Rethinking Religion and Secularism in Urban Planning

Introduction

Babak Manouchehrifar^a and John Forester^b

^aDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; ^bDepartment of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Urban planners – whose disciplinary focus is the local, the spatial, and the practical – have been largely indifferent to the significance of religious difference in urban settings and seemingly unable to understand why religious diversity presents both problems and opportunities for the modern city.

This Interface examines challenges that urban planners face in managing the complex and morally heterogenous cities of our contemporary secular age – an age in which urban environments are increasingly interconnected economically and yet fractured by religious contestation. We live at a particular socio-historical juncture when conventional notions of the public sphere face constant pressures, not only from the growing public influence of religion, but also from the secular anxieties that emergent religious claims generate. These interdependent forces have cast aside the facile prophecies of secularization theories – supposing that as modernity waxes, religion, in its public manifestation, wanes. Renewed religious and spiritual commitments to tackle social injustices of urban problems have also questioned old conceits that religion must be irrelevant in conventional planning deliberations.

The question before us is less about how to avoid spatial manifestations of religious differences in planning, but more about how to rethink the relationship between religious convictions and planning actions in ways that move well beyond presuming the exclusionary stances of religiosity and the dismissive glances of professional planners.

As spatial disputes that involve religious-secular entanglements have proliferated, so have urban planners become more involved in the religious and secular lives of the communities they serve. To explore these issues, we asked our Interface contributors to address one or more of these challenges:

1. First, local opposition to locational decisions can come from, or focus upon, claims invoking religion – or its absence. Examples include: opposition to the construction or expansion of religious spaces (e.g. a synagogue, mosque, or church) as well as religious opposition to practices of different faith groups (e.g. building a Muslim cemetery or a pagan temple) or to proposals that some religious groups consider ‘places of vice or iniquity’ (e.g. a casino or strip club).

2. Second, these spatial disputes often involve competing and parallel views of what counts as ‘religious’ and what constitutes a ‘religious space.’ How to practically steer through, not away from, such salient variations for planning purposes?

3. Third, how does one understand a phenomenon that is quietly but incessantly shifting the socio-spatial fabric of our cities, namely the spatial segregation, or voluntary withdrawal, of certain religious communities reinforcing the redrawn, even hardened, communal lines of religious-secular differences?

4. Fourth, we recognize longstanding traditions of progressive religious activism that tackle urban problems as issues of injustice (e.g. racism, poverty, or degrading living and health conditions) as well as the emerging spiritual or inter-religiously mobilized grassroots movements for social justice and environmental protection. But how to engage with these movements and their histories practically and constructively, rather than shun them as existing outside of the domain of urban planning because of their religious roots and theological tenor?

We asked commentators to consider these challenges and reflect on cases of their choosing, to address and account for religion’s ongoing public presence and productivity in material and discursive terms, for contemporary planning purposes.

In what follows, we have organized these contributions into four sections. In the first section, Religion and Justice in the Postsecular City, Vincent Lloyd, Pamela Klassen, and Katie Day, scholars of Theology and Religious Studies, Africana Studies, Ethnic and Pluralism Studies, provide provocative and moving commentaries that link abiding questions of justice to everyday forms of embodiment, memory and forgetting. In the second section, Spiritual and Secular Canons of Urban Planning, Charles Hoch and June Thomas, professors of urban planning each centrally involved in professional planning circles in the U.S. for decades, offer both personal and socially-engaged reflections that tie intimate experience to evolving and contested spiritual and religious convictions. In the third section, Religious Pluralism and Urban Planning Covenants, scholars and researchers Angela Carmella, Brian Miller, Weishan Huang, and Christine Hwang address intersections of faith commitments, law and policy, as these shape planning conversations concerning and delimiting religious convictions and development proposals. In the final section, Reflections and Implications, Courtney Bender, Professor of Religion, reflects on these contributions to sharpen and extend the debates at hand. Finally, in the Editors’ Afterword, we pull together promising threads offered by our contributors to foster further interdisciplinary discussion.

Notes on Contributors

Babak Manouchehrifar is a Doctoral candidate in Urban Planning and International Development at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work examines spatial dilemmas of religious difference generated in and across cities of Western and non-Western societies. His previous article, Is Planning ‘Secular’? Rethinking Religion, Secularism, and Planning, which has won two awards, was published in this journal in 2018. Babak has degrees in Geomatics Engineering, City Planning, and Regional Studies, and has worked for several years as a professional planner.

John Forester is Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. His How Spaces Become Places: Place Makers Tell Their Stories (New Village Press, 2021) is in the process of publication. His earlier books include The Deliberative Practitioner (MIT, 1999), Planning in the Face of Conflict (APA, 2013), and Conflict, Improvisation, Governance (with David Laws, Routledge, 2015).

Section I: Religion and Justice in the Postsecular City

Editors’ Note: What does the notion of postsecularism mean, normatively, for contemporary planning practice? Which religio-spatial forms of injustice and exclusion remain invisible in, or are challenged by, the present-day spatial practices in urban settings? Which new planning possibilities have been made available by emergent religious/spiritual movements for social justice? Tackling these questions, the contributions in this section help us rethink what it means for an urban profession to engage constructively with an incarnate faith; and they do so by pushing the material up against the metaphysical, the imagined up against the real, and the hypothetical up against the grounded.

The Normative Dimension of Postsecularism

Vincent Lloyd

Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

At first, the city seems quintessentially secular. Religion is a creature of the provinces, of rural homelands and grandparents and bygone times. Spirituality is a creature of the wilderness, of untrammeled nature and indigenous cultures and retreats to the primeval. The city, with its density, diversity, speed, and fluidity, with its culture, youth, forward-thinking, and experimentation – this is not a place to find God or gods. The story of the city is one of secularization (declining religious involvement), secularity (non-religious ethos), and secularism (exclusion or management of religion). Or so the story goes. While appreciating the recent wave of scholarship that has complicated this story, in this essay I argue that urban planners should go further, attending not only to the critique of the secular but also to the calls of justice that can be heard as the power of the secular recedes.

Scholars now argue that secularism is an ideologically-freighted myth, seemingly a practical necessity for complex modern life but actually a means of advancing the interests of the powers that be (along lines of gender, race, empire, and – especially – religion, e.g. Protestantism), and the story of the secular city, the religious provinces, and the spiritual wilds no longer holds sway. Recent scholarship in religious studies has explored the secular construction of the spiritual wilds (Howe, 2016), the complex and fluid spirituality of rural and urban areas (Bender, 2010; Frederick, 2003), and the way urban unbelief itself is part of spiritual traditions (Schmidt, 2016). Rather than sites of religious decline, cities have been cauldrons of religious innovation as well as contest. Scholars of Black American religion have tracked the proliferation of religious practices and institutions in urban centers that followed the early twentieth century migration of Blacks to the North (Weisenfeld, 2018), a spirit of innovation evident in new urban religious forms today (Waghorne, 2004). Others have tracked the way religious diversity in cities has provided an occasion for multiple tensions to play out: from nineteenth-century church bell controversies (with wealthy, native-born congregations objecting to loud, frequent bells that would attract poor, immigrant congregants to the neighborhood) to twenty-first century debates over calls for prayer coming from mosques (with Islamophobia and racism nearly indistinguishable, fueled by the resentment accompanying economic decline) (Weiner, 2013).

With the old story of the secular in question, a ‘postsecular’ perspective asks more complex questions about religion, spirituality, and the city. But offering a better description of the world’s complexities is only one element of questioning the secular. There is also a normative dimension. If secularism is an illusion perpetuated by the powers that be to advance the interests of the few, then calling out and then countering or interrupting secularism may be an obligation of justice. This is the implicit premise of much recent scholarship, in the tradition of critical theory, exploring the links of secularism to projects of imperial, gender, racial, economic, and other forms of domination. From a different direction, other critics of secularism focus on the norm-laden religious traditions that secularism masks or mutes. While seemingly neutral, secularism is actually a bad (i.e. heretical) form of Christianity, with its own confused commitments to transcendence, incarnation, and salvation (Milbank, 1990). Or, secularism takes away the ability of any participant in a religious tradition to speak fully about what they believe to be good, true, and beautiful.

As Christian theologian Graham Ward puts it, “The city is not accidental to Christianity; it is a means of grace and an analogue (however fallen or remote) of eschatological possibilities” (2000, p. 205). Ward has in mind Augustine’s City of God, and he is urging readers to take the urban nature of that foundational Christian analogy seriously. After we are disabused of the myth of secularism, we feel the imperative to organize our (diverse, fluid) communities according to our deepest values, and, for those who participate in the Christian tradition, this means becoming an urban planner. The primary task of each Christian is, first, to understand the way the current shape of a city organizes desire, displays or conceals truth, and forms people in the good or deforms their souls; second, to discern the interventions that are most needed and most useful in shaping the existing city to more closely resemble the image of the perfect city embedded in Christian texts and practices. Put another way, focusing on church buildings and zoning boards is much too modest a project for the urban planner taking religion seriously; taking religion seriously ought to shape everything the urban planner does to the point that the vocation of theologian and planner become one and the same.

It is tempting to add: mutatis mutandis for participants in Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or indigenous religious traditions – but that cannot be quite right. The ‘city of God’ is a particularly Christian image. But even from within the Christian tradition, there are those who would say that the ‘city of God’ is first and foremost a collection of outcasts, the invisible community formed by the poor, weak, imprisoned, and dispossessed. Black theologians and Latin American liberation theologians (and myriad Christian folk traditions outside the academy) have called attention to the way Jesus identifies with the marginalized. God is to be found in communities organizing for justice, protesting the false gods of White supremacy, Eurocentrism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Organizing instead of planning: the task of the Christian, in this view, is to catalyze the movements of the excluded, a role starkly opposed to that of the planner tasked with managing difference.

Approached another way, are there new ways of imagining justice that we can access, and that call us, once secularism is set aside? This question is too often ignored by critics of secularism, even those with normative interests: they are either content commending interruptions of the secular or turn from the secular to an alternative, now theological, site of authority for managing difference. But in recent years, we have seen an increase in calls for justice from social movements that cannot be easily reduced to secular terms: from the Arab Spring to Guantanamo Bay hunger strikes, to massive US prison strikes, to demands for police abolition, to indigenous communities’ claims that water is sacred (Dubler and Lloyd, 2019). In cases such as these, justice is not exhausted by giving each their due. Justice begins by attending to the invisible: who is not counted, who is structurally excluded. Making the invisible present through practices of conjuring that thwart secularism’s staged contest between secular and sacred (Lambelet, 2020), justice-seeking movements draw on but are not identical to religions sanctioned by the state – or by authority figures internal to religious traditions. Policy reforms are not enough, and to access a broader horizon, to transform the horizon, souls and spirits must have a say (see Chakrabarty, 2000).

The accounts of the postsecular that have attracted the attention of urban planners tend to diagnose our age – and, implicitly or explicitly, to celebrate it. Put crudely: secularism is bad, dogmatic religion is bad, but an appreciation of the complex mix of the religious, spiritual, and secular that characterizes our moment ought to guide planning practice. My suggestion is that scholarly discussions of the postsecular make available a richer normative palate. Claims to justice made visible by a postsecular perspective can inflect what planners mean when they talk about social justice and can inflect the practical wisdom used in negotiating state, market, and civil society concerns. When the worldly, immanent frame that bounds social justice and practical wisdom is broken by political-theological movements and interruptions, new issues appear to concern justice and new styles of engagement appear as paths to justice.

To take the normative dimension of postsecularism seriously does not necessarily mean that the roles of theologian and urban planner collapse into each other. It could, rather, mean that the distinctive vocation of the urban planner involves attending to calls for justice in a particular way. It is tempting for the urban planner to translate calls for justice into secular terms, claims to this or that resource or space or relationship that can be carefully adjudicated using the planner’s existing tools. Resisting such translation means acknowledging the interlocking systems of domination that are constitutive of our world, that overwhelm and capture well-intentioned attempts at reform and improvement. It means realizing the inadequacy of existing tools (and frameworks and habits), the imperative to try new ones – to fail again, to fail better. And it means attending carefully to those places and practices that straddle the line between the religious and the secular without reducing them to either; seeing in them, instead, invitations to pursue an impossible justice. And where else but the city, with its cacophony of voices and lifeways, can so many invitations be found?

Notes on Contributor

Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University, where he also directs the Africana Studies Program. Lloyd’s books include Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology, the co-authored Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, and the co-edited Race and Secularism in America. He co-edits the journal Political Theology and edits the American Academy of Religion’s book series Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, published with Oxford University Press.

