Urban regimes and the interaction order of religious minority rituals

ABSTRACT

This article develops a multidimensional concept of urban regimes that allows for explaining racialized asymmetries of access to public space among different religious minority groups. Departing from an empirical study of collective religious rituals in the streets, parks and squares of Barcelona, we compare Buddhist, Sikh and Islamic events in public space. Although all religious events are in theory subjected to the same regulatory regime, we find significant differences in the ways that these regulations are enacted. Making sense of these differences requires a multidimensional concept of urban regimes involving (a) the bureaucratic regulations, (b) the interaction order of the city and the attached emotional registers, and (c) imaginations of public space. The conjunction of all three domains allows for a deeper understanding of how conceptions of ideal public space, urban visibility and public emotional registers are configured in the governance of religious events and partly intersect with institutional racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious diversity
• urban regimes
• public space
• visibility
• urban space
• institutional racism

Introduction¹

Every April, Barcelona’s Sikh community conducts its Vaisakhi celebration in the streets and squares of the city. Central to the celebration are the nagar kirtan processions. In these processions, which are led by the khalsa – a special order of Sikh men baptized by their tenth guru Gobind Singh – women, men and children dressed in colourful clothes follow an elaborately decorated float that carries the Sikhs’ holy book, listening to spiritual hymns and chants. In addition, there are performances in which Sikh men engage in martial sword fights with so-called gatkas (wooden sticks to simulate swords). In 2017, the celebrations also involved singing performances by children for the first time, which gave the festival a distinct family atmosphere. Currently, the celebration of Vaisakhi involves relatively few complications, and the community obtains bureaucratic permissions very easily. However, this has not always been the case, and was initially very difficult, as Gunkar, one of the community leaders responsible for the organization of the festival, told us in an interview. Requests to hold the procession were denied several times for bureaucratic reasons; local civil society actors showed distrust toward the community and local police put up obstacles to the blocking of traffic.

This experience contrasts starkly with the experiences of Barcelona’s Buddhist community in organizing their religious processions and public meditations in the city’s public spaces.² As both urban officials and community members told us, permissions were usually easily obtained, meetings and coordination between them went smoothly, and, more importantly, shop owners, residents and tourists never voiced any concern about Buddhist activities or use of public space.

In this article, we describe and explain divergent experiences in the organization of religious events and asymmetries of access to urban spaces among religious minority communities. Our central question is, what are the factors that account for the ways in which religious communities – especially those with migrant backgrounds and relatively short histories of settlement in the city – are able to use public spaces for collective religious rituals?

While sociologists have long seen European cities as epitomes of secularization, these cities are now increasingly recognized as sites of religious innovation (Bramadat et al. 2021). They have thus emerged as paradigmatic sites of religious revitalization and change, with the rise of transnational migration, the expansion of holistic spiritual movements, and ongoing refugee flows being the main drivers behind their transformation. Part of this recognition is owed to the proliferation of religious rituals, processions, and events in public space. These undertakings have led to complex negotiations among longstanding residents, newcomers and policymakers over the terms with which public spaces are defined, used, managed and governed.

Our article contributes to the burgeoning social science literature that seeks to explain these negotiations and the politics around contemporary urban religious developments. Three conceptual strands are central to this body of work: first, studies that translate religious diversity into numbers, linking religious change to demographic trends and patterns of residency (Estruch et al. 2004; Martikainen 2004; Qvortrup Fibiger 2009; Stausberg 2009; Ahlin et al. 2012); second, projects that focus on the evolution and characteristics of local religious communities, often with an emphasis on their transnational-local dynamics (Chaves 2004; Monnot and Stolz 2018; Martínez-Ariño 2018b); and third, studies of conflict, cooperation and accommodation of religious diversity in urban domains (Martínez-Ariño 2018a), highlighting religious controversies over urban space (Eade 2012; Garbin 2012a) and visibility (Göle 2002; Stringer 2013) as well as dynamics of contention between religious communities, resident populations, urban authorities and brokers of all kinds (Astor 2016).

While we are inspired by these studies, most of them focus on the more durable and institutionalized aspects of urban religion. This article, by contrast, addresses urban religion’s most visible yet most ephemeral dimension: the organization of religious rituals in streets, squares and parks. We understand urban spaces as collectively fabricated assemblages of humans and artifacts that emerge from macro-processes of spatial governance (Brenner 2004), micro-practices of the placing of people and objects and their shaping into an interrelated ensemble (Löw 2001), and meso-level urban interactions. We construe these interactions as sites of “doing religious space” (Burchardt and Griera 2020), viewing urban space as an interactional accomplishment in the ethnomethodological sense.

By analyzing how religious events for Muslims, Buddhists and Sikhs are regulated by law, governed through policy-making, and framed in public discourses in the city of Barcelona, we seek to explain more precisely the ways in which regimes of urban governance operate on the ground. This also allows us to reflect on how moral imaginations and related affective dimensions shape the spatialization of religion and the enactment of governmental regulations concerning public religious expressions.

