011: 368).
The assemblage approach is particularly suited to analyzing the forms of the encounter
between the urban and the religious, understood as a “practice of mediation.” On the basis
of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of agencement, AbdouMaliq Simone (2011: 357) regards

29
assemblage as pointing to the relation “between the possible—the unstable flows of mate-
rials and substances—and the prescribed—the imposition of functional stable structures …
—between code and singularity, expression and content.” It is especially this underscoring
of potentialities, ever-present in the urban, beyond the existent as well as a focus on doing,
performing, and events that enables the worlding practices of urban religious communities,
understood just as much as prescriptive regimes as sensational forms, to be grasped as cre-
ating alternative urban worlds transcending real cities. Such an approach facilitates a con-
ceptual framework capable of doing justice to the diversities and ambiguities in the connec-
tions between city and religion—its temporalities and instabilities—without reducing it to a
homogenizing conceptual access to specific aspects (fundamentalism, post-postsecularism,
etc.). Hence, interactions between the urban and the religious can be understood as inter-
actions between the components forming the assemblage; as Colin McFarlane (2011c: 653)
notes in quoting Gilles Deleuze, their sole unity is that of “co-functioning: it is a symbiosis,
a ‘sympathy.’” In this way, it becomes possible to focus on the multiple interlacing of the
religious even with all those aspects of urban space—the sensory, imaginary, material, etc.—
which would remain beyond the reach of standard urban theory. Thus, in the words of Ash
Amin and Nigel Thrift (2002), this approach can then “repopulate the city” (ibid.:4), which
is also “a kind of force field of passions that associate and pulse bodies in particular ways”
(ibid.: 84), with those urban—here religious—actors and aspects having previously fallen
through the cracks in models of urban theory.
In this spirit, Global Prayers analyses the diverse and various encounters and links be-
tween the urban and the religious, identified in the project as “urban-religious configura-
tions,” which we understand as assemblages of material, social, symbolic, and sensuous
spaces, processes, practices, and experiences where the religious and the urban are inter-
woven and reciprocally produce, influence, and transform each other.

Experimental Comparison as a Research Strategy Global Prayers’ third theoretical maneu-

ver relates to the project’s concrete research strategies. This also addresses the issue of how
to mutually relate the individual case studies, which have investigated specific urban-reli-
gious configurations in—or between—a total of twelve cities. As noted above, this research
project initially started from more contingent observations, which later became increasing-
ly systematic and collaborative, on the multiple transformation processes and the growing
presence of urban manifestations of the religious which evidently crossed the classic bor-
ders between, for example, South and North, or overstepped traditional religious territo-
rialization and cultural embeddedness. This contradicted basic urban theory assumptions
which we also subscribed to, or was either simply overlooked by urban studies or discussed
with a one-dimensional explanatory logic. Given this major gap between everyday urban
life and urban knowledge production, there was an obvious need to critically review ac-
cepted urban studies methods and theoretical approaches from the ground up. Here, it
was important to initially manage without any definitional conceptualization—since this
could only have followed accepted theories—and design a research approach as open and
experimental as possible, informed by decentering, defamilializing and “un-truthing” (Jane
Jacobs 2012). Such research is based on an interrogative, inductive and interpretative ap-

30
proach directed, not least, at (self-)critically reflecting, within the framework of post-co-
lonial inequality of power, the prevailing “geopolitics of knowledge” (Mignolo 2002) mir-
rored in the “dynamics of academic and research policies” (Kaltmeier 2012: 28) in which
the research process is embedded.
The initial objective was to avoid an analytical Western-centric reductionism informed by
a ruling discourse where urban modernity per se is fuelled by secularity, and “open up an
analytical space” (Marshall 2009: 3) facilitating the identification of the connections be-
tween religious practices and lifestyles and the urban. To achieve this, we adopted, in the
broadest sense, an actor-centered and practice-theoretical research approach focusing less
on the (religious) worldviews appearing in urban-religious configurations than on access-
ing the concrete world of their actors and investigating their “way of doing things.” Hence,
this is about reconstructing “the interior perspectives of the actors and the experiences un-
derlying them” (Schiffauer 2010: 27) and critically reflecting on them.
To this end, we carried out the following operations: expanding the concept of research to
cover art; configuring the project transinstitutionally to transcend the scientific academies;
primarily engaging local Fellows to conduct on-site research; and a collaborative progres-
sive knowledge production, partially developed in cooperation in intensive workshops and
on research trips, and partially in discussions with university and civil society communica-
tion partners in the cities in the research project.
In a first move, we took a transdisciplinary approach to expanding the research concept,
historically colonized by academia, and included artistic forms of research. We decided
that neither the scholar nor the artist should have the sole authority over knowledge-for-
mation or the diverse forms of presentation for Global Prayers – from the various text
formats to exhibitions, performative events, and installations (see Kathrin Wildner in this
volume). The project’s transdisciplinary approach transcending the borders of academia
and art was not directed at a methods-based integration of artistic research into scientific
systems. Instead, the artistic approaches were to be regarded as an independent “epistem-
ic practice” (Bippus 2009), hence expanding the concept of research. As noted by Anne
Huffschmid in the Global Prayers publication Faith is the Place (2012: 165–66), research
is not regarded “as a procedure of validation of a hypothesis,” but as a “procedure of explo-
ration and discoveries, a constant and delicate movement between knowing and not-know-
ing.” This promotes, on the one hand, self-reflective practice in research and, on the other,
a practice of the “aesthetical interrogation of reality.” In the context of the researchers’
subjectivity, the former questions how they construct their analytical perspective; the lat-
ter contains a reflection on “on form, aesthetics and representation, that is the mediality,
materiality, performativity of religious urbanities, or political stagings, including a critical
consciousness of visual discourses” (ibid.: 166).
This expanded research concept was reflected in the diversity of the institutions involved
in the project and, given their situatedness in the fields of academia, art, culture, and pol-
itics, their sometimes significantly divergent interests and functional logics. These had to
be balanced out in a dialogue within the research process as a kind of an ongoing con-
flict-prone crisis management and, in the process, generated a new diversity of perspec-
tives on research topics, issues, and methods. The project Global Prayers was developed