Skating in the City

Pamela E. Klassen

Department for the Study of Religion, Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

When I released myself to the mystery of the ice I became a different creature. I could slow down time, choose the tempo I needed whenever I launched myself into learning a new skill. I could hurtle down the ice at full speed and then bend time in upon itself to slow the turn, every muscle, every tendon, every sinew in my body remembering the movement, learning it, making it a part of me.

Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse, 2012.

As I was writing a different version of this reflection, a news release popped up on my screen telling me that the city of Toronto, where I live, would be entering a provincially declared state of emergency due to the second surge of COVID-19 cases. The hospitals a few city blocks east of me were overwhelmed with critical cases; people were dying in higher numbers than at any other point in the pandemic. As I read the details of the stay-at-home order and what the province called ‘enhanced enforcement measures to reduce mobility’ one of my first thoughts was, I sheepishly admit – will the skating rinks be closed?

Skating, like walking, is an ‘elementary form’ of living in the city in the wintertime, to borrow from Michel de Certeau, a theorist who was also a deeply Christian-infused writer (de Certeau, 1984; Sheldrake, 2014). In his classic essay, Walking in the City, de Certeau urged his readers to shift their gaze from a god’s eye view of the city, that comes from the height of a tall building, to the pedestrian’s view from the street. By now, Google maps have made even a street-view into a frame of panoptic surveillance, but for de Certeau, writing in 1984, walking in the city was a “spatial practice” of the everyday that disrupted the “imaginary totalizations” of the theoretical, “planned” city (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 124, 126). Arguing that walking was a form of movement that was at once rhetoric, metaphor, and memory, de Certeau understood walking to animate space in a manner that could revive the past into the present: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 108). Skating, too, is a kind of circular mobility that animates the spirits of the city by way of diverse rhetorics, metaphors, and memory.

What does skating in the city have to do with the task of rethinking religion, secularism, and urban planning? To answer this question, I build on the insights of a team of ethnographers who argue that urban planners have much to learn from taking the outdoor skating rink seriously as a site “where we might make good on the inclusive principles of truly public spaces” (Horgan et al., 2020, p. 151). With the goal of complicating the “iconicity or mythological status” of “rink life” in Canadian cities, Horgan et al (2020, p. 144) argue that “pleasure skating” (i.e. not hockey) rinks make possible a seasonal, everyday ethics of conviviality across generations, genders, racialization, and levels of skill. As skaters interact, enabled by the affordances of public infrastructure, they exhibit responsibility to and trust of the stranger; they joke and encourage each other, while also staying out of each other’s way. Writing as a White woman, Canadian settler, and middling skater, I take up this argument, but extend it by arguing that skating, like walking, also animates the haunted places of the settler colonial city.

The centrality of nostalgia and rhetorics of national identity to the everyday solidarity of skating has been noted by many scholars, as has the metaphor of the ‘mysticism’ or ‘civil religiosity’ of the ice rink – especially the hockey rink – in Canadian narratives (Bekkering, 2015; Ramshaw & Hinch quoted in Edwards & Kulczycki, 2018, p. 391; Trothen, 2006). Throughout this work, Christianity is often an implicit and/or explicit grounding for the secular mythos of skating. This Christian grounding is not surprising, given the history of Canada as a settler colonial nation that invented itself through regimes of property based on spiritual claims flowing from the power of the Christian God (Borrows, 2010; Klassen, 2018a, 2018b). Toronto is a city abounding with Christian affordances for secular nostalgia and public sociability. The built form of churches anchors prominent corners all over the city, even if many of these churches are now condominiums (Klassen, 2012). Many of the city’s prominent parks (and their ice rinks) were once ecclesial property, carrying the memory of this Christian past with names such as ‘Trinity-Bellwoods’ and ‘St. James.’ The secular calendar of ‘festive sociality’ is itself a Christian affordance that makes Christmas a ‘public’ holiday bound up with the desire to ‘skate away,’ as Joni Mitchell sings in her iconic song, “River”¹ (Barrera, 2006; Bell, 2009; Klassen & Scheer, 2019). Another Toronto skating landmark, the Hockey Hall of Fame, is a site of pilgrimage self-dubbed ‘the Cathedral of Hockey;’ a shrine for ‘hockey relics’ that are vehicles of ‘secular grace’ (Bekkering, 2015).

During COVID-19, the public infrastructure of ice-rinks became part of what our editors called the “quietly and incessantly shifting socio-spatial fabric of cities.” Pre-pandemic, most public skating rinks – free and operated by the city – had schedules that divided the time between shinny (informal hockey games), skating lessons for children and adults, and leisure or public skating. These socio-spatial practices of skating in the city governed access to the rink in ways that were highly gendered and generationally stratified (Horgan et al., 2020). At shinny time, the rinks were mostly filled with younger men tearing around the rink in chase of the puck. They often stayed for the leisure skate, darting with their sticks through the slower skaters, sometimes setting up nets on one half of the ice, pushing the leisure skaters into ever smaller circles. The material infrastructure of rinks as spaces of ‘entrepreneurial display’ emphasizes the primacy of hockey, as corporate and city placards along the boards of the rink remind skaters that Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment has sponsored the ‘upgrading of community rinks’ and that the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team is ‘the passion that unites us all.’ Imbuing ice-skating with a rhetoric and metaphor of nationalist enthusiasm, the public ice rink messages itself as a site of spirited, and branded, national identity: ‘We All Play for Canada’ (Bell, 2009).

During the pandemic, the need to play for Canada both intensified and became more highly regulated: the rinks shifted to a 10 am to 10 pm schedule of pleasure skating requiring reservations, with fines for bringing hockey sticks on the ice. This meant that every hour a new group of 25 people headed onto the ice, skating in circles in the same direction. The expert skaters wove their way through the slower ones, including children and adults pushing plastic skate-helpers, sometimes offering advice on figure-skating technique or a hockey stop. Each day – and each hour – this ersatz community of skaters generated the possibility of “everyday solidarity between strangers” at a time of lockdown and social isolation (Horgan et al., 2020, p. 146).

With the pandemic ban on hockey sticks, more of the city’s public ice rinks began to mirror the diverse community of the strictly pleasure skating rink. Anecdotally, from my experience on three neighbourhood rinks, the hourly rounds of skaters included many children falling on the ice with abandon, young women wearing hijab and hockey skates, and older masked women circling slowly and carefully, but whose movements retained the telltale traces of skilled skaters (Khan, 2009). Skating is the enacting of bodily memory – the figure-skating child of decades ago remains in the graceful strokes of the middle-aged woman; the hockey-playing teenager is evident in the sharp-turning, hard-stopping grey-haired man. And for those without this embodied memory, our dogged efforts to keep moving carry their own choppy grace.

This individually embodied memory is gathered up in a ‘we’ by the public rink’s entrepreneurial display. The idea that we all play for Canada invokes nationalist spirits of the city through a secular branding that forgets and obscures the violence that grounds Canada (Klassen, 2015). Toronto was born of, and remains imprinted by, an amalgam of Christian and secular spaces that have tried to erase Indigenous pasts and presence (Bobiwash, 1997; Low, 2016). In the wake of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, scholars of hockey are rethinking its Whiteness, masculinity, and racism as a ‘national’ sport (Allain, 2019; Bains & Szto, 2020; Cairnie, 2019; Te Hiwi & Forsyth, 2017). Even some exhibits in the Hockey Hall of Fame have made efforts to remember Indigenous pasts and their demands on the present.

If this remembering is not to become yet another kind of entrepreneurial display, however, it will require deeper questioning of what makes up everyday sociability. As Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi dramatist Jill Carter writes, Indigenous people – especially artists – “skate on the razor’s edge” between invisibility and hypervisibility, as they call for deeper practices of memory and responsibility while also trying to avoid being consumed as mere entertainment. It is a challenge to do so in a Canada “built by those who live, now by choice, in a perpetual dissociative state, who are spatially and temporally groundless, and who have adopted a posture of benign blindness, refusing to acknowledge their own complicity in the traumatic histories and uncomfortable truths they so avidly consume” (Carter, 2020, p. 21). One way for Canadians to acknowledge this complicity is to ask, over and over again, what does it mean to ‘play for Canada,’ and what spirits do we invoke in doing so?

Storytellers such as the late Ojibwe writer Richard Wagamese show how what he called “the mystery of ice” need not be interpreted solely by Christian or secular frames of grace. In Indian Horse, Wagamese tells the story of an Ojibwe man named Saul who taught himself to skate as a boy while at a Catholic-run, government-sponsored residential school in northern Ontario. Coached by a priest who abused him, Saul experienced hockey as the pretext for and space of racist, sexualized violence that nearly destroyed him, both at the genocidal residential school and when he became a professional player in Toronto. While implicating hockey, Wagamese also writes with soaring prose of the joy of Saul as he learns to skate in a “soliloquy of grace and motion” (Wagamese, 2012, p. 64). In trying to understand his remarkable and seemingly innate ability to translate a vision of skating into embodied skill on the ice, Saul recalls his grandmother’s teaching that humility in the face of mystery is the source of learning: “I knew it as a mystery and I honoured it that way” (Wagamese, 2012, p. 65). Saul’s grace is neither Christian nor secular. His grandmother’s teaching of humility is one of what Anishinaabe scholars and knowledge holders discuss as the seven Grandmother and/or Grandfather teachings (See also John Borrows’ discussion of humility as a “grandmother teaching” in Anishinaabe tradition, in Borrows, 2019).

Humility in the face of mystery is markedly different from the virtue of humility trademarked in the National Hockey League’s “Declaration of Principles,” as found on NHL.com. The principles are eight virtues to which people can pledge their commitment by appending their email to the statement “I believe in hockey,” and then clicking to give their permission to receive offers from the NHL corporation. “We are Humble in Victory,” the website declares underneath the virtue of Humility, bringing the promise of inclusion, entrepreneurialism, and the competitive spirit together in one affirmation (see also Lofton, 2017; National Hockey League, n.d.).

Skating rinks distill, animate, and reconfigure the socio-spatial practices of city-run public spaces in ways that both rest upon and question the spirituality and secularity of the settler colonial city. Public spaces are affordances for particular kinds of public memory, which people take up and reshape by moving through the space in ways both free and joyful, sanctioned and surveilled. For the outdoor skating rink to be a socio-spatial practice that embodies an everyday ethics of conviviality and encounter that is central to “any vision of the just and inclusive city,” it too will need to become a space where the city’s rhetoric, metaphor, and memory is re-narrated and re-planned, with the participation of Indigenous visionaries akin to Carter and Wagamese (Horgan et al., 2020, p. 143). Skating in the city is a mode of persuasion, a rhetoric convincing people of all kinds to move their bodies differently, on sharp blades that scrape the mystery of the ice, offering time to think anew about the meanings and responsibilities of community, memory, and justice.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the editors, Babak Manouchehrifar and John Forester, for their invitation to participate in this symposium and their very helpful editorial comments. Thanks also to Kathryn Lofton, Magdalene Klassen-Marshall, and John Marshall for their comments and suggestions.

Notes on Contributor

Pamela Klassen is Professor & Chair in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on religion, colonialism, and public memory in North America and Turtle Island, engaging with Indigenous studies, museum studies, and critical secularism studies. Her recent books include The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (U Chicago Press, 2018) and the co-authored Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (U Chicago Press, 2018). Her digital project Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations can be found at www.storynations.utoronto.ca. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she writes regularly for The Immanent Frame.

Planners and Faith-Based Activists: Forging a Creative Partnership

Katie Day

Schieren Professor Emerita of Church and Society, United Lutheran Seminary, Gettysburg, PA, USA

The fact that this journal is focusing on the relationship of religion and urban planning (and that you are reading it!) represents a shifting paradigm. Although communities of faith are vital parts of urban life, and their houses of worship contribute to neighborhood aesthetics and identity as they are incorporated into cityscapes, planners and policy makers have often had a blind spot about the importance of the religious presence. Very few analysts in planning take seriously the interaction of religion and cities. Sanjoy and Shampa Mazumdar argue (2013, p. 235), “a shift in attitude is required for planning and design to address religion adequately.” Urban designs rarely incorporate religious elements. An outstanding exception would be James Rouse, who included interfaith centers within the planned city of Columbia, Maryland. Nevertheless, the practitioners of religion, along with those who research them, bear criticism for often treating religion as an independent entity, unrelated to its context (Day, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2020). Perhaps animating this is the stubborn mind-body dualism so engrained in Western thinking since Descartes, which supports a perception that the built environment and spiritual practices are unrelated.

In contrast, the contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities (2020), representing a variety of disciplines, view urban contexts and the religions within them not in mutual isolation but in dynamic interaction. This more inclusive approach to cities and the spatial lens in understanding religion uses an ecological frame to examine how religions both shape and are shaped by their urban contexts.