The article results from a wider comparative project that explores urban expressions of religiosity among five distinct religious groups (Catholics, Protestants, Sikhs, Muslims and Buddhists) in Madrid and Barcelona. More specifically, the project focuses on the governance of public rituals, the ways different urban audiences perceive and frame them, as well as on their consequences in terms of urban coexistence.

Religious rituals in public space: performativity and institutional racism

Increasingly, streets, parks and squares are becoming stages for the performance of collective religious rituals in contemporary cities. Events such as the Sikh Vaisakhi procession, the Islamic procession of Ashura, the Peruvian Catholic procession of the “Lord of Miracles” (Fernandez-Mostaza and Henriquez 2018) and the Hindu Vesak Day celebrations are some of the religious events that are held annually in Barcelona. These events take religion “outside of congregations” (Bender et al. 2013, 8) and in many cases they contribute to transnational and global entanglements as they are celebrated simultaneously in many places around the world. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Sikh procession, photograph taken by Carolina Esteso in May 2017.

In recent years, anthropologists and sociologists interested in Western cityscapes have begun to examine public performances of religiosity among diaspora populations.³ Vasquez and Marquardt point out that “cities become places where those displaced by globalization (…) try to make sense of their baffling world by mapping and remapping sacred landscapes through religious practices like making pilgrimages, holding festivals, and constructing altars, shrines and temples” (2003, 45). Scholars have read public religious performances as forms of marking and symbolically remapping the space of the city, as means of “home-making” (Eade 2012), “place-making” (Knott 2005; Garbin 2012a, 401; Vásquez and Knott 2014) and “place-taking” (Burchardt and Becci 2013). In a similar vein, in his research on the Congolese Kimbanguist Church in London, Garbin has explored the “relationships between the public performance of faith and the grounding and regrounding of diasporic identities” (Garbin 2012b, 244).

Scholars thus seem to agree on the relevance of public religious performances for the remaking of migrant communities and public space in European cities. However, especially in Mediterranean cities such as Barcelona, there is also a long tradition of public displays of religiosity among Catholics as the historically dominant religious tradition. While Catholic processions have lost some of their dynamism over the last decades, they are simultaneously being overhauled by new Christian immigrants hailing from Latin America, Africa and Asia (Burchardt 2020, 5). Significantly, while the motivations behind these public performances are relatively well understood, little is known of how these practices are regulated, inscribed in secular European cityscapes, and shaped by different regimes of urban governance. This article seeks to fill this gap by examining the urban regimes through which these events are politically framed and legally regulated. By urban regime we mean the entire ensemble of social forces that, drawing on both formal and informal sources of authority, shape urban hierarchies as well as uses and access to urban space (see also Burchardt and Griera 2019). How are religious and secular concepts of urban space entwined in the management of religious performances? How do infrastructural regimes, i.e. regulations around transport, urban planning and land use, shape these religious performances? How do religious uses of the public space coexist, compete or conflict with other uses? And how are imaginations of the city as sacred made compatible with the economic, cultural or consumerist frames of urban space?

As mentioned at the outset, our starting point is the observation of the remarkable ease with which Buddhist groups in Barcelona develop their public performances, contrasting starkly with the multiple and notorious obstacles that Muslim and Sikh communities have encountered in the organization of their processions. In all interviews and meetings related to the organization of Buddhist public meditations, meditation flash mobs and mindfulness silent marches that we attended, we noted that organizing this type of public performances appeared effortless, untroubled and smooth (Clot-Garrell and Griera 2019). Importantly, difficulties in organizing Islamic and Sikh performances were not only perceived by the Muslim and Sikh actors interviewed, but by the public officials as well. One of the public officials we interviewed complained that “organizing the procession of the Vaisakhi required many, many meetings with almost everyone, the police, the politicians, the community members. This was too tiring. There are always lots of obstacles. That should be easier”. This account raises the question of what exactly the obstacles were and why it appeared so difficult for politicians and bureaucrats to remove them. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. Buddhist meditation, photograph taken by Carlota Rodriguez in September 2016.

At first sight, theories of institutional racism (Williams 1985; Bourne 2001) as well as the racialization of Muslims (Dunn, Klocker, and Salabay 2007; Garner and Selod 2015) seem to have much to commend. This scholarship argues that processes of racialization work by drawing lines around group members and ascribing certain characteristics to them, leading to representations that put all devotees into the same homogeneous bloc (Garner and Selod 2015, 14). Exclusivist anti-immigrant policies and rising populisms have surely contributed to the racialization of Muslims in Europe.