31
by metroZones, an association of scholars, artists, journalists and curators, who have been
investigating urbanization processes on the global level for some years. The project is im-
plemented by metroZones together with the European University Viadrina’s Cultural Stud-
ies faculty as well as the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a forum not only for contemporary
art but also for theoretical and socially relevant discussions on the global circulation of
cultures. Research cooperations were also realized with the Berlin arts association Neue
Gesellschaft für Bildende Künste (New Society for Visual Arts), which is located in a po-
liticized artistic milieu, local Goethe-Institut offices (in Lagos and Nairobi), and the lib-
eral left-leaning Heinrich Böll-Stiftung (in Beirut, Istanbul, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Rio de
Janeiro, and Lagos) which, in its local-level civil society cooperation, has often been con-
fronted with the set of problems relating to urban religion and is interested in developing
approaches to it.
The Fellowships for the scientific case studies were awarded by global tender. The tender
process also sought to avoid reproducing the prevailing geopolitics of knowledge by un-
reflectedly applying the Euro-American academic evaluative logic (publications in inter-
national journals, connections to elite universities, etc.). Instead, we welcomed local ap-
plicants’ well-founded and specialized knowledge acquired on the ground in the research
cities or deriving from sources beyond academic logics. In the course of the project, the
resulting composition of actors not only facilitated a multifaceted readiness to experiment
with methods and forms of collaboration, but also generated numerous problems and con-
flicts. Rather than these deriving solely from the field of tension between the project’s ex-
perimental constellation and the particular logic of and demands in the German research
and funding landscape in which the project is embedded, they were also due to the struc-
tural inequalities between the various project actors in terms of access to resources, links to
academia, or the implementation of standardized demands on international research and
the documentation of findings.
A modus operandi was then established through four long workshops in Berlin, Lagos, Bei-
rut, and Mumbai, which were combined with fieldtrips as well as local cooperations and
public events. After the initial explorative phase, the way of working became increasingly
consolidated, with growing reciprocal understanding between researchers and collabora-
tion in a variety of local as well as translocal constellations, which gradually led to the de-
velopment of more robust conceptual frameworks and terms. This step-by-step process
did not only generate a conceptual framework for the entire project, but also produced
close cooperation between, for example scholars and artists in Beirut, Istanbul, and Mum-
bai. Moreover, the reciprocal approach to critiquing methods and content also increasingly
led to a number of closer connections being identified: for example, between the “cities of
God” in Lagos and Istanbul; between the politico-religious urban constellations in Jakarta,
Mumbai, and Beirut; between the urban-religious forms of de- and re-territorialization in
Kinshasa, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Berlin; between the historical foundations of the
religious movements in Tehran, Mexico, and Buenos Aires; and between forms of sacraliza-
tion of urban cultural practices in Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and Amsterdam.
This leads me back to the initial question in this section on the comparative nature of Glob-
al Prayers. This question has to be discussed, not least, in the context of the recent emerg-