Cities and religions are changing today, particularly given the social distancing made necessary by the pandemic. This impact is especially dramatic because social proximity is at the definitional core of both urban life and religious institutions. Communities of faith are decreasingly attached to their buildings for several reasons that presaged Covid-19. Many sacred spaces in cities are older structures that are expensive to maintain, especially as many religious traditions experience declining memberships. In addition to demographic changes, people of faith move beyond these sacred walls for proactive reasons that are particularly reflected in the growth of faith-based community organizing (FBCO).

The phenomenon of FBCO has its roots in the confluence of community organizing techniques developed by Saul Alinsky and the theological strains of the Social Gospel Movement (for Protestants), Catholic Moral Theology, and the Tikkun Olam tradition within Judaism. African-American churches have long had a tradition, born of necessity, of organizing within the Black community for change. Coming together in the mid- to late-twentieth century, this diversity of religious folks found resonance in their concern not just for individual souls but for the common good. But beyond just concern for the public has been an embrace of agency – the emergence of collective power among organized citizens to bring significant social change. For people of faith, public activism gives expression to commitments to love of neighbor and social justice. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel famously told Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Selma March for racial justice, he felt like he was “praying with my legs.” This represents a reversal of the Cartesian dualism; here, body, spirit, and space are organically related.

FBCO has grown exponentially in recent decades – numerically, geographically and tactically. Organizing networks such as Faith in Action (originally PICO), the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Poor People’s Campaign, and Gamaliel (with whom Barack Obama was an organizer), continue to train religious folk to analyze problems and leverage power to address them. In moving outside of their sacred walls and into the public square, FBCO challenges religious piety in significant ways. First, parochialism is incompatible with FBCO, which draws people into coalitions with people of other religious traditions, or even no religion. In working for the public good, FBCO forms partnerships with secular as well as religious organizations. Secondly, FBCO re-frames ‘power’ from negative theological connotations, to being seen as essential to mobilization, interpreted not as domination, but as ‘agency’ or ‘the ability to get things done.’

Transcending parochialism and newly appreciating power, FBCO challenges religious sensibilities in a third way – tactically. A tenet of FBCO holds, “there are no permanent enemies and no permanent allies.” So, when pursuing a goal, FBCO tactics might require framing public officials as ‘enemies’ standing in the way of justice who must be publicly confronted. The popular theological imagination, therefore, moves from a passive understanding of ‘loving one’s enemies,’ to an activist engagement with them as adversaries who are obstructing justice. The writings and speeches of Dr. King are often invoked in this process of becoming comfortable with confrontation, while loving the enemy into changing.

While FBCO certainly takes place in rural areas, it is largely an urban phenomenon. Faith-based community organizations currently engage a varied list of public issues addressing the quality of life of the urban poor and/or those who are ‘left behind or left out.’ There is an underlying understanding that by eliminating the disparities between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ a healthier city, a robust urban ecology, will result. Therefore, FBCO networks focus on myriad issues: affordable housing, resources for homeless populations, hunger, healthcare for all, public safety, quality public education, livable wages, police brutality, climate injustices (such as location of toxic dumps or opposition to fracking), and so on. Agendas vary by context, but the list of changes wrought is impressive. These coalitions carefully research issues and focus their efforts on changes that are at once consequential and winnable.

There is a large literature on FBCO which is situated in an even larger literature of Social Movement Theory (which is focused on how social change happens). Without wading into a detailed discussion of definitional issues here, it can be said that basically community organizing movements (and FBCO is a subset here) are grassroots efforts that are specifically seeking structural change. This is a departure for much of the religious community which has traditionally responded to social needs through charitable outreach – that is, volunteer efforts to alleviate suffering, rather than to seek to change policies and cultures that create the social problem in the first place. The Points of Light initiative would fall into this category. This is not to deprecate these volunteer efforts – they are just not FBCO. When one considers the social good generated by Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, or so many hospitals and schools founded by religious groups, it is clear that these efforts have made and are making an enormous contribution to the common good. There is tension within the faith communities of responding to immediate needs or working for systemic change: decisions about whether to put resources into food pantries or changing food policies are common in congregations.

In focusing on structural change, FBCO efforts are often working on progressive issues. But this is not always the case. For example, the longest organizing effort based in the faith community was Prohibition, a movement that lasted a century. More recently we can think of the faith-based movements against abortion. Both came out of ministries of working with victims (wives and children abandoned by alcoholic breadwinners in the 19th century for example) and evolved into collective efforts to work on changes in policies.

FBCO employs a repertoire of tactics, most visibly through public marches. City streets, long being arenas for religious processions, are increasingly sites for the mobilization of organized people of various faiths, often allied with other justice-seeking organizations. Marches can last for a day or be sustained over weeks and months, as we have witnessed recently in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Actions can be localized or mobilized in multiple cities. Some strategies include long-term encampment. Philadelphia’s homeless encampment echoes the Occupy Movement of 2011 and Resurrection City in 1968. For decades, tent cities have served as both last-resort housing and longer-term expressions of resistance.

Central to FBCO efforts is the reframing of social grievances as social problems needing redress. As noted, this is a fundamental shift for faith communities from familiar ‘charitable’ responses to social needs – religious people have typically been seen as serving food to the hungry rather than as advocating for policy changes to redistribute public funding or to pressure retail grocers to open stores in food deserts. Systemic changes require directing action against those with decision-making power – in corporations, governments, and yes, planning commissions and zoning boards. Planners might be surprised to be confronted by those in clerical collars or hijabs.

How then should the urban planning and design community respond to the increasing visibility and activism of faith-based community organizations? First, it must consciously recognize the religious presence, not as reified or benign institutions, but as dynamic actors in the urban ecology. Religion has always impacted cities and currently, through FBCO, is doing so much more intentionally. So urban decision-makers need to first see religion, and to take it seriously as one among many forces shaping cities. As city planners unveiled a development plan for a particularly disadvantaged neighborhood in Philadelphia, for example, they claimed that it resulted from a year of comprehensive research along the four-block corridor. They had interviewed small business owners, agencies, and organizations about their challenges and hopes for the area – but none of the 14 churches or their organizations had been consulted. Dialogue with the congregations should have been part of the research plan. Religion matters.

This heightened awareness will mean additional research when approaching design projects. What religious organizations exist in a planning area? Religion is not monolithic and the faith communities present most likely represent a diversity of traditions, sizes, capacities, spaces, demographics, social and political capital. What FBCOs are active here? What are their priorities and agendas? Research could mean an organized ethnographic study or more informal walking tours and conversations with those not normally consulted when developing policy.

These connections can become the basis for future dialogue. For example, if new housing is being planned, consult, not only with individual religious leaders, but also FBCO efforts. This will help you to anticipate their concerns and possibly to work collaboratively. FBCOs are not shy about publicly confronting those on commissions, boards, or governments who are implementing plans and decisions that impact impoverished communities. These actions attract media attention and can be quite creative.

On the other hand, partnering with FBCOs in developing projects can facilitate local buy-in and success. The two approaches can have stunningly different outcomes. Perhaps the most well-known example is the collaboration over the last 30 years between East Brooklyn Churches¹ and New York City to build hundreds of affordable housing units and public spaces – literally transforming the distressed sections of Brownsville and East Brooklyn into an attractive and livable neighborhood. This became a prototype for Nehemiah Housing, developed in other locations through partnerships between public agencies and local faith-based organizations.

On the other hand, when the city of Evanston, Illinois, attempted to pass an ordinance limiting the opening of new houses of worship (this was particularly aimed at independent or ‘storefront churches’ which the aldermen considered signs of blight), a coalition of religious leaders and law students organized to defeat the ordinance. This conflict could have been avoided with more dialogue with the faith community and research into the value of local churches, not to mention federal law (Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000) (see Day, 2014, pp. 61–63).

Finally, as public spaces are being increasingly claimed for civic engagement, it is important to plan such spaces with this in mind. The Washington Mall has been the site of many marches for social change. Its symbolic importance, openness, access to public transportation, and multiple entry points invite public participation. In local cities and towns, plazas and streets have become the venues of social mobilization – with some spaces being more accommodating than others. Access to benches for weary marchers, spaces for pop-up vendors, permanent or temporary bathroom facilities, water fountains, provisions for cyclists, and availability of public transportation all contribute safe spaces conducive to democratic participation.

Public art has become increasingly important to social movements, for better or ill. A controversial statue can be the focus of pain and anger. Yet, some statuary representing local aspirations and inspiration – such as the Robert Indiana LOVE statue or representation of Harriet Tubman – can demark what becomes sacred space where vigils of commitment, remembrance, and lamentation are held. In other words, public art should be a critical consideration of public space development.

I have argued that the planning and design professions need to take more seriously the growth of religious activism through faith-based community organizations. But this is a two-way street: FBCOs also need to seek out planners as potential partners in their struggle for justice. Perhaps in a few years, this article will seem obvious and outdated. I hope so!

Notes on Contributor

Katie Day is a sociologist (Ph.D., Temple University) and a theologian (S.T.M., Union Theological Seminary), and is the Schieren Professor Emerita of Church and Society at United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia. She has published four books, including, Faith on the Avenue: Religion on a City Street (Oxford, 2014) and has co-edited four volumes (most recently, The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities). Dr Day’s research focus has been on the intersection of race, religion, and violence in urban space, and she has published in numerous collected volumes and journals. She has served on numerous boards, including the advisory boards of Partners for Sacred Places and the Center for the Study of Religion and Cities.

Section II: Spiritual and Secular Canons of Urban Planning

Editors’ Note: Are all planning possibilities to act responsively and responsibly in our contemporary secular age vulnerable to the raucous debate that propels us into separating spiritual and religious commitments from practical interventions? Joining spiritual-religious visions to professional planning sophistications, the contributions in this section urge us to reconsider the old planning convention that urban planners’ personal inspirations need be fully separate from their professional commitments.

Secularism, Planning, and Religious Belief

Charles Hoch

Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA

Secular Conversion

I am a believer. I learned to believe as the youngest member of a pious Roman Catholic household. I memorized the Baltimore Catechism. Q: Who made you? A: God made me. I tried to follow the ten commandments, participate in the seven sacraments, pursue the seven corporal and seven spiritual works of mercy, and avoid the seven deadly sins. I mostly succeeded with occasional failure. Doctrinal belief and devotional practice provided the scaffold I used to create my moral identity as a good boy.

Rationality came haltingly in subtle hues of critical doubt. I learned that black neighbor kids in the valley were like me. I recognized that my teachers were just advanced students still figuring things out. A few, Mrs. Smith and Father Kulleck, recognized and rewarded my curiosity and disciplined inquiry. I was inspired to enter a Catholic seminary. All the tumultuous emotions of anger, pride, fear, shame, and guilt that accompanied my male adolescence provided tempting accelerants for a heroic life of religious service. Those emotions fueled my own journey.

As a Catholic seminarian, I learned fraternity and solidarity among mostly idealistic comrades and some strange misfits. Intellectually, the same doctrines and beliefs that brought me to the apex of Catholicism became the subject of unbound philosophical and psychological critique. My beliefs in doctrine, tradition, and devotions gave way to inquisitive reconsideration and revision. I worked with youngsters as a volunteer and teacher.

In my fifth year, I experienced an emotional rupture losing confidence in my Catholic faith. Personal prayer, sacramental practice, ritual expression, and spiritual devotions no longer evoked a sacred divine presence. These felt now to be conventions reproducing an astonishingly complex institutional system of authority and compliance. Wonder before a transcendent and mysterious deity gave way to hunger to learn about human consciousness, the cosmos, social action, and the places people inhabit.

Ironically, a deeply religious life of education and devotion had prepared me for a humanism tied deeply to scientific inquiry and questions of how to reduce human suffering. I came to trust social democratic efforts to care for each other and the world we inhabit. Our plans, for example, offer no reassurance about divine order, but they reflect promising human inventiveness, insight, and resilience, even as willful ignorance and evil persist.

My experiences suggest how the sacred and profane cross-pollinate in a secular world. The enlightenment myth of a natural rationality, freed from the strictures of dogma, ignores the complex ways that religious tradition and belief contribute to the architecture of modern inquiry. Philosopher Charles Taylor (2007) has tracked secularism in the West to changes in Roman Catholic doctrine, practice, and devotion over ten centuries. My story provides a psychological analog to Taylor’s masterful historical interpretation.