While we do not contest these findings, we suggest that scrutinizing the political, legal and bureaucratic mechanisms and governance practices that regulate such public religious events in comparative perspective offers new insights and elements for further theorizations of complex urban interactions. We suggest that institutional racism can take several forms: racist prejudices among members of bureaucracies, racial hierarchization as an outcome of bureaucratic norms, and racial bias resulting from bureaucracies’ tacit adaptation to (perceived) majority views. We find the third logic to be dominant in Barcelona. As we will see, it is not so much the stereotyping or unfavourable labelling of religious minority groups among members of urban bureaucracies that lead to unequal treatments of different religious groups, but the anticipation of particular sensibilities of majority populations and their ideas about religious events that account for these differences. We suggest that a comparison of Muslim, Sikh and Buddhist events yields a deeper understanding of how conceptions of ideal public space, regimes of urban visibility and public emotional registers operate on the ground and contribute to racial hierarchies.

Although all religious events are in theory subjected to the same regulatory regime, we find significant differences in the ways that these regulations are enacted. We suggest that making sense of these differences requires a multidimensional concept of urban regimes involving (a) the legal framing and bureaucratic-administrative regulations, (b) the interaction order of the city and the attached emotional registers, and (c) imaginations and representations of the city’s public space. As existing research shows, each of these domains seems to favour and hence predict different governance outcomes. Macro-sociological research on the legal and bureaucratic governance of religious diversity has shown how religious minorities have been incorporated into existing church-state regimes (Koenig 2005) and would therefore predict (relatively) egalitarian access to public space for different religious groups. Research on interaction orders, by contrast, has highlighted diverse forms of negative stereotyping and stigmatization of minorities, in particular Muslims, and would predict far-reaching exclusions of religious minority practices from public space (Astor 2016). Finally, research on city images and representations, i.e. (post-)multicultural cities (Rogers and Tillie 2001; Keith 2005; Nicholls and Uitermark 2013) or cosmopolitan cities (Young, Diep, and Drabble 2006), would suggest that minorities’ access to public space depends on the ways that such images successfully promote cultural diversity and equal urban citizenship as well as on urban bureaucracies’ commitment to their professed values. We argue that in order to explain religious groups’ access to public space, we need a concept of urban regimes that addresses all three domains in conjunction.

Setting the scene: Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh religious performances in Barcelona

In recent years, the substantial growth of Catalonia’s foreign population has shaken up the religious scene of a territory that, for centuries, was almost exclusively Catholic. More than 250 mosques have opened over the last two decades (ISOR 2015), and Muslims currently account for 7.3% of the population (CEO 2015). There has also been a major increase in the number of evangelical churches (especially charismatic and Pentecostal), as well as Buddhist centres, Sikh temples, Orthodox churches and Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Halls. Nearly half of the places of worship catering to minorities in Catalonia are located in Barcelona. The establishment of minority places of worship has sometimes encountered resistance (Burchardt 2020, 93) and is to some degree understood as a facet of public recognition. For community members, however, they are chiefly places of religious practice. Public rituals, by contrast, are always also viewed as interactions with urban audiences.

These audiences are increasingly secular as religious diversification in Catalonia has occurred amid a steep decline in levels of Catholic observance. Nowadays, 52.4% of Catalans declare themselves Catholic, a figure that is substantially lower than those of other Spanish regions.

The heightened presence of religious minorities, especially Muslims, has attracted significant political and media attention. Several public agencies and policy programmes dealing with religious accommodation have been established at the regional and local levels (Itçaina and Burchianti 2011; Griera 2012; Astor 2014). The regulation of open-air religious activities is one of the key challenges faced by local authorities. Given the long tradition of Catholic religious celebrations in public space, such activities are by no means new to Barcelona and other Catalan contexts. However, the number of public events organized by religious minorities has increased significantly over the last two decades.⁴ The increase in Muslim public events, such as the organization of public iftars during Ramadan and the celebration of the Ashura procession by the Shiite community, is especially evident. Meanwhile, the Sikh community organizes the Vaisakhi and Nagar Kirtan processions as well as smaller events. Sikh celebrations usually involve a procession followed by a final event with the participation of political authorities and the offering of food to the community and other persons attending. In our fieldwork, we also found heightened dynamism among the Buddhist community in organizing many and varied public performances in Barcelona. Especially remarkable is the annual mindfulness silent march for peace, which gathers hundreds of people to walk silently through the main streets of the city led by Buddhists monks. The motivations behind the organization of these public performances are varied, and as Garbin suggests, religious events “are multivocal and […] they draw on a plurality of identity repertoires and imaginaries, creating new intersecting ‘urban liturgies’” (Garbin 2012a, 4). In the organization of these events, religious motivations appear intertwined with secular aspirations for recognition and improved internal community dynamics.

Despite these differences in motivations, what all these religious parades have in common is that they momentarily visibilize religiosities and religious identities and expose them to urban audiences. Therefore, we suggest that they be read as acts of interpellation that challenge taken-for-granted notions about the location of the religious and the secular in contemporary cities. In addition, these public performances should not be conceived of as routinized repetitions of pre-established cultural scripts, but as meaningful acts with symbolic power and a certain degree of efficacy for transformation. By efficacy for transformation, we mean the momentary transformation of the prosaic character of the urban space into a sacred place. Moreover, these performances afford participants new positions in their relationship with urban spaces and alter interaction orders. Their efficacy derives not only from the religious ritual itself, but from the fact that these “ritualized performances” (Butler 1990) are developed “out of place”, thus breaking the “normal” local interaction order (Goffman 1963).

