Governing Religious Diversity in Cities

Critical Perspectives

Julia Martínez-Ariño

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032839509
• eBook ISBN: 9781000059038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Governing Religious Diversity in Cities provides original insights into the governance of religious diversity in urban contexts from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and drawing on a wide range of empirical examples in Europe and Canada.

Religious diversity is increasingly present and visible in cities across the world. Drawing on a wide selection of cases in Europe and Canada, this volume examines how this diversity is governed. While focusing on the urban dimension of governance, the chapters do not examine cities in isolation but take into account the interconnections between urban contexts and other scales, both within and beyond the borders of the nation-state. The contributors discuss a variety of empirical examples, ranging from the controversies around the celebration of the International Yoga Day in Vancouver, the mosque not built in Munich, and the governance of Islam in cities in France, Germany, Italy, Quebec and Spain. Adopting a critical perspective, they shed light on the factors shaping different governance patterns, and on their implications for various religious groups. Ultimately, this book shows that governing religious diversity is not a matter of black and white.

Contributing to a growing field of academic research that focuses on the governance of religion in urban contexts, and providing lines for future research, Governing Religious Diversity in Cities will be of great interest to scholars in the sociology of religion, religious studies and urban studies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Religion, State & Society.

Religion in urban assemblages: space, law, and power

Marian Burchardt

ABSTRACT
This contribution explores how religious diversity is governed at the urban level and seeks to explain patterns of regulatory practice. It does so by developing the notion of the urban religious diversity assemblage, by which I mean heterogeneous regulatory apparatuses that are territorially ambiguous and fluid, change over time, and operate as enabling and constraining conditions for religious expressions in diverse cities. Made up of human actors (both state and non-state, secular and religious), material elements (infrastructures, technologies, and artefacts), laws, and representational tools (e.g. maps), I argue that these urban assemblages produce and configure religious diversity as an urban social reality. I draw on empirical examples from my fieldwork in Quebec to illustrate the arguments. Based on these theoretical concerns, the contribution identifies and elaborates on fields of regulatory practice and shows how they are shaped by law and judicial contestations.

Introduction

While many scholars predicted that processes of secularisation would diminish the role of religion in urban life (e.g. Wilson 1969), in actuality dynamic and vibrant forms of urban religion have emerged in cities across the North Atlantic. Developments such as rising levels of transnational migration, the growth of new religious movements, and the current refugee crisis have contributed to the religious diversification of cities. At the same time, cities have turned into sites of religious innovation and have become stages for the performance of the religious events and celebrations that form part of urban consumer cultures and contribute to the construction of urban identities and city images (Knott, Krech, and Meyer 2016). The proliferation of religious structures and expressions in urban contexts has created a number of challenges for urban governance. However, while social scientists have started to explore the forms and expressions of this new urban religious diversity, they have rarely looked at how it is regulated and governed.

This contribution conceptualises the forms, sources, and consequences of the urban governance of religious diversity, identifies gaps in the existing research literature, and suggests avenues for future research. Situated at the interface of the sociology of religion, urban studies, and migration research, it examines the ways in which governance processes, religious expressions, and urban spacialities are entwined in North Atlantic cityscapes. It does so by developing the notion of the urban religious diversity assemblage, by which I mean heterogeneous regulatory apparatuses that are territorially ambiguous and fluid, change over time, and operate as enabling and constraining conditions for religious expressions in diverse cities. Made up of human actors (both state and non-state, secular and religious), material elements (infrastructures, technologies, and artefacts), laws and representational tools (e.g. maps), I argue that these urban assemblages produce and configure religious diversity as an urban social reality. I draw on empirical examples from my fieldwork in Quebec to illustrate the arguments.

Religion, cities, and space

Pressures to respond to religious diversity acquire a particular urgency in cities for several reasons. Across the world, large cities are hubs of transnational migration and are home to disproportionately high numbers of migrants. As a consequence, religious diversity is generally most pronounced in cities. At the same time, cities are configurations of places and spaces where religious diversity is spatially manifested and visible, and in which religious communities may, or may be seen to, compete with other social groups or users over urban space as a scarce resource, and over the symbolic demarcations and meanings of space. This also implies that urban governance processes are particularly concerned with spatial elements, and directed largely at communities’ spatial presence. Through their presence in urban space, religious communities become visible to other social groups and urban populations, make claims to being legitimate parts of urban society, draw symbolic and spatial boundaries between themselves and others, and affirm their collective identities thereby enhancing internal social cohesion. Taken together, these factors raise the question of whether there is continuity or discontinuity in the lived reality and regulatory dynamics around religious diversity in large cities and their surrounding nation-states.