The cultural presuppositions I had acquired as a young mid-twentieth-century American had planted the seeds of modernism in my consciousness. I had acquired my Catholic piety by swimming in a secular sea. I was not alone, however. In the United States, most people harbor religious beliefs, engage in religious practices, and join religious communities. Religious norms accompany – even if they do not authorize – modern scientific, industrial, commercial, cultural and government norms. For our idea of a secular way of life only makes sense to us today because people everywhere used to live according to the norms of a religion. For most of recorded human history, we know that people inhabited cultures where religious practices and doctrines shaped the contours of daily life, guiding expectations toward the future. Secular society is a recent historic accomplishment, emerging differently in different societies.

Many religious leaders resist modernity. The myth of a universal secular humanism celebrating the triumphant powers of the rational mind over the powers of religious belief has not achieved the hegemony that the champions of the enlightenment envisioned. Ties to religious faith, practice, and membership remain resilient. But modernity has taught us new ways of life that challenge many, if not most, of the norms and conventions that these religions promote.

The Secular and the Religious

The emergence of the self-conscious individual does not eliminate religion but displaces religious norms as social foundations for the self. Human flourishing becomes the responsibility of each person in a civil society. This practical idea of ‘the individual’ grew over centuries in the West to produce disparate accommodations with religious doctrines and practice.

‘Secularity’ implies that people recognize as normal and unexceptional, a plurality of religious affiliations and doctrines that compete for devotees and converts. But religious convictions can range across a spectrum from warm embrace to full rejection of an exclusive humanism. First, those whose religious ties constitute – linguistically and culturally – their own senses of self, tend to ignore or reject the legitimacy of a secular/religious divide. The monotheists believe in the ultimate foundational reality of a personal or impersonal divinity. Polytheists believe in the animating spiritual force of many local gods. These theistic believers can recognize the salience and power of modern innovations tied to scientific discovery, and still insist upon the foundational relevance and validity of religious doctrines and customs as cognitive filters and moral guides.

Second, for others, God has become a spiritual force, infusing and animating the energy and matter of the universe. Rational scientific knowledge for these believers has validity and reach without grasping the filaments of spiritual forces at play. Third, for still others, religious ties persist mostly as embedded cultural precedents, largely stripped of their animating power, like metaphors used so often that they become literal. These believers may conduct religious rituals, celebrate religious holidays, participate in worship services with others and even adopt devotional practices. But they do so to create social rather than sacred meanings. Finally, we find those indifferent to all forms of religious belief and activity, but who recognize the power and influence of religion in the lives of others. These exclusive humanists believe that we humans invented the divine as a social product of an evolving conscious understanding of ourselves and the world. Among these are atheists who insist that people cannot and should not persist in an attachment to a divine spirit because this distracts them from understanding their responsibility to the world and each other.

Secular Planning and Religion

As students of planning, we often presume a secularity that excludes religious belief. Ideas about planning and plans typically seek neither inspiration nor foundation from either a hands-off transcendent designer or a hands-on creator. Planners educated in universities acquired their conceptual gear neatly arrayed within an Enlightenment toolbox that supposedly replaced religiously doctrinal and devotional discipline centered in divine providence. Nevertheless, many people, including planners, remain emotionally and cognitively attached to both. Secularism does not preclude religious membership. Professional planners can belong to a religion even as they do professional work. Planning can even fuel religious devotion!

Local planning in the United States was not impeded by the growth in religious participation. Christian denominations competed among each other for congregants along with more Jewish and Muslim believers. Non-theistic religious practices have increased in popularity along with atheism. These believers typically have learned to adapt and reconcile diverse religious demands as they have come into conflict with the practical demands of modern living. Such adjustments can be modest – like silencing cell phones during a religious service as one does in a cinema. These believers do not worry about the inconsistencies that this creates as they focus attention, form expectations, craft justifications, and make plans.

Professional planners, though, must care about these inconsistencies if they are to work with and for these people and compose plans together for the future of the places they inhabit. Planners can recognize and even celebrate those whose religious devotion informs community values and public action. But the challenge stiffens as religious devotion and doctrine exclude rational inquiry about local problems and democratic deliberation informing the conception of potential solutions. Believers whose religious convictions seek to impose the hegemony of a single universal faith cannot reconcile scientific inquiry and invention with divine mandates. The planning struggle here is not against religion, but against hierarchical domination, theocratic dogma, elitist privilege, and the many forms of undemocratic suppression and subordination of equality and emancipation.

Pragmatist Religion and Secular Planning

When pragmatist philosopher William James wrote his The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, he recognized the persistence of the search for meaning in the face of suffering and death. Religious beliefs have fostered practices to remedy the anxiety and alienation that often accompany the demands of modern life. Religious experience, James suggested, taps unconscious thought – infused with memory, laden with emotion, charged with intimacy and intuition. The sentiment of faith fueling a commitment to a higher power ironically comes from the unconscious. Religious expression flows from the experiential combination of religious tradition and unique individual differences. Religious practices of sacrifice, confession, and prayer discipline how devotion happens and works.

Roberto Unger (2014) offers a pragmatist religion for the future. He hopes to retain the expansive, animating potential of religious belief while tapping the innovations wrought by the emergence of secularism. Unger casts our human condition as inescapably troubled in three ways. First, we not only die, but also inhabit a consciousness that encompasses a world that death destroys. Second, we inhabit a world indifferent to our needs and desires – a vast alienating universe beyond the bounds of time. Third, each of us experience insatiable desires that insistently resist fulfillment. In his view, the three great religious traditions – humanizing the world (Confucianism), overcoming the world (Buddhism) and struggling with the world (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) – each offered beliefs and practices to reconcile death, console alienation and tame desire. But for Unger, they do this at the expense of individual freedom and flourishing for everyone.

Unger describes a religion of the future that – like the monotheistic religions – struggles with the world and reconciles transcendence with solidarity, not in doctrine, but in conduct and social norms. A future focus displaces alienation from the present by inviting us to expand the bounds of possibility. We may renounce the longing to be God and so escape struggle. We may embrace the struggle, not as fate, but as the context for shaping the contours of an emancipated self (Unger 2014, p. 355). Planning, for Unger, describes the imaginative work of creating alternative ways of life that inspire devotion to democratic experiment in the service of a paradoxical yet expanding self.

Reading my brief secular awakening tale, Unger might offer congratulations, share a similar story, and then ask what plans I was making to resist the seductions of fate for my future – and his.

Notes on Contributor

Charles Hoch is Professor Emeritus of urban planning, University of Illinois at Chicago. He taught urban planning for forty years. He studies why and how people make plans to prepare for the future. He believes this humble activity expresses the wonderful power of human imagination and practical judgment to anticipate and cope with complex uncertainty. Hoch served on the governing board of the American Collegiate Schools of Planning, and chaired the Planning Accreditation Board. His books include What Planners Do (Planners Press 1994), The Practice of Local Government Planning (ICMA 2000), and Pragmatic Spatial Planning (2019).

ORCID

Charles Hoch http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2815-6969

Left without Racial Justice in a Secularist Profession

June Manning Thomas

Urban and Regional Planning Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

In 1940, facing the rise of fascism, urbanist Lewis Mumford urged humanity to understand its “central core of purpose” (1940, p. 197): “Only insofar as values are fostered – through art and religion and science and love and domestic life – can [human beings] effectively […] secure human existence from the worst outrages and accidents that forever threaten it” (p. 208). One core value, he explained, was social justice: “When justice is flouted, in order to give precedence to large holders of capital or landed property, to create a fixed caste with special privileges […] the result is an evil one” (p. 211).

As a Black woman, after a fractured decade including a pandemic and multiple social ‘outrages,’ after a lifetime dedicated to urban planning, I found Mumford’s words sobering. As Isabel Wilkerson argues today (2020), a racial caste system undergirds America, a charge that many of us have felt, intuitively, for decades. Mumford’s suggestion, too, is haunting: only with such means as art and religion and love can we protect the values that human civilization needs.

Mumford’s was, of course, but one attempt to define social justice, a tricky concept that many have tackled in much more detail. Early twentieth-century origins of the planning profession featured battles over the primacy of beauty or efficiency or relief of living conditions of the poor; for the most part, efficiency won. Planning tools such as land use regulation protected the privileged from the underprivileged classes. We have struggled for the last sixty years to relate social justice in planning to issues of race and ethnicity. In the 1960s, Black activism had led to advocacy planning, popularized by Paul Davidoff, and, later and more indirectly, to the equity planning championed by Norman Krumholz. These concepts and the more theoretical one of the ‘just city,’ however, have had uncertain impact.

It is time to consider the implications of religion and spirituality for planning, particularly as these relate to race. The lack of social and racial justice continues to plague urban communities. The crises of the pandemic, sectarian violence, and plummeting employment have revealed, once again, structural fissures in our society. Planners must understand these conditions and develop strategies of response; exploring links between our spirituality and planning actions can help us. Here are several ideas that address these possibilities.

North American planners work in physical environments embedded within systems of social injustice. That injustice, structured through generations of institutional racism and expressed as White privilege, has become so ‘normal’ that it is almost invisible (Goetz et al, 2020). Planners have supported institutional racism in ways large and small. Since the racially oppressive urban renewal of the mid-twentieth century, tools supporting exclusion and privilege more obliquely have included exclusionary land-use zoning, economic development without workforce training or school reform, transportation planning without social equity, and housing development without inclusivity. Practicing planning without conscious thought about institutional racism or White privilege has been too easy. Rather than educating municipal leaders, colleagues, and citizens about the need for inclusionary housing or transport mobility for all, planners have often remained silent, falling back on inertia. Rather than seeking out Black youth to mentor, planners have more narrowly regulated development or land use. Doing more requires a passion for racial justice that we have not learned and do not nurture within the planning profession. Planners’ professional ethics code does not resolve the dilemma.¹ The Code’s explicitly stated social justice principle is quite clear – but little incentive exists to take it seriously, given competing obligations (Thomas, 2019).

In addition, urban planning rests supposedly on secularism, and yet it makes decisions about religion, and secularism, as a political doctrine, is malleable (Manouchehrifar, 2018). We consider our field neutral, with secular impartiality, but our rationalism can be too silent in the face of institutional racism. The sheltering garment of secularism has hidden the nakedness of our confusion, leaving us vulnerable to collusion or irrelevance. We have become more communicative, participatory, somewhat more equitable, or post-secularist, yet on matters of racial or ethnic justice we have faltered nonetheless. For example, the planning profession treats religious activism on behalf of social justice as separate from the work of professional planning, even as faith-based organizations, including but not limited to Black Christian churches, have unique abilities to further essential social justice goals in distressed communities (Akom, 2007; Lowe and Shipp, 2014; Thomas and Blake, 1996).

Discussing spiritual bases for our ethical code could help us resolve such problems. Our professional imperatives to redress the ills of racism may actually require commitments to spirituality, defined here not as religion, a source of considerable disagreement and even prejudice, but rather as connection with the finest impulses of human beings. Some authors call out spirituality as a way to realize our place in an ecological world, a matter of survival for our species and for the planet (Sandercock et al, 2011; Woiwode and Woiwode, 2019). They suggest applications of spirituality to planning, considering place, our inner selves, or our relations with others (Allam 2020; Thomas 1999; Sandercock 2006), but more is necessary to say about operating amidst institutional racism and White privilege.

Spiritually-driven social movements have nourished society in the past, and sometimes they have helped individuals survive as functional human beings. A personal story might illustrate this point. Raised in a wonderful, activist hometown church, while growing up in South Carolina during the Jim Crow segregationist and civil rights eras, I saw what drove my Black community to fight for social justice: an ironclad belief, stoked by social action, in a vision of a just society. Spirituality was a pivotal part of that vision, since faith gave us courage and certainty in the face of institutionalized oppression.

Buoyed by that community, I nevertheless experienced a very personal form of racial trauma as one of several ‘first’ Black students to integrate our local White high school under court order. This resulted in years-long harassment and ostracism. My religious upbringing in a Black church helped a lot, but did not suffice as a vehicle for emotional recovery from such an onslaught of racism. My tormentors claimed to be Christians, as was I. As with White supremacist proponents today, however, openly hostile White students and teachers saw no contradiction between their ‘othering’ version of religion and their hostility, socially sanctioned in a Jim Crow state, and almost as bad were the school’s Whites who silently supported the harassment. Sometimes, in the planning classroom, I have told stories of my youth just to bring agency to the topic of racial injustice and its roots. Even now, an analogy with that experience holds: some contemporary observers excoriate high-minority cities and poverty neighborhoods as riddled with crime and ineptitude, deserving of shunning and abandonment. Their vindictive narrative finds justification from some think tanks and infects ultra-conservative media (Hackworth, 2019). These are the tormentors. The challenge is not to become part of the silent majority, those who stand by and blame the victims while distressed cities, neighborhoods, and families flounder.