Comparing religious, political and legal framings of religious events

Prior to the diversification of Barcelona’s religious landscape, religious celebrations in public space, which were mainly Catholic and had been diminishing since the seventies, had largely been arranged via informal and behind-the-scene conversations between municipal authorities and religious leaders. In recent years, due to the increase in the number of such activities, public administrations have started to develop protocols that standardize local regulations for collective religious performances.⁵ The legal regime rests on two principles, freedom of religion and freedom of public assembly, whose only constraints are “public morality” and “public safety”.

The literature on social movements has underlined the relevance of strategies of legal framing (Pedriana 2006) for understanding social movements’ political success. Albeit in a different context, strategies of legal framing also seem crucial for understanding differences in the regulation of religious public events. In this regard, when trying to understand the “ease” related to the organization of Buddhist events, we found that Buddhists followed a different legal route than Muslim and Sikh communities when applying for permission to use public space. As mentioned earlier, public protocols state that public religious performances are deemed legal through two different principles: the right to free association (holding public meetings) and freedom of religion. Both are fundamental rights according to Spanish law, but while the right to hold public meetings is administered and granted by the National Internal Affairs Department through a clear procedure, the right to freedom of religion – or, more specifically, freedom to organize collective religious events in public spaces – does not have a clear bureaucratic translation, and it is usually administrated through the “right to occupy public space” granted by the City Council.

In the first case, the bureaucratic procedure is fast and prohibitions are rare since, as a public official told us, denying such petitions “would be perceived as a violation of political rights”. In this case, communities only need to submit a requirement form, and the permission is granted almost immediately. In the worst-case scenario, the police might contact the organizers to suggest a different itinerary due to infrastructural limitations (e.g. traffic, urban works), but no more.

However, if the other legal route is chosen and permission is requested from the local administration based on arguments concerning the right to occupy public space for religious events, the bureaucratic procedures become much more complicated, with many actors intervening. Religious representatives need to fill out a complicated request form and submit this form to the administration of the district, which then internally forwards the application to the municipal Religious Affairs Office and local police. The requesting community is subjected to several requirements, such as proof of civil liability insurance, a legal entity backing their petition, and the submission of a detailed description of the event’s dynamics. In order to fully appreciate the complexity of these processes, it is worth quoting at length from an interview with the former director of the Barcelona Religious Affairs Office:

There are actually two different forms, one for events with a maximum of 1000 participants and another one for more than 1000 participants. And then they ask for a lot of information, such as the name and address of the responsible organizer, where you plan to park the ambulance, what are the means of transport that participants are going to use, where participants are going to park their cars, where is the nearest hospital, where are you going to get the electricity for your event, and so on. So this is about infrastructure. Then also, if the event is for more than 1000 people, you also need to pay a fee for using public space.

In addition, the organizers are usually asked to attend several meetings with public officials and local police “to adapt, coordinate and organize” the event. Sometimes permits are denied, and in some other cases permits are only granted on the condition that major adjustments be made. Through these meetings, there is a process of adapting or modifying public religious choreographies to make them fit public authorities’ conceptions of adequate use of public space.

Illustrative of these processes of domestication were the requirements made by the City Council to the organizers of the Ashura procession. On the Day of Ashura, Shia Muslims commemorate the death of Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of Mohammed, during the battle of Kerbala in 680 C.E. During the processions, male participants are dressed in black, carry banners with religious inscriptions, engage in collective rhythmic chanting and undertake a form of self-flagellation called matam, especially the beating of the (bare) chest with one’s fists (see also Astor, Blanco, and Cuadros 2018, 32). While the concrete shape of matam practice varies considerably across regions, there are several forms that involve the appearance of blood. In this case, the organizers of the Ashura were granted permission only after the community committed to participants wearing shirts, avoiding practices of self-flagellation involving blood, and prohibiting children from participating in the procession. These requirements were justified as necessary for safety and public morality reasons. In addition, the precise route of the Ashura procession became the subject of negotiations when, in 2018, it interfered with activities organized in the context of Barcelona’s patron saint celebrations. The eventual rerouting of the Ashura procession showed “how majority traditions in the city take priority over minority traditions when the two enter into conflict” (Astor, Blanco, and Cuadros 2018, 37).

A striking question is why Sikh and Muslim communities do not follow the (much easier) legal route chosen by Buddhists groups. Some of the religious actors we asked told us that they followed the “city” route for two reasons: first, if they ask for permission from the City Council, they also receive the right to use outdoor infrastructure (stages, tables, chairs), which is not possible when authorization is acquired from the Internal Affairs Department. Second, and more importantly, they told us that they had been advised to follow this route as a means of working toward conviviality and cohesion in the city. In fact, the first year that both the Vaisakhi and the Ashura were celebrated, their respective communities asked for and obtained permission from the National Internal Affairs Department. However, in both cases, the celebration of the processions raised several public concerns, encountered many obstacles, and generated serious criticism in local media and in the neighbourhood. Thus, the communities decided that it would be preferable to be closely monitored by the City Council rather than take the risk of being denied permission by the National Internal Affairs Department.