In order to conceptually carve out this contested political terrain, there is a need to expand and build bridges between two different research literatures: studies on integration, and ethnographies of urban religion. First, scholars of immigrant integration and citizenship have recognised that as a consequence of religious diversity societies are facing increasing challenges with respect to accommodating religious newcomers within existing institutional frameworks of religion-state relations, adapting these frameworks so as to safeguard religious freedom, non-discrimination and equal treatment, and fostering social cohesion and conviviality among different religious groups. This research has focused mainly on the nation-state, as well as on regional and international legal regimes dealing with religion and human rights (Bader 2007; Burchardt 2017; Koenig 2015). As Fox (2008) has shown, there are pervasive and in fact increasing government interventions and state regulations of religion across the world, which show regional variability and which can be expected to resonate with, or impact on, the urban level.

While these macro-level developments and challenges are particularly palpable in cities, religious diversity also produces a distinct set of challenges at the urban level because of the nature of cities as sociospatial configurations and ‘condensations’. In fact, urban governance is chiefly about organising the spatial presence of religious diversity. While national laws and policies arguably remain the most important source of religious regulation, cities have their own regulatory competencies and capacities. A central empirical question is how, and to what extent, North Atlantic cities develop and cultivate these regulatory capacities. There is a need for more empirical knowledge on how urban actors actually govern religious diversity, and for new concepts and theoretical innovation to interpret and explain distinct patterns in the urban governance of religion.

Second, anthropologists, scholars of religious studies, and geographers have devoted increasing attention to the importance of religion in urban settings and have explored how religious minorities negotiate their presence in large cities in their daily lives (Becci, Burchardt, and Giorda 2017; Eade 2012; Gale and Naylor 2002). Rarely, however, have they looked comparatively at how the practices and identities of religious minorities residing in urban contexts are shaped by regulatory processes, and how religious communities themselves participate in governance networks (but see Gale and Naylor 2002). Clearly, urban authorities and administrations are not the only actors involved in the urban governance of religious diversity. Regulations dealing with religious diversity develop through the actions of complex networks and assemblages of actors made up of diverse governmental agencies, legislative bodies, religious representatives and organisations, neighbourhood and residents’ associations, and other elements of civil society. Yet, key questions have been left unaddressed: do urban regulations have a differential impact on distinct religious groups? How does the regulation of religious diversity influence notions of urban citizenship and shape symbolic constructions and uses of urban space by religious groups amid struggles over belonging and identity?

Against this backdrop, this contribution pursues two interrelated objectives: first, it conceptualises the ways in which religious diversity is governed at the urban level; and second, it identifies different dimensions of the impact of urban governance on the spatial presence of different religious communities, as well as the influence of religious communities on the development and functioning of regulatory practices. In order to do so, it builds on research on immigrant incorporation and state-religion regimes but also goes beyond these by taking up three aspects of recent conceptual innovation in the study of religion: the turn towards materiality (Keane 2008; Knott, Krech, and Meyer 2016), the turn towards spatiality (Hervieu-Léger 2002; Knott 2005), and the turn towards visibility (Burchardt, Becci, and Giorda 2018; Garbin 2013; Göle 2011).

Spatial governmentality between nation-state and city: evolution and patterns

While some scholars have emphasised the relative autonomy and distinctness of cities in regulating processes of immigrant integration (Alexander 2007; Poppelaars and Scholten 2008; Schiller 2016), most have focused on the role of the nation-state (Martínez-Ariño 2018). As the sites of sovereign power par excellence, nation-states have long been viewed as the supreme actors with regards to citizenship, immigration, and integration, and as carriers of different national models (i.e. multiculturalism or assimilationism) linked to path-dependent processes of nation-building and state formation (Brubaker 1992). In recent years, however, such ‘model approaches’ have come under increasing scrutiny for ignoring variation in regulations and practices within nation-states, and overlooking how national models are not just models of reality but also models for reality that political elites strategically reference to advance their respective ideological agendas (Bertossi and Duyvendak 2012; Favell 2001; Van Reekum, Duyvendak, and Bertossi 2012). In addition, we have seen a retreat from multiculturalism in major immigrant societies such as the Netherlands and the UK, and a ‘civic turn’ in immigration policy and law centred on pushing minorities to adopt host country norms, values, and languages (Joppke 2004). Instruments such as citizenship tests that are structured to exclude minorities who do not share ‘western’ values and lifestyles have been taken as testimony of nation-states’ turn towards repressive, or illiberal, liberalism (Joppke 2007; Michalowski 2011).