To continue the personal story: After choosing to work within a profession known within the urban Black community more for injustice than for justice, I was not sure I could function in such an environment. I made a pivotal decision in my early 20s that has stood me in good stead. I joined a global religious community committed to social and racial justice. I realized that my future work could be dispiriting within a field with no visible Black scholars, a field known for suppressing Black communities and acquiescing to the White privilege ingrained within metropolitan communities. My personal faith and reliance on spiritual teachings as guiding force allowed me to proceed nonetheless, with confidence and even joy, as I worked to support racially oppressed urban communities, to diversify planning scholarship, and to educate students about racial justice.

Similar spiritual teachings characterize many belief systems, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, the Baha’i Faith, etc., but others might learn if I share what I learned in my spiritual search. I found in my adopted Baha’i Faith clear scriptural teachings that all human beings are fundamentally equal, with no inherent superiority or inferiority for any one race, nationality, or ethnic group. I found firm directions concerning the importance of interracial fellowship, including exhortations to seek out members of other races and build bonds of community through practices that mirror principles. I found guidance for American Black and White members, warnings that racial prejudice had “attacked the whole social structure of American society” and exhortations to develop “freedom from racial prejudice” (Shoghi Effendi, 1963, pp. 28, 30). I found both a visionary blueprint for a world civilization that was uncannily similar to Mumford’s view of the future of humanity’s global culture (1978), and a commitment to social justice, partially defined by the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty.

We might tap the benefits of spirituality as a force for social change, empowering action for racial justice, if we consider three levels of possible strategies. The first concerns our own personal identities and inner spiritual resources; the second, education, either individually or in dialogue with others; and the third, social action.

At the first level, what would it mean for planners to assess their own spirituality and its implications for racial justice? As Sandercock helpfully noted, spirituality is not synonymous with religion: “I think of spirituality as a way of being as well as a way of knowing, informed by certain values that then underpin ways of acting. The values can be named as respect, caring, neighborliness; a concern with building connections between people, building a caring human community from whatever fragile starting point; a notion of service to others” (2006, p. 66).

Many of us have, in addition, religious roots or beliefs that could bolster such spirituality in specific ways relevant to this conversation, such as by tapping religious scripture that centers on loving your neighbor as yourself, in some variation of the Golden Rule.² The task here involves recognizing how that sentiment might enable us to overcome socially engrained prejudice or privilege and, going further, to support efforts seeking racial and social justice.

A strong spiritual or moral sensibility about doing such work differs significantly from merely acknowledging stated ethical principles or simply restating aspirational goals. For example, the AICP Code (2016) advises that planners have “a special responsibility to plan for the needs of the disadvantaged” but this language appears among 20 additional principles, all advisory, accompanied by 26 rules of conduct. No incentive exists to act on these principles. Driven by an enhanced sense of spiritual responsibility, however, planners might more easily undertake such planning, and actively seek such ways to do so.

As planners, we might educate ourselves, either individually or in groups. Educating ourselves individually is self-explanatory, but learning groups who focus on racial justice in planning are less common, except in planning classrooms. My husband and I, for example, have participated in informal learning groups, many hosted in our home, with those of diverse racial and religious backgrounds. These gatherings promoted racial unity through both intellectual and social means (Thomas, 2020). Also, southeast Michigan planners formed a monthly book club that met in restaurants to discuss several key books about racial justice. A state APA chapter’s social equity committee met literally for years; at times, our progress seemed slow, but we built collaborative bonds and vision. Several innovations in racial justice emerged from that state chapter – surely not a coincidence.³ Enhancing such dialogue with different races of participants and with spiritually-informed sensibilities (mutual support and fellowship rather than conflict) can be a rewarding experience, helping us develop the vision and camaraderie needed to move forward.

Many sources can help. A veritable industry flourishes with books about racism, racial prejudice, and their effects (for U. S. planners, e.g. Garcia et al, 2021; Goetz et al, 2020; Mallach, 2018; Rothstein 2018; Wilkerson 2020). It might be useful, however, to complement these readings with other work reflecting spiritual sensibilities, offering vision about unity among different racial and ethnic groups, or suggesting pathways to a better future. One might begin with classics – collections of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches (Carson and Shepard, 2002) or, from South Africa, Bishop Desmond Tutu’s essays on racial reconciliation and its spiritual implications (Tutu and Allen, 1994). Then contemporary works (e.g. Meacham, 2019; last chapters of Mallach, 2018) can follow. Resources change as new work emerges.

Fortified by personal reflection, dialogue-based education, and stimulating source material or readings, further possibilities for social action arise. The possibilities are endless. The most obvious, respecting the role of religion and spirituality, is simply to recognize organizations we tend to overlook because of secular bias. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious groups who support initiatives for racial and social justice deserve to be noticed, respected, and tapped as potential collaborators. They may become essential and effective partners in community building efforts, extending beyond housing initiatives of community development corporations to include more social, educational, or economic initiatives. Individual planners can consider enhancing social justice possibilities for their own portfolios. Organizational leaders could re-examine their programs to establish social justice initiatives. They could also support advocacy or minority groups, such as ACSP’s planners of color, who are attempting to advance strategies designed to enhance racial justice.⁴

This, then, is a call to mission: urban planners can help lead the way in protecting the values that guard human civilization, tapping religious or spiritual as well as secular traditions. Stewards of cities and regions, we see the devastation wrought by social division and institutional racism in distressed areas. In less distressed locales we see evidence of the legacy of White privilege but we can try to help mitigate its effects. We can dedicate ourselves to this in the tradition of the best of urban planning’s considerable legacy of social reformers. This is easier if we can summon the best of us, our finest selves; understand the social and racial justice challenges that lie in front of us, as well as creative strategies for addressing them; and move forward, with confidence and even joy, toward enhanced social action.

Notes on Contributor

June Manning Thomas is Mary Frances Berry Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Urban Planning, University of Michigan. Books include Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (2013, Dewar and Thomas, eds.), The City after Abandonment (2013), and Mapping Detroit: Evolving Land Use Patterns and Connections (2015). The semi-autobiographical book that is forthcoming, Struggling to Learn (Univ. of S. Carolina Press, 2022) discusses the civil rights movement for school desegregation in the South and its implications for historical and present racial disunity.

Section III: Religious Pluralism and Urban Planning Covenants

Editors’ Note: How to view RLUIPA (the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000) as neither uncritically endorsing all religious practices nor bypassing prudent planning actions? What are the planning possibilities to enhance religious pluralism in cities beyond an immediate resort to secular law? Which ethical and practical questions are dismissed by conventional planning views that relegate religion to history? What does a planning encounter with religion look like in supposedly ‘godless’ settings abroad? Addressing these questions, the contributions in this section urge us to view planners’ interventions as not simply spatial but also as social and political, advancing religious diversity in ways that courts, legislators, and electorates cannot.

RLUIPA: A Vehicle for Conversation between Religion and Planning

Angela C. Carmella

Seton Hall University School of Law, Newark, NJ, USA

For twenty years, religious congregations in the United States have enjoyed the protections of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) (2000), which is intended in part to prohibit discriminatory and unduly burdensome decisions by land use agencies. This federal statute has ensured the inclusion of houses of worship and religious schools – particularly those of minority faiths – within the urban, suburban, exurban, and rural landscape. In the pluralistic society of the U.S., the house of worship is not only central to the life of a religious community but also sends a message of religious presence – the presence of a particular religious tradition, an off-shoot of a tradition, or a totally new faith. RLUIPA has largely delivered on its promise to protect religious minorities (Dhooge, 2020): many mosques, synagogues, temples, churches, prayer halls, and even a sweat lodge have been built despite local opposition and permit denials.

I contend that RLUIPA-related experiences can facilitate dialogue between religious traditions and the planning profession. The law provides two genuine opportunities for the planner-congregation encounter. First, the law requires the incorporation of religious uses into zoning, planning, and design policies, and pulls planners into religious discourse on site-specific matters. Second, the conversation can move beyond site-specific issues to encompass religious conceptions of space and resources, like designs that nurture the human person, reflect care for creation, and promote community – topics of great interest to both planners and religious groups. When planners tap into the wellsprings of religious belief and practice, as well as the intellectual traditions of faith communities, fruitful synergies can emerge (Ives & Elisara, 2019).

Recognizing Site-Specific Religion

RLUIPA is a civil rights statute, adding to the panoply of civil rights laws that for fifty years have protected access to public accommodations, employment, voting, and housing. The law was enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support in response to local discrimination toward religious communities in the zoning and landmarking contexts after a mountain of evidence was brought before Congress showing that minority faiths were disproportionately denied permits as compared with majority faiths (U.S. Dept. of Justice, 2020).

RLUIPA is explicitly intended to offer religious land use the broadest protection possible.¹ While most claims involve worship sites and schools, cases address other uses on property owned or leased by religious organizations: cemeteries, charitable activities like homeless outreach, ancillary non-worship uses, residential treatment centers, and boarding schools, to name a few. Courts have determined that RLUIPA’s reach does not cover for-profit or large institutional uses like an apartment complex (Carmella, 2015; 2009).

Even for land uses that are covered, the statute does not ensure that religious uses will prevail over local regulation. Instead, RLUIPA provides an opportunity for a court to assess a congregation’s claims and review the behavior of local officials. Where there is clear evidence of governmental hostility or procedural irregularities, religious claimants have a stronger case. But the statute does not insulate congregations from regulation. The law is thus contingent and indeterminate. Indeed, most RLUIPA claims fail (Dhooge, 2020). The reasons are many: the adequacy of the church’s existing facilities; alternative locations for the project; the assertion of insufficient grounds such as inconvenience, financial hardship, or speculative future needs; the reasonableness of an agency’s conduct or conditions; the option to amend a proposal; the assertion of improper comparators for assessing unequal treatment; the inadequacy of mitigation measures on severe externalities (Carmella, 2015).

RLUIPA prohibits ‘substantial burdens’ on religious exercise that cannot be justified as the least restrictive means of advancing a compelling governmental interest. In one case, a Sikh community in Northern California sought a conditional use permit to build a 5,000 square foot gurdwara for 75 worshippers on a roughly two-acre parcel. Despite accepting numerous mitigation measures, they were denied permission to build in a residential zone because neighbors complained of potential noise and traffic. The Sikhs then acquired a 29-acre parcel surrounded by orchards and scaled down the gurdwara’s size to 3,000 square feet. Again, they were met with fierce local opposition. The permit was again denied, this time because the temple did not comport with ‘orderly’ growth – despite strong evidence to the contrary. In the RLUIPA challenge, the federal appeals court found that the proposal addressed all impacts, and that the local officials never explained why mitigation measures were insufficient. Officials had told the congregation that the county would approve an application in the ‘right location,’ but the court found no indication such a location would ever materialize. The Sikhs prevailed (Carmella, 2015, 2009).

The statute also prohibits unequal treatment between religious and non-religious assemblies and institutions. This ‘equal terms’ provision is commonly invoked when a religious group is denied permission in areas where comparable non-religious assemblies or institutions have been allowed. An Orthodox Jewish group in Florida sought to locate a synagogue in a business zone that allowed private clubs and lodges but not places of worship. The federal court of appeals found that the clubs and lodges were treated more favorably than comparable religious use; the town failed to show how these non-religious uses contributed to the business district in a way that differed from religious uses. The Orthodox Jews prevailed (Carmella, 2015).

RLUIPA further prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion or denomination, as well as exclusion from, and unreasonable limits within, a municipality. One particularly egregious example involved a New Jersey town’s treatment of a Muslim congregation that sought permission to build a mosque. The Department of Justice sued, alleging violations of all four of RLUIPA’s provisions. (U.S. Dept. of Justice, 2020) A federal district court found unlawful discrimination. And so, “[a]fter 5 years, 39 public hearings, and two lawsuits,” the congregation could finally build its mosque (Green, 2017).

RLUIPA has undeniably protected minority faiths – especially those involving immigrant communities and/or racial minorities. It has also protected many majority Christian congregations, including racial minority Christians (Carmella, 2015; Dhooge, 2020; Greed, 2016). For two decades, the law has accommodated the growth and movement of numerous religious communities. The statute signals that religious use is a legitimate use of space, indeed a constitutionally significant use of space. At public hearings and in court, congregations are able to describe their faith and spatial needs, to “articulate their identities” (Gale, 2008, p. 36).