From the point of view of public officials, it is also preferable that Sikh and Muslim communities ask permission from the City Council, since this allows officials to monitor obstacles and conflicts. As a public official stated in an interview, “You know, there are always problems, problems of many kinds”. Importantly, this discourse on obstacles was prominent in relation to Sikh and Muslim processions, but not in the case of Buddhist public gatherings. Obstacles do not emerge by coincidence but are consequences of urban infrastructural regimes and their political and ideological uses. Following Burchardt and Höhne (2016, 10), it is interesting to note that

in the same way that the recognition of diversity disrupted homogenized images of the nation-state it also disrupts homogenized images of the ‘ideal user’ of urban infrastructures, (…) urban infrastructures function as particular instantiations and materialization of projects of state-formation and nation-building. (2016, 10)

Again, we quote from our field notes in order to illustrate these dynamics:

At the beginning, executive officers always check who the applicants are and try to establish a closer relationship and permanent channels of communication with them. If the proposed activity is a procession, then the permission also involves the approval of the guardia urbana [urban police] who also manage the activity and need to give the green light and guarantee the route, the roadblocks and so on. In addition, the organizing committees need to acquire a special insurance that accounts for their civil liabilities in case something happens. […] The police also check that the route affects the smallest possible number of public bus lines and that there are no other activities and no construction works on the sites where the procession passes.

However, infrastructural regimes involve not only the regulation of space, but also of time. In Barcelona as elsewhere, a whole host of municipal regulations centre on what kinds of activities are allowed during which hours of the day. We return to our field notes to describe how these regulations affect religious events:

The executive officer of Ciutat Vella [the Old Town district] told us that this district is very special because of the high number of events that take place here. This leads to especially complicated regulations around timing. From Monday to Thursday all public activities need to finish by 8 pm in order to avoid nuisances for residents. This has consequences, for example for the Ashura, which in 2018 was scheduled for 6:15 pm. In order to make that possible, there was a deal with the organizing committee that the end point had to be the train station Barcelona Norte because it belongs to Eixample and not the Arc de Triomf which is in Ciutat Vella. […] There is also a new regulation about rest hours. From 2 to 4 pm, no music can be played because this is respite time.⁶

(Un)comfortability and the city’s interaction order

In order to understand how the governance of religious events works, micro-sociological approaches are helpful as they underscore how these events are inscribed into the everyday “interaction order” of the city (Goffman 1971), and how they are publicly perceived. Analytically, public religious events are “breaching experiments” (Garfinkel 1967) whose disruptive effects help to reveal tacit understandings embedded in the moral orders of public space. However, not all events are perceived as disrupting the urban order to the same degree.

The disruptive potential of religious events unfolds in four dimensions. First, disruption is embedded in the religious nature of these events. The performance of a religious ritual in a street, park or square temporarily invests the secular space of the city with a sacred character. Thus, secular public space becomes infused with new religious meanings, and practices of religious piety become visible to urban audiences. These practices challenge notions of public space as secular or culturally Catholic, thereby raising suspicion or curiosity among nonparticipating audiences. However, suspicion or curiosity are highly dependent on the form that piety takes and are filtered through cultural imaginations of the “other”. Our ethnographic observations show that Islamic and Buddhist body techniques produce radically different attitudes in urban audiences – while Buddhist body techniques are observed with indifference or sympathy, Islamic bodily comportment is often viewed with suspicion. One of the city councilors expressed this idea with the following words:

If there is a group of people meditating in a square in Gracia [a middle-class neighborhood] people often say “oh this is beautiful”, but if there is an evangelical pastor with a microphone this gives them the creeps, and if there is a group praying while facing Mecca they really freak out. This is very difficult here.

However, during our participation in the procession of Ashura (2016–2019) we never saw public displays of disapproval during the march or the finaly prayer. Concerns were usually voiced afterward.

Second, disruptive potentials also come from the basic fact that these events bring together large numbers of people in public place. In some cases, there are not more than ten, but in other cases there are hundreds or even thousands who, through their physical presence, interrupt the usual flows of human movement in the city. In the realm of the street, where, according to Goffman, “civil inattention” is the basic rule of behaviour, a collective gathering has a disruptive effect. Such disruptions can become amplified when events take place in spaces of particular symbolic and economic value. As one city official commented on the controversies regarding the Ashura:

The first year they had a fairly long procession, through the area of the Sant Pere neighborhood⁷ – which is where they have the oratory – and after that there was a very big controversy. The shopkeepers of the entire Sant Pere Més Baix street shouted and raised strong objections to what they described as a lot of men walking down the street and hitting each other, cutting off traffic at a time when all the shops were open. The controversy was terrible. And then a protocol was made to minimize the impact on the merchants, and the procession is now much shorter and no longer affects the stores.