32
ing demands and studies calling for a renewal of comparative urban research, and applying
such methods. This is particularly relevant since the projects suggested, including those
by Jennifer Robinson (2006, 2010), belong to the efforts to postcolonialize urban studies
by analyzing “ordinary cities” on the global level within shared conceptual frameworks. At
present, a number of highly different concepts are collected under the umbrella of compar-
ative research approaches, though there is no space here to systematically discuss the spec-
trum they cover (see for example: Robinson 2010, Ward 2010, McFarlane 2010 or Urban
Geography issues 28, no. 1 (2007), 29, no. 5 (2008) and 33, no. 6 (2012)).
Certainly, according to the definition of comparative urbanism by Jan Nijman (2007: 1) as
“the systematic study of similarity and difference among cities or urban processes,” Glob-
al Prayers does not follow a classical comparative approach. Working with the idea of a
“comparative consciousness” (Nader 1994), the project focuses less on similarities and dif-
ferences between mutually exclusive units (in particular since, in our view, cities cannot
be understood as such units) than on transformations and connections, or the melding of
those urban-religious practices and structures of specific configurations in the focus of in-
terest. Here, “transnational examinations” are a key strategy since these “can use one site
to pose questions on another” (Roy 2003: 466). The individual case studies do not follow
any formal comparative agenda. However, where they examine urban-religious configura-
tions as practices of worlding, they always point to global forms and processes, and mate-
rial as well as imaginary transnational networks and connections. In a certain sense, the
researchers often only needed to follow the urban-religious actors they were investigating
since their world is always based on comparisons—in the context of their affiliation to a
global religious community between here/this life and there/the afterlife, between “devil-
ish” and “devout” urban locations and cultural practices, between cities that really exist and
imaginary “cities of God,” etc.
In a certain sense, Global Prayers is a 1 + 1 + 1 + … project, as defined by Jane Jacobs
(2012), drawing on Gilles Deleuze as a “philosopher of this kind of (+).” Hence, this is not
about establishing essential differences between “A” and “B” or explaining everything by
a single logic, a “homogenizing geography of a single cause”: “Rather, the Deleuzian (+)
points to multiplicity, and in the direction of emergence and becoming” (ibid.: 905). This
follows the simple insight that “the project of decentering assumes multiples,” as is evident
in “the notion of the center against which one works” (ibid.: 904). In this sense, Glob-
al Prayers builds on the insights gained in the previous metroZones projects (Lanz 2004
Schäfer et al. 2006; Lanz et al. 2008) whereby, to quote Jane Jacobs, “the multiple (1 + 1)
generates an ever-present ground ‘un-truthing’ in which I am forced to admit that what is
happening in City A does not, might not, cannot stand for City B, and certainly not for City
E(verywhere)” (op. cit. 907).
The individual Global Prayers productions created from such an approach are mutually re-
lated to generate, in the sense of an assemblage from diverse urban-religious configurations,
a multifaceted picture of present urban transformations in the context of urban religions
and religious urbanities. Rather than, as in a narrower sense, comparatively tracing the de-
velopments identified to unifying patterns of causality, this multifaceted picture is intend-
ed, within the framework of productions, connections, fractures, similarities, or differences

33
between the elements regarded as dynamic and temporary, to stand for itself. Knowledge of
the contingency of this picture is reflected in the fact that although the choice of researched
cities, religious actors, and transregional connections was not arbitrary, it was naturally se-
lective. Thus, though Global Prayers are not generally limited to religious movements within
Christianity and Islam, the studies in this book, with the exception of one study on Hinduism,
all focus on such religious movements. In essence, their shared novelty lies in the fact that,
as global forms, they have grown to become mass movements in the most diverse metrop-
olises around the world, or are totally new movements, and interact intensely with urban
structures and lifeworlds (in contrast see the previous publication Faith is the Place, which
took a far broader approach to religious movements; metroZones 2012). The research was
conducted both in “particular cities,” for example, cities regarded as capitals of Pentecostal-
ism (Lagos, Rio de Janeiro) or hotspots of religiously contextualized conflicts (Tehran, Beirut,
Mumbai), but also in “ordinary cities” without any apparent specific characteristics in terms
of urban-religious dynamics (such as Berlin, Jakarta, Mexico, Amsterdam, or Atlanta). This
approach is either justified by the content, since the project not only set out to investigate
particularly conspicuous urban-religious configurations, but also “ordinary” ones, or is justi-
fied pragmatically, since fruitful collaborations already existed in some cities, or interesting
projects were suggested that reflected the overall research design.
In the context of the operations mentioned above, the 1 + 1 + 1 + project concept does not
only relate to questions of content, but also to the methodological and strategic positioning
of Global Prayers. In this sense, the project follows Colin McFarlane’s (2010: 727) notion
of comparison as a strategy: “In the expansive reading of comparison … I argue for atten-
tion not just to different scholarly knowledges on cities from social science across the world,
but different activist and public knowledges that are important for the production of a
more global, more democratic urban studies characterized by diverse urban epistemes and
imaginaries.” Understood in this way, comparison becomes a “mode of thought” beyond
the methodological issues of a comparative work, and a strategic tool in the overall config-
uration of a project seeking to cross transdisciplinary, transinstitutional and transregional
boundaries; in other words, it becomes a tool “for creating new conversations and collab-
orations, for reading different traditions and connections, and for expanding the field of
critique and inquiry” (ibid.: 730). Last but not least, following AbdouMaliq Simone (2010 :
263), the aim is to go beyond a purely analytic approach “to imagine a situation where” At-
lanta, Beirut, Berlin, Istanbul, Jakarta, Cairo, Kinshasa, Lagos, Mexico, Mumbai, Rio de Ja-
neiro, and Tehran “are ‘neighbors’ in a single metropolitan space and what that experience
might be like for people who would live within it.” Such a comparison is not only endowed
with meaning as reciprocal Learning from* (the title of an earlier metroZones exhibition,
see Becker et. al. 2003) but is equally “a key site for the urban imagination—a potential site
of politics” (McFarlane 2010: 732).