While the law has accomplished much for religious inclusivity and nondiscrimination, it is not without its shortcomings. Critics accuse RLUIPA of giving religious groups the unilateral power to disrupt zoning and planning goals. Surely, some groups have invoked the statute’s protection in attempts to intimidate local land use agencies; and although courts have not rewarded such efforts, municipalities might capitulate to avoid litigation and attorneys’ fees. Yet, this disruption is no different from potential litigation from claimants under other civil rights statutes like the Fair Housing Act or any number of protective federal (or state) civil rights statutes. Moreover, RLUIPA’s nuanced interpretations by courts throughout the U.S. offer no blanket immunity to religious groups. Many of the successful cases involve egregious behavior by local agencies, often calling for the intervention of the U.S. Department of Justice. If municipalities follow their procedures, enact ordinances that are fair, inclusive, and non-discriminatory, stand up to local bigotry, thoroughly consider mitigating conditions, exhibit good faith, and ensure a fair hearing, they will have a strong defense in the event of litigation. Religious groups, land use agencies, and the lawyers who represent them need to better comprehend the limits of RLUIPA protection.

Religious Conceptions of Space, Design, and Community

The planner-congregation conversation can move beyond law-based, site-specific issues to encompass religious conceptions of space and resources. Religious traditions have much to contribute regarding designs that nurture the human person, reflect care for creation, and promote community – topics of great interest to both planners and religious groups. I would suggest that much of what planning professionals do already contains elements of religiosity. The categories of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ are quite permeable, and many planning-related concepts act as proxies for profoundly transcendent notions rooted in non-instrumental values. Land use laws and policies employ the categories of cultural, historic, architectural, environmental, and aesthetic – and sometimes, spiritual.² Through law and planning principles, we steward the public’s access to beaches and parks, to beautiful buildings, to common heritage, to habitats and nature, to views and vistas. We set apart – in something like a civic consecration – many structures, features, and landscapes for protection. All of this becomes part of our collective memory and our public consciousness. Given these connections, planners are well positioned for a robust conversation with religious traditions.

Indeed, there is remarkable overlap between planning concerns and the greatly diverse religious landscape in the U.S. Planners understand the profoundly normative task in which they are engaged: how we organize our physical spaces is intimately connected to how life is lived and to the promotion of public welfare. Because religions are rooted in such communitarian values, they find commonality with planning movements like the New Urbanism. Indeed, the Congress for New Urbanism’s Christian Caucus, begun in 2016, has identified principles for planning from a religious perspective: “social justice, creation care/environmental sustainability, beauty, and urbanism that begets community well-being and serves the common good” (CNU Members Christian Caucus, 2017; 2017). The Caucus convened numerous designers to collaborate on the Century Church project in Alabama, which involves the organic integration of a house of worship into a pedestrian-friendly campus intended for the wider community (Norris, 2019; Ives & Elisara, 2019). In addition to efforts like these, planners can draw on religious support for curated open spaces like labyrinths and peace gardens, as well as open park spaces around cities and green space in the Garden Cities tradition (Greenberg, n.d.; Mazumdar & Mazumdar, 2013).

The planner-religion conversation also involves urgent social critique. Francis’ papal encyclical, Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home) – known primarily for its call to address climate change – speaks directly to urban planners, inviting them to “interweave nature and the built environment … for the health of nature and of humanity” (Crostwaithe, 2016) and to integrate the physical and emotional needs of all, especially the poor:

Given the interrelationship between living space and human behavior, those who design buildings, neighborhoods, public spaces and cities, ought to draw on the various disciplines which help us to understand people’s thought processes, symbolic language and ways of acting. It is not enough to seek the beauty of design. More precious still is the service we offer to another kind of beauty: people’s quality of life, their adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance. Here too, we see how important it is that urban planning always take into consideration the views of those who will live in these areas. (Pope Francis, 2015, sec. 150)

Francis calls upon planners to produce integrated developments on a scale consistent with human sociability and livability. These should promote a sense of belonging and avoid the privatization of beauty and tranquility.

Both the lived experiences of religious congregations and the theological and intellectual traditions of a diverse religious culture can provide a foundation for theoretical and practical conversation between religious traditions and the planning profession. Both religious communities and planners can recognize the value in exploring religious conceptions of space and resources, understanding the professional values that already capture religious sensibilities, and considering the urgency of bringing together economically divided communities.

In conclusion, RLUIPA prompts planners to engage with religious buildings and neighborhoods. RLUIPA’s recognition of religious uses in the visual and social landscape also nudges planners to venture beyond this site-specific task, to “consider religious perspectives on urban landscapes, explore the potential of faith as a vehicle for urban transformation, and participate in emerging initiatives for explicitly recognizing religion in urban planning and policy” (Ives & Elisara, 2019). RLUIPA puts the spotlight on houses of worship and other religious uses, and in the process allows religious congregations and the planning profession to find commonality regarding the stewardship of land, the duties we owe our neighbors, and the creation of communities for human flourishing.

Notes on Contributor

Angela C. Carmella is the James B. and Anita L. Ventantonio Board of Visitors Research Scholar at Seton Hall University School of Law. She writes extensively in the areas of Religion and the First Amendment, Religious Land Use, Catholic Social Teachings, and Property Law. She is a member of the Religious Liberty Committee of the Religious Freedom Center and serves on the editorial Board of the Journal of Church and State. She graduated from Princeton University, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Divinity School.

Planning and Religious Pluralism, Community by Community

Brian J. Miller

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, USA

Planners play an important role in how communities contribute to or limit religious pluralism in the United States. With broader legal and social structures that allow freedom of religion and forbid state-sponsored religion (Finke & Stark, 2005; Putnam & Campbell, 2010), communities throughout the country became home to a variety of religious groups (e.g. Butler, 2020; Day, 2014; Diamond, 2003; Gamm, 1999; Howe, 2018; Livesey, 2000; Mulder, 2015; Numrich & Wedam, 2015; Orsi, 1999; Wuthnow, 2013; Zelinsky & Matthews, 2011) in part due to urban planning and local decisions regarding land and building use.

Planners help communities operationalize (1) the vision held by local officials and residents for the current and future state and character of their community (Miller, 2013), including spatial arrangements and who might participate in the community, and (2) current or best practices regarding land and property use. Their work includes anticipating and planning for future religious land use as well as responding to proposals from religious groups involving land and buildings.

That these tasks affect religious pluralism in communities is evident in situations when local leaders, planners, and residents participate in public conversations and/or debate when religious groups propose changes for land and/or buildings. In the late 2000s, Muslim groups throughout the United States encountered increased opposition to plans for mosques and community centers, including resistance to the Park51 community center and mosque several blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. To more systematically study building and/or land requests from religious groups, I examined proposals in two different contexts: three suburban government bodies in the western suburbs of Chicago over five years (Miller, 2019) and the New York City region over 26 years with cases reported in the New York Times (Miller, 2020). I found patterns. Minority religious groups, including Muslims and Orthodox Jewish groups, received more opposition even as numerous other religious traditions, including Christian groups, also experienced difficulties with some proposals. Requests for buildings and land prompted more opposition when located near residences. Neighbors could raise similar concerns – traffic, parking, lights, water, historic preservation, maintaining revenue-generating property – in different geographies and in response to a variety of groups. The cases had a wide range of outcomes including religious groups successfully altering buildings or land with no or few concerns from the community, lawsuits brought by religious groups or neighbors with courts delivering decisions, and the religious group putting off plans or looking for space in another community.

Before public conversation about proposals takes place, planners can make clear in comprehensive plans, local regulations, and zoning maps where religious uses are allowed or prohibited, as well as prepare for and foster awareness of different needs across and within religious traditions. For example, do current guidelines and future plans make it easier for particular groups to find space for religious worship and fellowship? My research suggests groups that are able to make use of a wide variety of buildings – such as vacant stores, old religious buildings, office space, schools – or strategically choose particular locations, may run into fewer issues with communities. On Staten Island, one Muslim group faced significant opposition to plans to purchase a Catholic convent, yet pivoted and purchased a former Hindu temple in another neighborhood. In the western suburbs of Chicago, multiple Protestant groups successfully moved into non-downtown shopping spaces and buildings zoned for industrial use. However, not all religious groups have such flexibility or they may choose particular locations and designs important to them. A Muslim group in suburban DuPage County originally asked to go beyond local regulations to construct a building with a 79-foot minaret and 69-foot dome to facilitate worship. This led to several years of conflict.

When religious buildings are located closer to residences, or a religious group wants to meet in or convert single-family homes to religious use, residents can raise more concerns. Planners can help communities assess and/or reconsider single-use zoning, particularly if it protects single-family homes (Hirt, 2014). Is there room for religious buildings, often spiritual homes to residents of the community, in residential areas? The Flushing neighborhood in Queens, New York City illustrates this. In a community with changing demographics, an interest in more religious structures near homes, concerns from established residents about changes to residential blocks, and a decades-old zoning policy, local leaders and residents expressed their opinions in multiple venues – media, civic associations and homeowners’ associations, local political races – and local officials and the Planning Commission said they would study possible changes. Proximity to residences also mattered in suburban settings and more densely populated Manhattan neighborhoods where residents resisted changes to existing religious buildings.

Once a proposal is made, the level to which communities are familiar with or welcome certain religious groups can affect opposition or support. Issues raised about a proposal may be more about the group making the request than the physical specifications for land and buildings. With communities and religious groups embedded in social structures where race/ethnicity, class, nativity and immigration history, and other factors matter for how groups are regarded, opposition to proposals may not just be about traffic, parking, water, lights, or zoning. Several New York Times articles featured competing claims: community members objected to the religious structure and the religious group making the proposal argued they faced discrimination. Only with proposals from Muslim groups did neighbors and local officials raise the specter of terrorism. For example, the Park51 proposal in lower Manhattan fit within existing zoning yet attracted national opposition. Other cases were less clear: were concerns regarding ultra-Orthodox Jews meeting in homes solely about disturbing the quiet and character of residential neighborhoods? Voicing objections about a property change may not just be an exchange about that particular location and existing residents; it can involve a larger conversation about what the community is, where it is going, and who is part of the current and future vision.

This research suggests two specific sets of actions planners can pursue to promote religious pluralism. First, before proposals or groups arrive, in conversation with local government actors and residents develop plans, maps, and regulations with a variety of religious groups and needs in mind. With increasing diversity in many American communities, foresight in formal plans and informal understandings regarding religious needs or changes could help mitigate later difficulties with proposals and signal a welcoming approach to potential new groups. Second, when religious groups do make proposals involving land and buildings, planners can help a community focus on how religious land use could reasonably fit within and enhance the existing community rather than concentrating on the traits of the particular group or perceived threats to local character.

All of these land and building decisions involving planners, religious groups, and local residents and leaders have long-term consequences. Religious groups often devote much energy to buildings (Brenneman & Miller, 2020), and community members often have a vision of what they want their community to be. The presence – or absence – of religious groups and buildings affects the future character and trajectory of communities. Ultimately, the religious pluralism found across the United States does not necessarily occur within different communities unless planners and others are committed to space for all.

Notes on Contributor

Brian J. Miller is Associate Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College (IL). He is the co-author of the 2020 book Building Faith: A Sociology of Religious Structures (Oxford University Press). Additional recently published work examines zoning requests from religious groups, religious buildings, the interaction of religion and place (specifically the suburbs), and depictions of suburbs on television. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame in 2009.

ORCID

Brian J. Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1868-1660

Rethinking Religion and Urban Planning in Shanghai

Weishan Huang

Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Urban planners in China face increasing challenges to address a host of unforeseen social forces that are shaped, in part, by the growth of religious activism among younger urban generations and, in part, by the government control of religious growth. In this essay, I highlight two episodes of Buddhism’s ongoing public presence in Shanghai that best represent these challenges: one is the traditional government-sponsored, temple-based activities (labeled as tourist icons) for revenue generation; another is progressive grassroots activities, at the intersection of religion and social do-good, aiming at environmental protection and poverty relief, but without permitted physical spaces.

The post-Mao government has permitted limited freedom of religious belief and behavior, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions. Since 1979, a number of Protestant and Catholic churches, Buddhist and Daoist temples, and Islamic mosques have opened or reopened for religious services. In 1982, religious toleration was formally restored. The basic policy on religious affairs during the socialist period granted legal status to Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism under the government-sanctioned ‘patriotic’ associations, but not to groups outside of the five religious associations (Laliberté and Lanteigne, 2008). The state owns all of the land in the cities and the predestined recoveries of religious sites have always been considered, but also restricted, as cultural heritage or tourist icons in urban planning. Religious rituals and practices must be conducted within state-permitted religious sites, and almost all religious practices conducted outside of state-sponsored sites are outlawed. Planned spaces¹ dedicated to religious purposes have only defined opportunities or limitations for specific religious communities.