One policeman we interviewed explained that police proactively work with the communities to minimize their disruptive character by suggesting certain public spaces and avoiding the use of others. Significantly, local authorities generally suggest that choices of localities for events are made in accordance with concerns over safety and security. However, a closer look reveals other factors. The case of Les Rambles is exemplary in this regard. It is one of the most iconic streets in Barcelona, featuring plenty of restaurants and food stands, and usually very crowded with a mix of tourists and locals. For more than a decade, the Sikh community has asked to hold their procession along Les Rambles, which is logical since the main Gurdwara is nearby. However, permission has repeatedly been denied on the grounds of practical difficulties, and only in 2019 did the City Council allow the Sikh procession to cross Les Rambles. While the argument is not unreasonable, every year Catholic Easter processions take place on the boulevard with thousands of participants. When asked about this asymmetry, one manager in charge of religious affairs in the City Council argued that the presence of the Catholic community is much more “normalized” in the city than the Sikhs, and that the Catholic community had more practical knowledge on navigating the bureaucratic system.

Third, and related to the above example, disruption of flow also comes from the fact that, in many cases, these collective gatherings are enactments of ethnic, religious, class and/or gender differences. Alterity is particularly emphasized by the wearing of religious garments and the use of religious objects. Perceived cultural proximity usually works as a filter that minimizes disruption in onlookers, while perceived cultural distance accentuates it (Goffman 1971). However, while perceptions of cultural proximity are negotiated and subject to change, the urban authorities and local actors we interviewed evaluated cultural proximity along similar lines. Catholic rituals are perceived as belonging to the local cultural universe and, therefore, not producing disruption. These practices are forms of “banal Catholicism” and taken for granted by the majority of the population (Martínez-Ariño and Griera 2020). Importantly, Buddhist meditations are also increasingly perceived as culturally familiar. The fact that participants often belong to the white middle class, and not ethnic minorities, plays a key role here.

Finally, disruption comes from the generation of sensorial impacts. Performativity usually includes the production of particular soundscapes and also, on many occasions, specific “smellscapes”. Simmel’s notion of “sensitive proximity” helps to draw attention to the fact that the co-presence of bodies produces a mutual perception that “takes place from the senses, and that builds frames of meaning and feelings with the interaction” (Sabido Ramos 2017). This proximity might be the foundation of the most exuberant joy as well as the most unbearable repulsion (Simmel 1903; Sabido Ramos 2017). These perceptions are not neutral but are culturally shaped, and embedded in a hierarchical attribution of legitimacy and relevance.

These four dimensions all combine in the production of “infractions” (Goffman 1971) to the moral order that sustains public life. Goffman understood public space as the realm of unfocused interactions between strangers, and a place governed by the rule of “civil inattention”, that is, to carefully avoid direct interaction with co-present others while showing that we have no hostile intentions. Religious events challenge the interaction order and make it visible, provoking disruptions that might surprise pedestrians or render it difficult for them to “continue on with the activity at hand with only peripheral attention given to checking up on the stability of the environment” (Goffman 1971, 283).

Nevertheless, the impact of religious performances on the local order of interaction not only has consequences for urban audiences, but also plays a crucial role in legitimizing practices of governance in this terrain. The following quotation from an interview with a public official clearly illustrates these points:

What are the differences between the flash mob of the Buddhists and a procession of the Sikhs or Ashura of the Shiites? Of course, basically, the social perception is different, so that in the case of Sikhs or Shiites (…) Public administrations are afraid of possible local reactions, of the media, of other political leaders, etc. Therefore, we are all very attentive to really seeing what activities they will do in the street, how they will do them, and under what conditions. In addition, we also try to negotiate the terms under which these activities will be carried out. In the case of the Buddhists, so far no negative reactions to their activities have taken place, since they are clearly developing much more naturally; they simply communicate it and that's it. (…) People look with sympathy on Buddhist meditators. Therefore, it is less problematic.

The arguments justifying a greater zeal in the regulation of Islamic or Sikh processions are based on the public authorities’ perceived need to protect the sensorial and emotional comfortability of urban audiences, with an aim to avoid further and potential conflicts.

Producing narratives, imagining the future

In 2007, Catalan TV broadcast the Ashura procession under the headline, “In Barcelona, there has been no blood in the Ashura and minors have not participated in the procession following the requirements of the City Council”.⁸ The news portrayed the Ashura procession as a “domesticated” religious expression that, thanks to the efforts of the City Council, was adapted to local codes of bodily comportment. Meanwhile, the Sikh procession of the Vaisakhi was portrayed by the Catalan journal, Descobrir Catalunya, as an Indian folklore practice that contributed to producing a multicultural and cosmopolitan city. Public Buddhist meditations are rarely on TV news, but if they appear, they remain religiously unmarked and framed as spiritual expressions or political claims for a peaceful life.