Interconnections: Combining Analytical “Deep Explorative Drilling” to Form a Coher-

ent Picture
In this last section, I would like to suggest, on the basis of the higher-level issues, a variety of
interconnections between case studies and Global Prayers productions, taken as exemplary

34
here, and discussed in the present book or, in some cases, in the preceding volume Faith is
the place (metroZones 2012). The aim is to sketch a picture, no matter how fragmentary, al-
lowing the evolving and diverse urban-religious configurations, in the sense of an assemblage,
to be identified (on this, see also Werner Schiffauer’s first essay in this volume).

Urban Cultures of Conversion To begin initially with the relationship between religion,
culture, and space, global prayers research indicates how, to a significant degree, new re-
ligious communities distancing themselves from traditional orthodoxies interact with the
urban in the process of their particular religion breaking away from its traditional embed-
dedness in a culture or a territory. This is confirmed by Olivier Roy’s (2010: 25ff.) theo-
ry of religion’s global individualization, “de-territorialization and de-culturation.” In this
volume, for example, Amanda Dias’s research into the Salafist community shows how a
religious movement without traditional cultural and territorial connections created itself
in the Christian city of Rio de Janeiro. Its growth was derived from individual conversions,
which can be read just as much as an aspect of a dynamic religious market as the result of
Rio de Janeiro’s specific social and religious landscape. The transformation of Shiite Islam
in Beirut with its invention of religious ritual, discussed by Joseph Rustom, also follows
a deterritorialization due to Shiite migration from rural Southern Lebanon into a Sunni
Muslim Beirut. The Chhath festival in Mumbai can be similarly located, transforming from
a traditional religious ritual into a mega-event in the course of urban migration by the rural
population in northern Indian and their subsequent stigmatization (cf. George Jose).
“The return of religion into public space,” according to Roy, “no longer occurs as something
culturally taken for granted, but as a display of ‘pure’ religiosity or reconstructed tradi-
tions” (ibid.: 24).To avoid isolation in religious “ghettos,” religious communities look for
new “cultural markers” (ibid.: 255). In this process, it is no coincidence that new religious
communities turn to urban youth and pop culture, since this culture’s (young) protagonists
are a popular target for their missionary strategies. As the Global Prayers case studies
indicate, the cities especially are the locations where religious actors find a new cultural,
political, and economic embeddedness. To begin with, in a kind of anti-cyclical movement,
these new embeddings sacralize specific elements of the urban which, in turn, leads to the
progressive hybridization, de-bordering, individualization, and secularization of urban re-
ligions. This dialectic entanglement of the religious with the urban generates a diversity of
urban cultures of conversion. For example, (post-)Islamist middle-class milieus in Istanbul
infuse urban consumer cultures linked to the fashion and beauty industry with a religious
significance (Özge Aktaş and Eda Ünlü-Yücesoy; Hidayet Tuksal). Buildings complexes in
the wastelands of urban modernity—whether those generated by industrial production and
its bureaucracies or by the cultural industries—are similarly transformed into serial rooms
for Pentecostal prayer, appearing in the photo series by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber as a
global form going beyond regional patterns. Or religious actors adopt previously demonized
practices and genres from both worldly and global urban pop- and subcultures, “purify” them
to conform with their religious values, and market them in a highly lucrative global religious
media and culture industry (Martijn Oosterbaan; Adé Bantu; and Johannes Ismaiel-Wendt).
Such urban-religious configurations develop in the form of worlding practices from the

35
originally urban processes of mutual borrowings, appropriation, transformation, and ne-
gotiation, as well as those of segregation, demarcation, purification, and homogeniza-
tion. In a continual process of dialectic entanglements, they shift existing urban borders
between sacral and secular cultural practices, even though these rigid divisions were, in
general, initially constructed by the religious communities themselves to keep the faith-
ful from the temptations of the sinful world.