The first challenge related to the traditional, government-sponsored, temple-based view of Buddhism is that district governments measure the effectiveness of neighborhood renewal plans based on their increased consumer activities and real-estate values. Promoting social capital or neighborliness are rarely included in such ‘measurements of success’ in, for example, state-designed ‘street blocks development.’ With the state’s relaxation of religious restrictions, a ‘temple-centric’ revival of Buddhism became the reinforced type of state-sanctioned religious revival. It can be questioned whether Buddhist temples in the city-center provide niche or monopolistic spiritual services. Buddhist temples benefit from the present monopolistic arrangement since each temple is given a defined territory. Although small temples have little or no say regarding their allocated territories, there is no competition with other niche temples in the same neighborhood. As all faith communities face competition by secular sources in recreative and commercial business districts, Buddhist temples aim to deliver niche services in order to keep their long-time practitioners while attracting visitors.

During the revival of ‘temple-centric’ Buddhism, most Buddhist communities actively promoted their religious aims through innovative methods within the framework of state policies. For example, in the aftermath of a major fire, a local temple ministered the first-ever public commemorative rituals for two hundred victims of the fire in a public ceremony under the censored society. This public ritual provided religious services to the victims as well as social space where city residents could mourn collectively (Huang, 2019).

After the turn of the millennium, however, China has witnessed the emergence of a new type of lay voluntary involvement in the public space, led by monastics who are exclusively identified with temple history or whose loyalties rest on abbots or abbesses. With the monopoly of defined territory in recreative and commercial business districts, temple economies have been guaranteed financial gains by selling entry tickets. Not confined to the secular image of being tourist icons, temple abbots demonstrate the will to bring in newcomers from different ages and different educational and social classes into temples through establishing ‘volunteer troops.’

After establishing political and religious legitimacy, temples continued to use their locations in business districts to rebuild and expand. In urban areas, not all Buddhist temples have been recognized as profit-generating entities for local governments. The function of revenue-generation is considered as a public good for district development. However, Buddhist communities do have their own agency within this framework, as some try to advance their missions by incorporating themselves into state-planned tourist or recreational business districts. Some groups find ways to negotiate the roles planned for them by the state. Under conditions of neighborhood gentrification, temple leaders filled new niches, offering traditional ritual services, new teachings, and new forms of worship by which they not only relate to their old population but also reach out to non-geographically related newcomers.

State secularism, as the ideology of the one-Party-state during the Maoist era, was so strong that the only state-sanctioned option was unbelief. Even though during the post-Mao era, religious life has been recognized as a limited option (Yang and Huang, 2021), unbelief is still the overwhelming norm in view of the Chinese government; religion is thus treated in urban planning as, at best, culture or heritage. This outlook, however, posed a second challenge for urban planners: their lack of understanding of how the spatial fabrics of Chinese cities are increasingly shaped by the rise of non-monastic Buddhist movements that have attracted young middle-class urban residents. Progressive grassroots activities (secular and religious) are not recognized by the state and thus not acknowledged by urban planners.

As Richard Madsen’s work in Taiwan shows (2007), middle-class urban Buddhists leave their traditional temples to find new forms of spirituality in such reformist groups. Consider, for example, the case of Tzu Chi Foundation in Shanghai – a transnational network and voluntary association. This lay movement, from household kitchens to workplaces and public residential communities, is separate from the efforts carried out in religious sites reserved in city plans. These reformist Buddhist groups act as a major agent for moral aspirations of the new urban middle classes. A similar situation is happening in Shanghai. The cosmopolitan and well educated urban middle classes are increasingly attracted to the groups that address the relationship between religion and modernity.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Chinese government shifted the spatial focus of its urban control from Division of Municipal District to Work Unit and, later, to Residential Community. In the 1950s, municipal level was the basis of spatial control, extending from the street level to the district level. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Work Unit system was introduced as an extension of the military and political administrations to state-owned businesses and collective enterprises, under the establishment of the ‘Unit society,’ which aimed, at once, at ‘unitization of community’ and ‘communalization of the unit.’ The fading of the Work Unit in urban areas in the 1980s and 1990s created a new sense of anomie among urban dwellers. Although the Subdistrict Office politically replaced the functions of the Work Unit, city inhabitants sensed a different transformation of organizational affiliations in their daily lives. Residential Community is the newest administrative entity of the government to both distribute welfare and exercise social control to individuals. City inhabitants, however, no longer strongly rely on either Work Unit or Residential Community as their primary source of identity.

Meanwhile, with the state-planned urbanization at the national level and gentrification at the city level being carried out forcibly, new policies gradually open up new social spaces for certain religious groups. In 2016, for example, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China mandated that all residential community-centers must be open to the public.² The central government also issued a plan to establish ‘green communities’ focused on waste reduction. These policies provided an opportunity for groups such as Tzu Chi Foundation to bring their missions into the public space. Such religious voluntary associations, in a way, fill the demand vacuum and desire for associational life among urban residents.

Different from monasteries, I treat Tzu Chi’s mobilization as a public expression of moral reform/demand in a strictly secular setting, tapping the social context of religious revivalism in contemporary China. Active at the local level, these grassroots efforts intensify a larger secular trend in Shanghai: a shift from a Work Unit-based society to a neighborhood-based urban life, representing a religiously-inspired society. Socially-engaged Buddhism is a source of identity for groups like Tzu Chi that serve and protect marginalized communities and the ecology. The physical location for these social services is the neighborhood community, such as a local recycling activity. Volunteers also mobilize in public places for their missions of poverty aid, disaster relief, cultural education, or medical support. With the heightened awareness about environmental problems, Tzu Chi Foundation Shanghai has transformed its volunteers’ offices or former factories into educational centers to promote ‘sustainable lifestyles’ and ‘zero waste.’ Such religiously-inspired environmentalism has introduced the notion of an ethical lifestyle, attractive to young urban residents.

The official temples are trying to extend their reach beyond being tourist icons in a global city. The religiously-inspired civic groups are battling with environmental degradation without permitted physical space. These two forms of religion’s public presence, as social capital and as civic engagement, have posed new challenges for urban planners.

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, under Grant number 14609315, and the Direct Grant of Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019–2020).

Notes on Contributor

Weishan Huang is a Sociologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work focuses on the sociology of religion, urban sociology, and transnational sociology. One of her research projects was to inquire as to how culture and economics intertwined in urban re-structuring before and after the 1990 recession in New York City and Shanghai. Her current research is to investigate the reconfiguration of two significant state-planned social phenomena, gentrification and religious revival, and its impacts on Mahayana Buddhist communities in contemporary Shanghai, based on urban ethnography and census data.

ORCID

Weishan Huang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3804-9523

Rethinking Religion and Planning at the Lunch Counter

Christine Hwang

Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

In 1960, Baptists were found on both sides of the lunch counter at Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina (Morris, 1981). On one side, sat Black activists. On the other, Woolworth’s employees urged them to follow store policy: Black customers were not allowed to drink a cup of coffee at the counter due to the color of their skin. Herein lies a simple observation in response to religion, its complexity, its interpretation, and its practice: it is neither a monolith nor a passive aspect of identity that can be shelved away. Yet, planning, by and large, treats it with silence (Baum, 1994; Gale, 2008; Manouchehrifar, 2018). Given that religion has been largely ignored in the context of American planning (Manouchehrifar, 2018; Sandercock, 2006), how can planners broach this complex mammoth of a topic?

After leaving the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, customers, protestors, and employees more than likely returned home to different neighborhoods segregated by race and different churches segregated by sermons (Chafe, 1981). Bible verses were used and are still used to justify segregation and White supremacy (Noll, 2008). Bible verses were also used and are still used to work towards liberation and racial justice (Cox, 2015; Noll, 2008). This was replicated as the sit-ins, protesting the segregation of people and place, expanded across the southern United States. By the end of 1961, over 70,000 protesters participated in sit-ins (Shah, 2012). For the most part, Black and White individuals repeated the following pattern: returning home to different neighborhoods and different churches hosting the preaching of radically different sermons from the same scripture.

Several hundred miles north, the Woolworth Building, dubbed “The Cathedral of Commerce” in 1916, graces the skyline of New York City’s financial center (Fenske, 2008, p. 216). Monikered for its resemblance to European Gothic cathedrals, the metaphor is a common one in urban history: Urban historians often make broad statements about how the skyscraper replaced the cathedral (Kostof, 1991; Mumford, 1961). While this may be true of the form of many cities, the implication is the following: Religion is of the past. Capital is the present.

This Interface complicates the paradigm in the histories of planning and urban form that religion is of the past, and focuses on how religion is in fact central to contemporary conversations in planning. In the first illustrated scene – the Greensboro sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counter – the Christian theology of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. served as a foundation for social action against racial segregation (Chafe, 1981), even as Christianity was being used, simultaneously, to perpetuate White supremacy in the South (Noll, 2008). In the second illustrated scene – New York’s Woolworth Building – a theological metaphor was used to glorify the height and the might of a secular institution. David Harvey briefly juxtaposes the spiritual and the material when he contrasts Baltimore’s downtown financial institutions and the churches in its working-class neighborhoods: “God, it seems, has meaning for the working class; mammon is fully in control downtown” (Harvey, 1991, p. 227). By ignoring religion and its “meaning for the working class” – are not planners, inadvertently or advertently, siding with “mammon” (Harvey, 1991, p. 227)? At the very least, even if religion is not a personal matter of planners, it is central to much of the public that they serve.

Working in a field that is connected to the public sphere, planners may well avoid or feel discomfort with religion. Their reasons may include the stigma that religion holds on all sides of the political spectrum on the global stage regarding immigration and xenophobia, colonial legacies, the tension between religious and democratic freedoms, and gender and sexuality (McClymont, 2015, p. 535). Planners may default to indifference as perceived neutrality or allocate faith to the realm of the private (Manouchehrifar, 2018; Sandercock, 2006).

Yet, many movements, for better or for worse, have origins in religion. My argument is simple: By refusing to engage in religion as alive in the present, planning not only misses ongoing work in communities, but also risks an inability to see all the facets of communities. Renowned theologian Harvey Cox, in a reflection of his seminal work The Secular City twenty-five years after its publication, acknowledged that by fervently describing the rise of the secular city and its unexpected contributions to religion through his own lens and influences, he had also ignored that the “American city is the principal locus of African-American theology,” citing the role of religion in the Civil Rights and the Black Power movement (Cox, 2013, p. l–li). As planners tackle issues of social justice and empowerment, ignoring religion and movements centered around religion is not only superficial marginalization but also a form of erasure.

How should planners revise how they think about religion? This requires shifting how we approach and what we assume about the histories of cities. Rather than a linear history of two parts, a long history of the religious city that progressed into a modern narrative of the secular city, a number of scholars either assert that the role of religion in the city, its influences and its practices, never had a discrete end or that the city progressed linearly, but to the post-secular rather than the secular. ‘Post-secular’ refers to the emergence of discussions of religion in the public sphere accompanied by the rise of religious pluralism (Beaumont & Baker, 2011; Cloke & Beaumont, 2012; Habermas, 2008; McClymont, 2015; Nawratek, 2021). Justin Beaumont and Christopher Baker argue that religion has persisted and evolved to a more pluralistic or cosmopolitan form that plays an active role in the foundations of public life (Beaumont & Baker, 2011, p. 2). In arguing that the seemingly secular city is actually post-secular, Katie McClymont notes that the post-secular is not embracing religious life, an absolute rejection of the secular, or a call to theocracy, but rather a “broad challenge to the assumption that religion ever became superfluous to society as a whole, and that spiritual values were merely an anachronistic minority interest soon to wither away” (McClymont, 2015, p. 537).

“Post-secular cities”, as applied to planning, refers to the “rejection of the idea that places and policies can be completely free of religious or spiritual values, or that these sorts of values hold no meaning in contemporary planned spaces beyond specific places of worship” (McClymont, 2015, p. 537). Rather than take a position on the term, I argue that contemplating the term post-secular, often building upon rich literature in other fields, is a way to challenge how we think of the histories of cities and, ultimately, religion and cities. For the sake of a democratic framework, planning might veer towards ignoring critical engagement with religion, but religious and liberal democratic values do not have to be mutually antagonistic. Religious and spiritual concepts could be repositioned to make planning less hegemonic and more encompassing (McClymont, 2015). Moreover, by engaging religion, planners both question the neutrality of secularism and engage important elements as well as organizational structures of communities that might otherwise be missed. If religion has long been present in the city, then what are the implications if it is ignored in planning? If cities are becoming increasingly religiously pluralistic, then what are the perils of ignoring the disparity in how planning treats different types of places of worship? In my own research, I look at both the legacy of how the Catholic Church shaped Detroit and the continued active role of the Catholic Church in shaping a religiously pluralistic metropolitan region – hence, how a religious institution, unlike the public and private institutions thought of as traditional planning institutions, stratifies society and impacts everyday life through space.