Interestingly, in 2018 the Catalan government began to reassess the catalogues of cultural activities that are meant to be inventories of those cultural practices, which have the strongest impact on collective identities in the region. Registering cultural events in these catalogues comes with privileges, such as symbolic recognition and eligibility for public funds. In the context of the reassessment, the government formed a commission tasked with evaluating different proposals, and for the first time, Sikh, Islamic and Buddhist processions were considered. While this consultative process is not yet concluded, the inclusion of these processions would be tantamount to their official authentification as part of “Catalan culture”. Based on interviews with urban officials, we suggest that the image of Barcelona as a cosmopolitan city has strongly contributed to these changes.

To some extent, public religious events are rendered legible through existing frames – the religious, the multicultural, and the spiritual – and governed according to them. Imaginations of a desirable city are embedded in processes of evaluation of religious performances, and governmental practices work to adapt them to fit into such projections. The observation of the micro-politics around the organization of these events shows the crucial role of public officials in transforming religious choreographies in the public sphere in order to make them suitable for the city’s imagined future. Public narratives (both positive and negative) about possible futures are enmeshed in governance strategies and in the evaluation of these communities’ right to the city.

The approval of several measures for accommodating religious minority rights has promoted Barcelona’s image as “an oasis of interreligious coexistence”, as one official put it. However, this was not a straightforward process. While officials who are responsible for this policy field are committed to promoting religious minorities’ rights, such support is not unanimous. As one local councillor stated in an interview:

When I took this position I was shocked. The officials working at the Religious Affairs Office explained to me that in one district, the civil servants did not allow Buddhists to organize a small event to commemorate Buddha’s birthday. Buddhists asked permission to give a speech and play some music. However, as they are Buddhist, and this is a religion, they were not granted permission. So imagine, if these local bureaucrats do this to the Buddhists, who are perceived as the “cool” ones, you can guess how they treat Roma Pentecostal groups.

Promoting Barcelona as a cosmopolitan city has not only been translated in the re-education of civil servants, but also in the domestication of religious expressions to fit the narrative. Two examples serve to illustratate this. First, the council has helped communities to improve their communication strategies. As one official suggested, “Communication is an important issue. Communication is not only the linguistic part, (…) but also the imaginary. We want people to feel invited to the events. We are at the district level; therefore, we work with the communication team”. Second, the City Council has produced pamphlets explaining religious minority celebrations. While the religious communities themselves are involved in drafting these documents, the City Council is in charge of the design. According to our interviews, both with members of the City Council and the communities, these pamphlets play a key role in facilitating acceptability among local populations.

The City Council also shapes the adaptation of performances to fit with certain norms. Religiously mandated gender segregation plays an important role in this regard. City officials have often made explicit their discomfort with public gender segregation, explaining that they actively worked to minimize it (and to make it less visible to the public). One official from the City Hall stated:

The City Council promotes religious freedom but always tries to have as little separation as possible between men and women. We know that they are a community that celebrates religious rituals separately, and we understand that, but we try to make them share more space between men and women, and … to make the separation between them less visible.

In addition, local councilors have tried to reduce the visibility of explicit religious rituals while trying to “culturalize” these celebrations, e.g. by fostering the presence of food and music. They have also promoted the participation of local authorities and neighbourhood associations to demonstrate local support for these events.

Cultural brokers within communities and local councils play crucial roles in making these events possible. Cultural brokers contribute to the reshaping of these events through strategies such as including interreligious activities in Islamic events, reducing their sensorial impact by modifying soundscapes and appearances, or inserting events into a neighbourhood’s cultural calendar (e.g. organizing a concert for the Islamic Mawlid festival). In the case of Buddhist meditations, these kinds of adaptations are not considered necessary since, as an urban official argued, “They act very, very normal”. The vision of a group of people meditating in the street does not generate alarm, but rather fits into “normal appearances” (Goffman 1971); audiences thus perceive them as innocuous events. The normal, as Brighenti argued, is typically the invisible: “unmarked, unnoticed, unthematized, untheorized” (2007, 326). However, this notion of normality is not neutral, but mediated by particular urban memories, aspirations, analogies and future imaginations, and the power of the actors who carry them.

Conclusion

In this article, we have suggested that unequal access to urban space among racialized religious minorities can be explained by the working of urban regimes. We have argued that urban regimes comprise legal and bureaucratic regulations of the use of urban space, the interaction order of the city and the attached emotional registers, as well as imaginations of the city’s public space. Only by integrating these domains – which are otherwise often treated separately – and by paying attention to how they filter racial and class-based inequalities are we able to explain differential forms and degrees of access to urban space. By way of conclusion, we specify how exactly these domains are linked in social reality.