Religious Metropolitan Mainstream Where urban religions interact with current cultur-
al and political practices and scenes in urban space, they create new kinds of cultural
self-evidences facilitating their compatibility with the most modern forms of urbanity. Even
in Berlin, the dynamic of religion is no longer limited to disputes between migrant religions
in the diaspora, as still shimmers through in Werner Schiffauer’s essay. The artistic research
for Global Prayers by Magdalena Kallenberger and Dorothea Nold (2012), in contrast, inves-
tigated the spatial practices of new Christian congregations in Berlin who rent such sub-cul-
ture venues for their church services as a trendy nightclub, an arthouse movie theater, or
a co-working space. Here, it becomes clear how the urban dynamic of religion has already
reached the “creative classes,” the educated, individualist, and entrepreneurial milieu which
represents that metropolitanism in Berlin currently celebrated around the world. The pro-
fane locations these congregations appropriate are less sacralized by staged interventions
than atmospherically by a mediating “spirit” of religious “communitas” spread through the
space by the power of community rituals, gospel music, or discursive affirmations of faith. In
this way, such new religious communities forge links to other metropolitan community for-
mations that are presently highly dynamic and which, as in the case of co-working and club
communities, have emerged from urban subcultures.
The studies by Ayşe Çavdar and Asonzeh Ukah, which can be read as complementary, focus
on urban planning projects, lifestyles, infrastructures and power structures in the religious
gated-community facilities in Başakşehir in Istanbul and Redemption City in Lagos. On
a global scale, these complexes also belong to the most modern representations of late
capitalist urbanity—though here, as megaprojects developed through centralist planning
and functioning on the basis of a capitalist profit logic, in its form as consumer-oriented,
technocratic, and modernist. Although the Istanbul development was designed by a state
apparatus dominated by the Islamic faith and the Lagos complex is the product of an eco-
nomic-religious (global) company, both constellations ultimately appear as urban-religious
configurations following, not least, a capitalist logic. At the same time, these are also loca-
tions where processes of secularization (of Christian as well as Islamic milieus and their
values) and sacralization (of urban social space) are active, creating paradoxical effects. In
these two religious worlding processes, it is precisely the gated community, the global par-
adigm of space in the Western secular city under neoliberal capitalism, which becomes an
exemplary model for the development of a real “city of God” which follows the modernist
urban ideal influenced by homogeneity, purity, and segregation.
In her multi-sited ethnography, Gerda Heck describes quite different types of urban worlding
practices which, however, are equally avant-garde. Her research traces the global migration
routes of Congolese revivalist Christians from Kinshasa to the transfer cities of Rio de Janeiro,

36
Istanbul, and Berlin, and ultimately to Paris. As Heck illustrates with the example of Istanbul,
the churches have numerous functions in this urban-religious configuration, which develops
paradigmatically in a “worlding from below” (Simone 2001), to enable urban Africa to expand
around the globe. The churches function as places of retreat, offer migrants economic and po-
litical options, serve as the location, in their role as a spiritual home, of a religious community
and experience, and provide a “distinction marker to assert their believers as having a moral
concept and lived identity” (Gerda Heck).
These examples show that, contrary to the traditional urban theory assumptions, in the con-
text of such urban-religious configurations as practices of worlding, religion does not repre-
sent some exotic reminiscence, but its agency unfolds at the heart of metropolitan moderniza-
tion. Such configurations have not developed in contradiction to capitalist logics in the course
of a global “new metropolitan mainstream,” which the research network INURA (2011) un-
derstands as structurally comparable urban development strategies and lifestyles applicable
“under the conditions of planetary urbanization” in economically competing cities. Instead, in
conjunction with these logics, the configurations jointly shape dynamic assemblages.

Urban-Religious Bodily Practices as the (Self-)Governmentality of Believers The following

section discusses interconnections between Global Prayers’ research into the relationship
between religious communities and their believers and non-believing urban residents, as ev-
ident in their interactions with the city. This is closely linked to the question of the religious
actors’ “embodied acts and the bodily practices” (Holloway and Valins 2002: 8) in urban
space. Since this in essence addresses the question of governmentality in Foucault’s sense,
drawing on this concept allows various studies to be read together. As a “totality of proce-
dures, techniques, methods that constitute the way people rule one another” (Foucault 2005:
116), governmentality does not only suppress subjectivity, but also promotes technologies of
the self, which can be docked onto the aims of governmentality. Hence, governmentality is, in
general, not characterized “by the power to rule,” but “by the power to affect, like the relation-
ship between priest and congregation, producing a certain set of behaviors within members
of the flock so that, for example, salvation may be achieved” (Garmany 2010: 910).
Religious communities, then, can be understood as programs of conversion and redemp-
tion and as technologies of governance to collectively implement the rules and anchor them
in the individuals (cf. Marshall 2009). In doing so they offer religious rituals through which
individuals are, for example, “reborn” and fight in a permanent “spiritual war” against evil.
At the same time 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 fami-
ly life, gender roles, sexual orientation, consumer behavior, and cultural activities (Lanz
2012). In this interconnected governing of the self and the other, the believers go through
a process of subjectivization creating them as new people, and intending to lift them out
of an urban environment perceived as not-pleasing to God or, literally as devilish, into a
divinely ordered space—a “city of God,” as it were. In this process, space is also to be under-
stood in Lefebvre’s sense as geographical.
Each individual conversion in the context of the individualized and deculturized forms of
urban religion turns into, first and foremost, a question of the governmentality of the self,