These debates have been echoed in research on religion-state relationships. Scholars have explained different patterns of religious accommodation as the outcome of distinct national church-state traditions such as laïcité or corporatism (Fetzer and Soper 2005; Koenig 2005), and of different interpretations of the notion of secularism (Cady and Hurd 2010; Kuru 2009; Modood 2010; Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012). As in the literature on immigrant integration, however, ‘model approaches’ to analysing religious governance have been criticised for ignoring the internal consistencies and contradictions of church-state models (Bowen 2007), convergences across countries and variation within countries (Bader 2007; Koenig 2007), and gaps between the policies that models would seem to predict and the actual policies ‘on the ground’ (Maussen 2012).

Responding to such criticism, some researchers (Griera 2012; Martikainen 2013) have explored new forms of network governance of religion, involving new civil society actors such as interfaith initiatives and religious umbrella bodies, which work in parallel to top-down national models. However, the specific relevance of network governance at urban levels has not been systematically addressed. And similarly, although scholars have repeatedly called for greater attentiveness to variation in religious governance within countries, few have actually examined how policies regulating religious diversity vary across cities within the same national context. In general, nation-state regulations are rooted in normative principles while urban regulations often seem to be the product of more pragmatic concerns (Schiller 2016). Poppelaars and Scholten (2008) have argued that policy outcomes related to immigrant integration differ between local and national levels, and they explain these differences by looking at the particularities of policy framing and institutional logics at different levels of government.¹

To date, however, there is no comparable research that focuses specifically on the urban governance of religious diversity.² Consequently, knowledge about the scope and content of urban regulations is in short supply. In addition, questions pertaining to why certain regulations emerge in particular cities at specific moments in history, whether regulations are transnationally disseminated (e.g. through city networks such as CLIP or EUROCITIES), constructed through bottom-up, problem-driven processes, or driven by media discourses on religious minorities, have not been thoroughly addressed in the existing literature. On a more theoretical level, existing research has rarely engaged with the nature of cities as spatial configurations in a systematic way. Given these shortcomings, there is a need to differentiate the distinct regulatory activities pertaining to religion in large North Atlantic cities, to identify regulatory patterns and relate them systematically to a range of city- and country-specific factors, and to explore how these patterns have evolved over time. In addition, these questions should be addressed through a multilevel approach that does not look at the urban level in isolation but in its relationship to national levels (nation-state regulations) and transnational levels (e.g. the diffusion of governance practices through city networks).

Consequences: how the urban governance of religious diversity affects different religious communities

Religious communities and identities are intrinsic parts of urban social life. However, only recently have social scientists begun to investigate the specificities of urban religion as a major marker of cultural difference and diversity in a rigorous fashion. Clearly, processes of urbanisation shape religious identities and forms of belonging (McLeod 1996; Van der Veer 2013). Cities affect religion by casting religious communities and their forms of sociality within particular spatial regimes, thus contributing to the territorialisation of religious categories. More specifically, religion can operate as both a bridge and a barrier to the incorporation of migrant groups into urban society (Eade 2012; Garbin 2013). In this regard, the establishment of places of worship is especially important for migrants with attendant visions, desires, and problems differing between different generations (De Galembert 2005; Maussen 2009). However, they are only one element within a complex range of materialities, technologies, and iconographies that mediate religious expressions in urban space (Hirschkind 2006; Meyer 2008; Oosterbaan 2009). In addition, in order to pinpoint the welfare functions religious groups acquire in urban settings in the context of neoliberal urban reform and austerity politics, scholars have proposed concepts such as ‘the postsecular city’ (Beaumont and Baker 2011).

With the exception of mosque controversies (Astor 2016; Cesari 2005; De Galembert 2005; Maussen 2009), however, scholars have rarely engaged with how urban religious expressions are blocked, transformed, or – conversely – facilitated and encouraged by urban regulations. For instance, in an otherwise highly cogent overview article Garbin (2012) describes religious minority practices as ‘religious place-making’, which he defines as ‘the appropriation and experiencing of space through various religious activities’ (ibid), without taking into account how such appropriations are enabled and restrained by governance processes. But how do religious communities interact with, and participate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Governing religious diversity in cities: critical perspectives
• 1 Religion in urban assemblages: space, law, and power
• 2 Religious governance in the Spanish city: hands-on versus hands-off approaches to accommodating religious diversity in Barcelona and Madrid
• 3 Political opportunity structures and the activism of first- and second-generation Muslims in two Italian cities
• 4 Open Access: Governing Islam in French cities: defining ‘acceptable’ public religiosity through municipal consultative bodies
• 5 Pacifying Muslims in Germany’s ‘City of Peace’: interreligious dialogue as a tool of governance in Osnabrück
• 6 Contract governance of religious diversity in a German city-state and its ambivalences
• 7 Reconsidering the spatiality of religion and the state: relationality and the mosque not built
• 8 A bridge too far: yoga, spirituality, and contested space in the Pacific Northwest
• Index