Dynamics of Transcendence and Urbanism: The Latent Mechanisms of Everyday Religious Life and City Spaces (original) (raw)
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This article explores the geopolitical significance of public religious institutions and the ways in which it has corresponded to changes in their urban environment. Based on a spatial analysis and ethnography of urban synagogues in the northern Israeli mixed city of Acre that were established and constructed by communities of Jewish immigrants from North African countries, we demonstrate how significant shifts in the city's demographic pattern and landscape have affected these institutions' ascribed functions and meanings. We theorise this dynamic as 'strongholding', or, more specifically, strongholding the synagogue as a means of strongholding the city. The formation of the synagogue as a stronghold is enacted through a dual configuration process by which the religious legitimacy, which the synagogue bestows on those who maintain it, is interwoven into a broader urban sociopolitical struggle to claim a presence in the city.
This article explores the geopolitical significance of public religious institutions and the ways in which it has corresponded to changes in their urban environment. Based on a spatial analysis and ethnography of urban synagogues in the northern Israeli mixed city of Acre that were established and constructed by communities of Jewish immigrants from North African countries, we demonstrate how significant shifts in the city's demographic pattern and landscape have affected these institutions' ascribed functions and meanings. We theorise this dynamic as 'strongholding', or, more specifically, strongholding the synagogue as a means of strongholding the city. The formation of the synagogue as a stronghold is enacted through a dual configuration process by which the religious legitimacy, which the synagogue bestows on those who maintain it, is interwoven into a broader urban sociopolitical struggle to claim a presence in the city.
Jerusalem Or: When Religion Shakes Urbanity
Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations, 2021
An(other) Interview with Nimrod Luz When I contacted Nimrod Luz for this interview the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel had come into force since two days. I thought time was ripe for profiting from his presence as a fellow at the Max Weber Centre in Erfurt and asking for his learned-cum-passionate opinion about the events triggered by the Israeli Supreme Court's decision on the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah on 6 May and the police's clearing of the Temple Mount complex on the day after. Prof. Luz is not one to shy away from speaking his mind on Benjamin Netanyahu's idea of national defense. Yet he had just released a long interview with Susanne Rau about the Meron catastrophe and thus I was prepared for a kind refusal or a tactical deferral. Instead, he promptly whatsapped me back by posing only one condition: that "we take a good coffee for you, a tea for me, and then walk and talk to live up to our great teacher Socrates." Actually, Socrates' legendary style of interview consisted of a caffeine-free ambulatory practice but, after almost eleven months of lockdown, coffee shops and bars had opened again in Erfurt. The city lured us into the good old habit that, according to both of us, I guess, made urbanity a most formidable invention of our social species and thus a sorely missed one.
ReligioCity: Towards a Theory of Urban Religion and Religion in Urbanity
Religion and Urbanity Online
This article offers the concept of ReligioCity as a way to theorize and understand both the tangible and intangible aspects of the reciprocal relations between city and religion. This theoretical notion joins together the imaginative aspects of being religious in an urban context and the tangible aspects (materialities) of religion by privileging neither one nor the other. ReligioCity, enables us to explore the ways religion and urban space are transformed together by current socio-political processes, but also to examine the ways the city’s landscape encompasses new expressions of religious materiality in the urban environment. The empirical context is drawn mostly from Acre, a multi-religious, multi-ethnic city in the north of Israel. The article further suggests ReligioCity as a theoretical concept which may advance research of both historical and contemporary cities.
Religio-nationalism and 'soft boundaries': Urban gating in West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
Recent scholarship on gated communities has challenged assumptions about the homogeneity of aesthetics and motivations for enclosure, emphasizing the place-bound origins and meanings attached to exclusionary development. It has also called for a conceptual shift in classifying gated communities from the 'hard' boundaries of a gate or wall to more 'soft' boundaries that achieve a similar outcome of limited or discouraged access. In this article, we examine urban luxury gated communities in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to demonstrate three main points. First, we explore how the unique and vastly different socioeconomic contexts and built characters of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv influence the aesthetics, marketing techniques, and residents of their respective gated communities. Second, we demonstrate how ideological and neoliberal interests have converged in new luxury gated communities, while emphasizing the diverse manifestations of exclusionary development within a single country. Third, luxury gated communities in downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv illustrate the need to shift attention away from an increasingly outdated notion of 'hard' gatedness towards accounting for the diversity and range of 'soft boundaries' that enclose and serve to privatize space while relying upon and perpetuating both local and national social and economic polarization.
The unifying thread of the interdisciplinary volume Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context is the fact that Jewish spaces are almost always generated in relation to non-Jewish spaces; they determine and influence each other. This general phenomenon will be scrutinized and put to the test again and again in a varied collection of articles by international experienced researchers as well as junior scholars using various urban contexts and discourses as data. From the viewpoints of different temporal and regional research traditions and disciplines the contributors deal with the question of how Jewish and non-Jewish spaces are imagined, constructed, negotiated and intertwined. All examples and case studies together create a mosaic of possibilities for the construction of Jewish and non-Jewish spaces in different settings. The list of examined topics ranges from synagogues to ghettos, from urban neighborhoods to cafés and festivals, from art to literature. This diversity makes the volume a challenging effort of giving an overview of the current academic discussion in Europe and beyond. Although the majority of the contributions are focused on Central and Eastern Europe, a more general tendency becomes apparent in all articles: the negotiation of urban spaces seems to be a complex and ambivalent process in which a large number of participants are involved. In this regard, the volume would also like to contribute to trans-disciplinary urban studies and critical research on spatial relations.
Religion in urban assemblages: space, law, and power
Religion, State and Society, 2019
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 expres- sions in diverse cities. Made up of human actors (both state and non- state, secular and religious), material elements (infrastructures, tech- nologies, and artefacts), laws, and representational tools (e.g. maps), I argue that these urban assemblages produce and configure reli- gious 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.