37
as is evident, for instance, in the studies, both conducted in Rio de Janeiro, by Amanda
Dias into a Salafist community or my own into Pentecostal urban cultures (Lanz 2012). The
event of conversion represents a break with a previous lifestyle and an extreme endeavor
to create a new personal identity. As the contribution by Özge Aktaş and Eda Ünlü-Yücesoy
on women’s religious lifestyles in Istanbul shows, this generally leads to a permanent strug-
gle in self-disciplining which interacts with its urban environment. The strategic program
of each particular religious community is inscribed in the new believers during the pro-
cess of subjectivization, which is largely realized through bodily practices enacted in urban
space as a break with the spatial practices exercised before the conversion—as, for instance,
in Amanda Dias’s example of the use of the beach in Rio de Janeiro. This is also realized
through religious clothing, especially in terms of women’s bodies (though, as Dias indicates,
not exclusively so). Taking the example of academic religious women in Istanbul, Hidayet
Tuksal describes how since, in contrast to men, their clothing makes them visibly religious
(and so makes them subject to stigmatization), women have developed specific ways of
combining their faith and everyday life. Asonzeh Ukah’s description of the virtually totali-
tarian code of conduct for all the residents of Redemption City in Lagos highlights in par-
ticular just how strongly the religious regulation of bodily practices extends into all areas of
everyday culture (alcohol, smoking, bars, dancing, music, sex, etc.).
The collective self-organization of created or transformed assemblages of religious perfor-
mance in urban space, however, reveals how unstable, dynamic, and contingent the de-
velopment of religious body practices are in the city. This includes such hybrids as the
Pentecostal “crusade,” carnival, or the drug-gang funk party in Rio de Janeiro (Martijn
Oosterbaan), ritual prayers in the Santa Muerte cult in Mexico (Anne Huffschmid), the
burial rituals in Kinshasa taken over by adolescents (Filip De Boeck), or young people in
Mumbai transforming the Ganesh Chuturthi festival into techno-style rave parties (George
Jose). Potentialities appear in such urban-religious configurations for quite different (so-
cial, cultural, spiritual) urban worlds than those envisaged in religious governmentality
programs. They show particularly clearly how, in their mutual interactions with the believ-
ers’ technologies of the self and the specific effective powers of the urban, governmentality
programs inevitably fail as an entirety (as do all such programs), and the relationship be-
tween governing the self and the other has to be constantly realigned. At the same time, in
their interaction with the urban, they develop a significant impact on both the subject and
urban society. For example, Pentecostalism’s de facto patterns of government in Rio de Ja-
neiro’s favelas, which deviate considerably from its strategic program, reflect the favela’s
historically developed character as a particular urban space. The favela’s self-made urban-
ism corresponds to the emergent urban self-made religion there, both being influenced by in-
formality in the sense of self-organized regulations and precarity, as well as an individual and
collective creativity as the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (Bayat 2004; Lanz 2012).
This also highlights how the connection between poverty and the rise of urban religions,
dubbed by Asef Bayat (2007) in the context of Islam as the “myth of the Islamic poor,” is
far from being as causal and one-dimensional as urban theory has so often assumed (cf.
Davis 2004). Although Global Prayers’ studies indicate that the urban poor often regard
religion as a means of enhancing their control over their own circumstances (see, for ex-

38
ample, metroZones 2012), such studies also confirm Asef Bayat’s (2007) statement that
marginalized urban residents cannot afford to be ideological. Instead, they are more likely
to side with those groups able to effectively support them in their everyday needs and, over
the last decades, these were often religious organizations. Their technologies of the self,
elaborated historically in an interaction with the technologies of power they were exposed
to, enable the urban poor to act as subjects, and certainly make them capable of, depending
on their—material, political, or spiritual—objectives and needs, interlinking the religious,
political, and economic fields and blurring the borders between them.
“The corporeal enactment and performances … [which] are central to the maintenance and
development of religious spaces and landscapes” (Holloway and Valins 2002: 8) are natu-
rally not only expressed in individual body practices, but also appear in performances, such
as collective prayers, missionary “crusades,” processions, or purely symbolic occupations
of space, which religious communities orchestrate in the form of a technology of power in
urban space. As the artistic contribution by Paola Yacoub shows, questions of visibility and
invisibility play an important role here as when, for instance, Hezbollah, in Beirut, osten-
sively enacted the power of God and his representatives on earth during an overpoweringly
and passionately staged funeral procession. This, in turn, is complemented by a process of
making those elements invisible which contradict its claims to religious-political purity and
perfection. In Yacoub’s words “Both ostentation and occultation contribute simultaneously
to how religious leaders have a major responsibility for dead bodies.”
Brian Larkin’s article, in turn, takes the different example of an urban-religious configu-
ration in the northern Nigerian city of Jos, which has repeatedly suffered from religious
conflicts, to explore the interwovenness of technologies of self and power. Larkin illus-
trates how the loudspeakers, which fill the streets with a religious sound “on behalf of” the
churches and mosques, are capable, as non-human actors in Latour’s sense, of drawing
attention to religious messages and creating emotions capable of fomenting religious con-
flicts. People of a different faith counter such a technology of power, on the other hand,
with a deliberate strategy of disattention. Through this opposing technology of the self,
they seek to distract themselves from an urban space which, through sound, has been ex-
plosively charged with religious conflict and which they cannot physically escape.