First, we often see that divergent treatments of religious minorities by urban bureaucracies and hierarchical forms of access to urban space have to do with the framing of collective practices as religious, cultural, spiritual or political. The ability to suggest and enforce different legal and bureaucratic routes for the management of religious rituals is thus in part made possible by the polyvalent nature of these rituals: they are made legible in multiple ways by both the religious organizers and their counterparts in urban bureaucracies. Importantly, these decisions are themselves shaped by Barcelona’s interaction order, or the ways in which established cultural hierarchies and regimes of worth guide the behaviour of urban officials. As our research has shown, the interests and spatial presence of longstanding residents are typically uninterrogated and taken for granted, taking precedence over those of newcomers. In this process, only Sikh and Islamic processions must be adapted so as to match and harmonize with the existing urban regime. Buddhist collective rituals, by contrast, are not seen to produce disruptions in public life, as Buddhists are less racialized and even less religionized, viewed as they are as carriers of a politically desirable form of consciousness: peaceful, silent, and eco-friendly. To a certain degree, current religious uses of Barcelona’s public spaces and their regulation reflect and reinforce hierarchies among religious groups. Power constellations and postcolonial imaginations of “Near Eastern” others (Muslims) and “Far Eastern” others (Buddhists) (Obadia 2015) influence the divergent capacities of different groups in framing their events not as religious, but as cultural, political or spiritual. We emphasize the role of city councilors and other officials as urban managers and brokers that shape these processes.

However, urban interaction orders are not immune to social change. We wish to highlight how city images can have ambivalent effects in this regard. The promotion of Barcelona as a cosmopolitan city has surely had an impact on the de-Catholicization of the city’s urban spaces and their redefinition and pluralization, and it seems to have provided greater benefits for Buddhists than for Muslims and Sikhs. At the same time, as the example of Sikh processions as well as Islamic rituals (such as the Ashura) and the reassessment of the catalogue of cultural practices show, city images do have the capacity to contribute to transforming interaction orders and forms of bureaucratic governance in the long run.

In their research on the Filipino procession of the Santacruzan in Padua, Saint-Blancat and Cancielleri state that this performance is a “process of identity-marking”, and that “for socially invisible actors such as migrants, it means empowerment, having a voice to invert stigma and a stage to set up their own performance” (2014, 646). However, while it is true that, as Werbner points out, “once people have marched openly in a place, they have crossed an ontological barrier” (quoted in Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014), this might not produce an inversion of social stigma. The relationship between visibility and recognition is complex and even paradoxical (Brighenti 2007). There is a permanent tension between religious groups’ perception of public visibility as a path toward recognition, and the fact that it is precisely indifference (or what Goffman calls “civil inattention”) which most clearly indicates belonging and recognition in the city. On the one hand, actors socially marked as “normal” – thus invisible in the public eye – are the ones who are seen as already belonging to the normal flow of the city. On the other hand, visibility can easily turn into hypervisibility, fostering more intensive forms of surveillance and governance. In Barcelona, Shia Muslims’ desire to enhance their public visibility via the use of urban space for Ashura processions did not automatically lead to their greater acceptance and normalization. Buddhists’ desire for visibility, by contrast, was rarely framed in terms of their social recognition as a religious group but in terms of spiritual outreach, which appeared less demanding. We suggest that more research is needed in order to fully understand how the urban regimes that define religious groups’ access to urban space change over time, what the social forces are that account for their transformation, and under what conditions religious newcomers are viewed as “normal” – as actors whose visibility remains invisible.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Anna Clot-Garrell, Avi Astor, Rosa Martínez, Victor Albert and Carolina Esteso for their help in the fielwork, and their comments to earlier versions of this article. We also want to thank Adela Taleb, Tobias Muller and Chris Moses for the edition of the special issue, and for having invited us to participate.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article has benefited from a research grant from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Research project: EREU–MyB: Urban Religious expressions in the public space in Madrid and Barcelona, Ref. Num. CSO2015-66198-P).

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented in the workshop “Religious? Secular? Re-thinking Islam and space in Europe.” We thank the participants there for their helpful comments as well as Avi Astor, Víctor Albert Blanco, Carolina Esteso and Rosa Martínez Cuadro.

2 Public meditations and mindfulness marches are not only organised and/or attended by members of the Buddhist communities but by a broader group of people belonging to what has been termed as “holistic spirituality”. For more details see Griera and Clot-Garrell (2021).

3 Anthropologists studying urban religion in other areas, such as South Asia or Africa, noted the significance of public rituals much earlier (van Dijk 2001).

4 Most of these events take place in the city centre and surrounding areas, with the most requested places being those that carry a local symbolic meaning (e.g. Les Rambles, The Arc de Triomf).

5 The Spanish Government published guidelines to advise local councils on how to regulate religious uses in 2013, and the Catalan Government in 2015. In a similar vein, the Barcelona City Council promoted the approbation of a “Local ordinance on the guarantee of egalitarian treatment of religious entities in relation to the carrying out of specific activities in the public sphere” in 2016.

6 The district of Eixample does not have the same strict timing rules as Ciutat Vella.

7 Sant Pere is a neighbourhood in District 1 (Ciutat Vella), which is the old vella. The quarter has many narrow streets, and a combination of “ethnic shops” and “trendy hipster” businesses.

8 See http://www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/programa/L%27Ashura-se-celebra-a-Barcelona/video/220274875/