Religion and urbanization

1 take ‘city’ as an object-language term implying a self-differentiation from the non-city, whether described as ‘rural’ or ‘wilderness’ or ‘uncivilized’ or the (sometimes at least) less derogatory ‘villages’ and ‘countryside’. Thus, city is just an invitation to look for the classificatory operations used by people to differentiate and often rank forms of settlements (including nomadic ways of life or transhumance).

In the following, I will use ‘urban’ as a meta-language term, implying dense settlement patterns of a large number of people (far beyond the 150 persons that mark the upper bound of a group in which all members are able to maintain regular face-to-face contact). This dense settlement pattern is characterized by a corresponding density of interaction. But urban areas also have external links with other settlements that are seen as cities in the aforementioned, culturally and historically variable, sense. This second characteristic element has two important consequences. First, urban settlements do not appear individually but only in networks - even if these might have only very distant corresponding nodes. Second, urban diversity transcends the mere effect of numbers, although it is, of course, reinforced by a multiplicity of inter-cultural contacts and by migration - even if these are restricted to more regional variants and distances.

On this basis, I follow Erfurt historian Susanne Rau in differentiating between ’urbanization' and ’urbanity’. Urbanization or. better, urbanizations are the different and reversible paths of the growth and spread of settlements as urban settlements (that is, ‘the history of the constitution, perception and appropriation of urban spaces’). ‘Urbanity’, by contrast, is the specific way of life in such cities, defined by the fact that the inhabitants realize that they are living in a city (again, however it is that they define ‘city’, Rau 2014. 405-6). It is urbanizations as larger historical processes that offer us a lens through which to view religious change here. It is part of the unequal, hegemonic character of urbanity that elements of urban ways of life have been acknowledged and partly copied in far-distant areas, not the least result of which is the production of immigration into cities. And yet the urban also causes violent or whole-hearted rejections, from emigration to the pursuit of alternative models of living and settlement, whether in extra-urban monasteries or by going ‘back to nature’ in garden cities or remote islands. Whether a given actor is an urban agent opting out or a non-urban agent rejecting absorption is an important question, not least for the history of religion. The claim made by some urban scientists today that the ‘global city’ is the solution to all problems regarding climate change, demographics, and sustainability might be correct, but such a claim is also subject to an Ideologie-verdacht, i.e. the suspicion of primarily being part of hegemonic urban ideology. Our own enterprise needs to be self-reflexive with regard to claims about the urban as much as claims about religion.