(Street) Politics Reclaiming the (Religious) Right to the City Following the two Global
Prayers contributions just mentioned, I would like to now take the case studies as a start-
ing point to consider connections to the relations between the political and the religious in
the city. This applies first of all to theories, such as that put forward by Mike Davis (2004),
supporting an unequivocal distinction between left-wing/emancipatory and religious/reac-
tionary movements, and assuming that the former are increasingly superseded by the latter.
Similarly, Nezar AlSayyad (2010) primarily associates radical-religious urban groups with
reactionary positions, connecting their rise to the possible establishment of a “fundamen-
talist city,” “where certain categories of people or the religious other are rendered ‘bare
life’” (2010: 24). In addressing the question of which urban configurations radical reli-
gious groups could constitute as powerful actors, AlSayyad and Massoumi (2010) point to
a multiplicity of mutually interwoven processes, as do a number of the authors of research

39
projects conducted for Global Prayers (for example, Danusiri, Jose, Bou Akar, Rustom,
Yacoub, Schäfer, and Huffschmid). These processes include power and exploitative struc-
tures from colonialism, ethno-nationalist projects, institutionalized forms of marginaliza-
tion, the arrogance of secular or traditional religious elites, and modernizing processes that
break up social structures. AlSayyad and Massoumi rightly note that radical political-reli-
gious groups can successfully establish themselves in cities by reacting to such societal con-
stellations with transcendentally-based practices capable of endowing meaning, providing
efficient social support, or facilitating new forms of citizenship and community.
Justin Beaumont and Christopher Baker’s (2011a, 2011b) concept of the postsecular city
offers a quite different interwovenness in contemporary cities in contrast to the repressive
religious-political forms of interactions described above. However, the one-sided empha-
sis 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 edu-
cational and ethical change, appear to be almost naively optimistic. Certainly, the asser-
tion that integrating religious groups in urban governance does not automatically lead to
conservative political change, but also facilitates the formation of overarching coalitions of
progressive, secular, and religious groups may reflect the research findings in the Global
Prayers project (e.g., Schiffauer in this volume; Teschner 2011). Nonetheless, the Global
Prayers research into the urban-religious way of doing things through actor-centered ap-
proaches linking theory and practice has produced a significantly more ambivalent result
than these two opposing concepts of, on the one hand, a fundamentalist city viewed as re-
pressive and marginalizing and, on the other, a postsecular city interpreted as a laboratory
of ethical change.
Such ambivalent interlacings are already evident in the two religious-political movements
which, in distinction to traditional orthodoxies, played a significant part in establishing the
modern urban interlinking between the religious and the political in the 1970s. These two
movements were political Islam which, as Hengameh Golestan and Sandra Schäfer note,
emerged as the ruling form in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, and a Catholic liberation
theology, whose worldly power was restricted to a discourse with a global influence and
a multiplicity of grassroots communities in poor districts across Latin America (cf. Anne
Huffschmid in this volume). Though these movements have fundamental differences as,
for instance, in their political and ideological proximity to the poor which was more instru-
mental in political Islam and, rather, an end in itself in liberation theology (Bayat 2007),
they also share important features, for example, in terms of their anti-colonial stance or
Marxist roots.
If one examines interwovenness between the political forms of religion in urban daily life
less on the basis of strategic programs and technologies of power and more through the
everyday forms and the concrete spatial and cultural practices by which they become man-
ifest in the city, the result is a picture of ambivalences and contradictions—as is evident
from the three following examples. For instance, Joseph Rustom’s research looked at three
Sheikh generations to explore the rise of the Shiites in Beirut from a marginalized minority
to a powerful religious-political group utilizing Beirut’s particular political and social char-
acter in their fight to gain, in Lefebvre’s terms, the “right to the city” for their religious com-

40
munity (on this notion see, for example, Marcuse 2009, Harvey 2008). Their success was
based on a political activism addressing those social issues that were existentially import-
ant for the Shiites migrating from rural southern Lebanon to Beirut. This urban-religious
configuration was generated by a stream of migrants to the city, a new kind of religious
community formation with an associated political practice and, interacting with this, the
material, social, and symbolic production of urban space, and it resulted not least in the
creation of completely new types of religious spaces and rituals.
Aryo Danusiri’s analysis of two religio-political conflicts over urban space in Jakarta, or-
chestrated by the Sufi Tariqa Alawiya movement, also reveals the novel ways in which reli-
gion and politics intersect on the urban level. Danusiri’s research clearly shows how urban
actors use religion as a platform to publically profile their protests against urban develop-
ment processes detrimental to their interests, and in this process invent new saints and
holy sites in urban space. In this urban-religious configuration, the religious motives and
rituals (such as the aspired sacralizing of space, veneration of saints, or hope of a miracle)
of a religious actor (the Sufi movement) are interwoven with the political and material mo-
tives of secular actors in a spatial practice, forcing urban development processes to become
the subject of a public negotiation.
George Jose’s research in Mumbai also considered the new way in which political and reli-
gious claims and practices in urban space are interwoven, in this case in the transforma-
tion of the Hindu Chhath festival from a ritual celebrated privately into a mega-event on
the glamorous Juhu Beach, resembling a scene from a Bollywood movie. Through this
religious-political event, representatives of the marginalized Bhojpuri migrants confront
ideological opponents such as the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. This transformation of
a religious ritual into an event reinvents religious tradition and fuses it with a political
mobilization which asserts and defends the right to the city for the individual ethnic
communities.
Paradigmatically, these Global Players studies show the lack of evidence to support ei-
ther the view that religious (fundamentalist) movements are simply replacing secular
(emancipatory) ones, or that the former’s political involvement can be reduced to re-
actionary (religious) positions or to a positive ethical change in the cities. Instead, one
can identify, often in the sense of Asef Bayat’s “street politics,” multifaceted intersecting
forms of politics and religion in all nuances of ideology and agency. At times, religious
and political mobilization fuses, while in other cases religion is instrumentalized as a
vehicle for political protest, and vice versa. Such an instrumentalization may also occur
to push through the classical demands of emancipatory movements, such as social rights.
When discriminated migrant workers self-organize (in this case, the Bhojpuri in Mumbai
or Shiites in Beirut), there is a successive sacralization of areas of political struggle or so-
cial support formerly defined as secular, a process which can be similarly observed in the
battle against gentrification (as in Jakarta). The borders running between the secular and
sacral are renegotiated, creating novel hybrid structures. As Roberto Orsi (1999b: 53) right-
ly notes: “There is nothing necessarily liberating about the alternative worlds constituted
or disclosed by these urban religious maps. … All religious reconfigurations of urban space
make some experiences possible, encourage and satisfy some desires and aspirations, while

