How do we live together in dense urban spaces? This is the big question – in today’s urbanised world as well as in historical urban networks. Evidently, people have given very different answers to that question. Ways of living urban lives change quickly across time or groups. This is what our workshop wants to explore.
In the UrbRel research group’s work, we have observed how cities change constantly – both on an object level (architecture, institutions, inhabit-ants, legal framework) and on the level of subjective experience. What also changes within and between cities is how inhabitants and visitors perceive a city’s lifestyle and/or socio-religious set-up. Attitudes towards urban religious diversity and processes of secularisation are both context specific and open to historical change. So far, we have dealt with urbanity in many guises – reflected in travel reports, monumentalisation, or in the ‘citification’ of specific groups.
Across time, religious and urban agents observe and comment on different types of urbanity – how life in this city is different to that in another or how a city’s urbanity has changed over time. This subjective experience of different urbanities between two cities, within one city over time or between neighbourhoods is our point of departure for the workshop. The subjective recognition of different urbanities and the comparative impetus of this recognition both mobilise a diverse set of observations of human appearances, sounds or architec-ture, to name but a few. This subjectivity also necessitates a reflection on the criteria of comparison, as do the limitations inherent in typologising cities. We would tentatively argue that the analysis of transforming urbanities is perhaps less a matter of systematizing synchronic and diachronic comparison. Rather, we are interested in explorations of juxtaposition, resemblance, imitations or contingencies :
- Which criteria or markers for differentiating urbanities can be drawn upon?
- Who is observing the differences? How much over-lap is there between the perspectives of insiders and outsiders?
- Which terms can be used to qualify different urbanities? Are these terms reflecting qualitative or quantitative differences? Are perceptions and sensory impressions or even ‘ecological’ topics (such as urban climate, air pollution or resilience) referred to?
- How does religion contribute to the metamorphoses of urbanity (inhabitants/emic perspective) and to grasping these metamorphoses (scholarly/etic perspective)?
- How and how much does religious pluralism and/or secularization contribute to the experience of urbanity, to changes in this experience, and to the scholarly perception and misperception thereof? How would one describe the urbanity of a 19th-century Polish shtetl or contemporary Peshawar in comparison with that of multi-religious metropolises like imperial Rome or present-day New York?
- How do religious and urban actors (re-) imagine the bygone urbanity of their city?