41
disallowing others.” Hence, interactions between the political sphere and the new urban
religions always contain at least the potential of opening the city, as AbdouMaliq Simone
expressed it, for the miraculous which can enable new urban worlds to appear beyond the
real urban landscape.

New Zones of Secular-Sacral Overlapping in Urban Space It remains to note, in conclu-

sion, that the Global Prayers research generally indicates the impossibility of limiting the
urban religious dynamic anywhere in the world to just the poor populations, or to migrant
religions in the diaspora with their niches and battles over diverging assertions. Instead,
this religious dynamic can be found on all levels of the permanent production of the urban,
and thus needs to be correspondingly integrated into urban theory. All the urban-religious
configurations identified, no matter how temporary and volatile, evidence zones of overlap-
ping and interwovenness between religious forms of producing urban spaces, forms of the
religious transformation of everyday urban life, the location of transregional religious con-
nections and the governmentality of urban religious communities, which all emerge from
urban-religious practices of worlding. As has become clear, the religious expands into all
other (supposedly secular) areas in the permanent production of the urban in such a way
that it seems increasingly difficult “to say where religion stops, and begins” (Meyer 2009:
21). Such a view is also supported by Adrian Ivakhiv (2006: 173), who regards religion as
an “unstable signifier,” whose substance melts away in any attempt to research into its ge-
ographies.
At the same time, though, the urban practices of religious actors cannot be reduced to
political claims or economic or social activities, even if they intimately connect “religion”
to such claims or activities (on this point, see Schiffauer). Despite saints being invented
during the political struggle over an urban development project (in Jakarta, see Danusi-
ri), or church communities representing centers of economic enterprises (in Istanbul, see
Heck), or Redemption City representing a capitalist form of urban planning (in Lagos, see
Ukah), these urban-religious configurations are always linked to a mediation practice be-
tween everyday life and spiritual experience. In many cases, such practices temporarily or
permanently transform spatial structures into sacred places: miracles are attributed to new
“Saints” and new pilgrimage sites established; religious services and forms of community in
the diaspora are experienced as religious communitas; and Redemption City facilitates a
unique religious mass experience, and a lifestyle informed by religious norms.
By focusing on the “way of doing things” from an actor and everyday perspective and the
configuration processes developing here between the city and religion, the studies in Glob-
al Prayers elaborate how new types of overlapping structures are formed between the sec-
ular and sacral in relation to the urban. Both the secular and sacral were always interwoven
in a multiplicity of ways in urban life, especially in non-Western societies, and can hardly
be divided conceptually. Although Western modernity has ascribed strictly and abstractly
drawn borders to the religious (see Asad 2003), the Christian churches have always played
an important role in urban social organization (through, for example, their religious char-
ity associations) even in a city such as Berlin as the supposed “world capital of atheism”
(Peter Berger 2001), a point that often remains unheeded in debates over the “return of

42
the religious.” Werner Schiffauer’s research into multireligious encounters and forms of
involvement in local politics, shows, not least, that such a selectively understood secularity
is also no longer viable. Such traditional borders are destabilized in the rearguard actions
of “militant secularists,” and are becoming far more complex, open, and subject to conflict.
As the Global Prayers research shows, there presently appears to be in the cities, on the
most diverse levels, a complete and continuous renegotiation of traditional borders—even
if “only” discursively established—between the secular and sacral, religion, politics, the
economy, and culture, and all their manifestations and forms of materialization in urban
space. As a result of ongoing social practices and negotiation processes, these borders are
shifting, producing novel hybrid structures, new fragmented and fractal borders, and inno-
vative types of urban-religious configurations, which transform urban social space through
their practices of worlding, and should be reflected in urban knowledge production—at
least this should be the aim of urban theory, as closely as possible in all their complexity.

Translated from the German by Andrew Boreham

43
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