Religion situates the city in a history that is specific yet migratory, often on a global scale. Not only has religion been used to segregate department stores, to divide cities, and to justify colonialization and war; it has also been used to lay the foundation for solidarity and liberation movements, to provide community services, and to inspire millions to march in a nation’s capital. Some might be trying to escape religion’s grasp in urban neighborhoods – perhaps for the seeming secularity of downtowns and other far-off places. But the unseen elephant in the room – i.e. religion’s complex history – is often alive in myriad communities centered around belief and places of worship.

Notes on Contributor

Christine Hwang is a PhD Candidate in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan who studies the role of religion in shaping urban form. Her dissertation focuses on how the Catholic Church shaped Detroit through parochial mapping not only during French colonization but also into the twentieth century when parishes paradoxically served as both places of refuge and tools of exclusion. Christine has worked as an urban planner, designer, and researcher in Baltimore. Christine completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and her Master in Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Section IV: Reflections and Implications

Editors’ Note: What religions do urban planners see – and which ones do they not see – in contemporary cities and planning processes? What themes link these contributions? How might planners’ more nuanced understanding of religious, spiritual, and secular claims enrich planning efforts without mystifying them? These contributions may, when taken together, give planners not only more vision, but more ground to walk on as well.

Seeing Religion in Urban Planning

Courtney Bender

Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

I often take long morning walks around my neighborhood when I have something to write, but rarely do my surroundings speak so clearly to the issues of this symposium on rethinking religion and urban planning. As I walked, I frequently found myself asking: what religion does planning see? My immediate neighborhood is dominated by educational institutions including my university and numerous landmarked buildings including the Riverside Church and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A morning walk takes me past people waiting in line for the food pantry and the city-sponsored covid-testing sites inside Riverside Church, and then through two small public parks, the land donated a century ago by one of New York’s civically and religiously minded elite Protestant families.

My walk takes me past a thriving Catholic parish school and church (services offered in several languages, and a new apartment building rising on the site of what had been an historic church and more recently the home to several small ‘storefront’ congregations. The new building is sponsored by one of Harlem’s religiously-based development corporations. On my way, I have also traversed a 1950’s era super-block, the Mitchell-Lama development, sponsored by a consortium of nine educational and religious institutions that expected that the racially integrated, middle class development (which required ‘slum clearance’ of 6000 homes) would be beneficial to their employees (Gottlieb 2008).

Some religions and some religious effects are easier to see than others. A glance into a nearby alley confirms that the live poultry market located a block north has closed, likely a consequence of the mixed-use block’s rezoning. (The market, so I had been told, had been a source of animals required for Afro-Caribbean religious rites.) Somewhere along the way I have passed from one Catholic parish into another; I have also crossed under the nearly invisible fishing wire that marks the edge of one of Manhattan’s eruvim. A tendril of unbroken thread extending the boundary of where Manhattan’s orthodox Jews can travel on the Sabbath is carefully checked and repaired each week. Turning south, a longtime walker observes the absence of halal markets and small storefront masjids and churches that had thrived in ‘little’ West Africa, most closing or moving to make way for new buildings and restaurants (Abdullah 2010). Three of the most prominently tall new high-rises in my neighborhood are rising on or near the grounds of three religious institutions that have sold air rights or leased land, the income from which allows them to continue their missions. Each one, nonetheless, was unsuccessfully challenged by neighborhood groups (and religious groups among them) troubled by the arrangements and the resulting changes (Finn 2012, Feuer 2015).

***

As Day observes in this symposium, religion in the city is multiple, dynamic, non-monolithic, and far from self-evident or given. It does not stay in the boxes or conform to the grids that secular norms and structures of governance presume or expect. Its effects extend well beyond representations of religious pluralism that circulate in contemporary understandings of religion and that secular planning has been most attentive to in the past. The essays in this symposium join Day in calling planners to more active engagement with and thinking with various religious actors within such a pluralistic field.

For example, several of the contributions call attention to a wide range of religious interactions and opportunities for collaboration and partnership. Thinking of my walk, I see how many of the authors’ approaches might help us think through the impact of zoning changes and gentrification on Harlem’s minority religious communities, and the role of various religious community organizations to engage planners in addressing current inequities, along with the sedimented layers of racist policies that continue to have major consequences for shaping urban topographies (e.g. Rothstein 2017, Taylor 2019). Contributions to this forum take in stride – and with good reason – that religious organizations in urban neighborhoods often offer powerful resources for groups and individuals who have been historically marginalized (Hwang, Thomas), and likewise celebrate the successes of such groups in building partnerships with planners (Day) or of the opportunities that new legal and regulatory frameworks such as RLUIPA offer to set the ground for new arenas of negotiation and accommodation (Carmella).

Many of the symposium’s authors also encourage us to think about the various ways in which planning intersects with secular norms of understanding and managing certain kinds of religious interactions and what many communities face as growing interest in and concerns about religious diversity. The authors in this symposium thus would help us see the shifts and changes, and perhaps challenges, of religious groups navigating religious pluralities in a dense urban environment, through attention to zoning issues (Miller) or collaborations among religious organizations (and with urban planners) to create religious spaces such as “labyrinths and peace gardens” that people of many faiths can enjoy (Carmella).

But some of these essays and others in this symposium do more than encourage more collaboration and active exchange between planners and the familiar and obvious set of religious actors that planning has historically engaged. These essays query more directly not only how secular planning has been indifferent to religion, but also what religion it has seen itself being indifferent to. As my morning walks ever remind me, ‘seeing’ religion is not merely a matter of looking: religion (like much else in the modern world) is not self-evident or straightforward or given. As scholars of secularism have long observed, and as recent work in secularism and urban planning helpfully extends (Asad 2003, Manouchehrifar 2018), a ‘secular’ view of religion, even an indifferent one (perhaps especially an indifferent one) nonetheless still retains a frame of seeing – and a claim on the power to see and demarcate what can be seen. It is the contours and the consequences of this longstanding (if not rigid) frame that this symposium and an array of work on urban religion aids in ‘rethinking.’

In other words, the question is not only how ‘religion’ is or could be more central to contemporary conversations in planning, as Hwang puts it, but more pressingly what religion should be central.

***

In thinking about what religion I see coming into and out of view on my walk, and in light of this symposium, I would like to highlight and advocate for frames of seeing religion that thicken and deepen attention to the religious lives of people on the ground. Much of this directly intersects with planners’ day-to-day activities and interests, and much of it extends well beyond questions of ‘religious pluralism’ or responsive activity. That is, I am asking whether planners can expand their understanding of the place of religion and, in so doing, find their way to seeing a much more dynamic world of religious diversity. And, to use this sensitivity and orientation (which thickens the image of religion in urban life) to observe and recalibrate the approaches that secular planners who are un-indifferent to religion might take toward actors, partners, and projects that continue to shape urban life.

Religious pluralism, as I (and others) have long argued, and as distinct from religious diversity or heterogeneity, operates as a political doctrine, an expectation for and a set of norms shaping the appropriate form of religion and religious interactions in secular societies. Huang’s contribution to this symposium presents a stark example of such a secular plan for religious management in contemporary China. As Huang documents, the extensive mismatch between the state-sponsored pluralism of sanctioned religion and the daily religious activities of religious voluntary associations and organizations (as ‘outlaw religion’) creates both opportunities and limitations for religious groups. While the US case – with its state policies and constitutional protections for religious freedom – represents a different kind of secular management of religion, it is nonetheless the case that secular norms and expectations (and laws and regulations) for religion likewise shape expectations that religious groups in modern life will accept the terms of secularity and the forms of religious cooperation that it celebrates (Bender 2015, Bender and Klassen 2010, Goldschmidt 2006).

A secular norm of religious pluralism arguably makes some religions harder to see, or to take account of. I am reminded of this when I walk under the eruv’s filament, or past thriving Catholic parishes. Parish and eruv mark two of multiple projects of religious boundary-making in the city that shapes and marks conceptions of community, and sovereignty, that do not always fit well within secular city governance, yet have had profound effect on community cooperation and conflict, as well as on city infrastructure including housing and public service provision in numerous American cities (see McGreevy 1996, Orsi 1999), even as religious communities face strong isomorphic pressures to conform to secular norms (Warner 1997).

The continuity of thriving and struggling, distinctive and sometimes fugitive religious and religious–racial worldings (Weisenfeld 2018, Ong 2011) help us identify the contours of a once familiar secular ‘frame’ for religion, which was best equipped to see and contend with religious groups that were already in line with or adapted to secularism. Viewed through the lenses of religious studies, urban environments appear made and remade by religious projects that make and remake city life (Evans 2020, McRobert 2005; Roane 2020, Primiano 2004). Numerous religious traditions and practices – and communities – thrive in and remake city space and neighborhoods in their image of the divine. Some, including those that organize their practices around sites other than ‘houses of worship’ and revolve around forms of practice that do not conform to recognized norms (e.g. requiring access to bodies of water, open spaces where sacrifices and oblations can take place) mark some religions as secret, fugitive, or even ‘outlaw’ (Athias-Robles 2021; Johnson 2007).

Recognizing a wider range of religious activity in city life means likewise coming to terms with the ways that religions remain a “constitutive force of contemporary capitalism and should therefore be placed at the heart of the neoliberal construction of urban space instead of at its margins” (Lanz and Oosterbann 2016, see also Guyer 2007). In my neighborhood, the rise of three apartment towers marks the alignments of historically ‘liberal’ religious institutions with for-profit developers, working together to advocate for changes and variances in zoning. Community groups and secular observers were challenged to grasp how these institutions could align themselves with ‘gentrification’ (Deutsch and Casper 2021; Marwell 2009; Mensch 1987). Without question, however, urban religious groups do not only or always speak from a marginal or powerless position: religious groups do not only occupy positions where they respond or react to secular economies and governmental processes. Powerful religious constituencies and organizations nonetheless in some ways seem more difficult to see, whether because their practices sometimes align so closely with ‘secular’ planning or development norms that they seem to inhabit a secular disposition altogether (Wild 2015).

What these varied sightings from my walks represent are examples that goad us to think about how secularity’s presumed indifference to ‘religion’ (in planning and in many disciplines) has nonetheless carried with it, and operationalized, a range of norms for seeing and managing religion (Sullivan 2018, McNally 2020, Manouchehrifar 2018). These have been quite powerful to shape the existence of actually existing religions. Yet they also efface a range of projects that religious groups undertake to make their urban worlds and that are equally of concern for anyone who lives in and thinks about the future of contemporary cities. As studies of secularism have so clearly represented, in myriad fields, secular indifference has, time and again, showed its power to hierarchize, dominate, and subordinate religions, deeming some but not others not only as better or worse partners, but moreover, making some forms of religion invisible, or even refusing their rights to the sacred. Yet this critique also presses a challenge (Hoch). This symposium thus represents an important moment of conversation and unanswered questions, along with a diverse range of opinions about secular planning’s capacity to see itself as one among many ‘worlding’ projects taking place simultaneously, and with unequal legitimacy and authority, unequal resources and distinct imperatives. This more diverse field of action is consequential to any understanding of religion in urban life. The question then arises in reading this symposium: how does a planner take this into account in their practice? What is planning’s role and position in such a heterogeneous and post-secular topography? What might come next?

***

Lloyd’s and Klassen’s contributions represent two answers to this question. Lloyd astutely notes that accounts of the post-secular have to date left urban planners diagnosing both bald secularism and dogmatic religion as bad – but that the resulting “appreciation of the complex mix of the religious, spiritual, and secular that characterizes our moment [as what] ought to guide planning practice” remains rather weak gruel. This is, I might add, especially so if ‘appreciation’ only calls more attention to the rosy-pluralism of managed and manageable religious groups. In this, I regard Lloyd’s call for an embrace of a “richer normative palette” vivifying. Taking this vision seriously requires embarking on different kinds of conversations about urban life with different kinds of actors, including those that are actively building their own particular (religious) worlds into and within the city landscape. How might planners engage such groups, furthermore, without beginning with secularism’s claim that the urban planner speaks for the ‘universal’ and the religious planner for the ‘particular’ (much less that all groups might understand or participate within a shared ‘spirituality’) but to recognize a more complex landscape of interests and futures that are being imagined. This might require a more robust acknowledgement that the management of religion has not ever been very effective, and that efforts to do so have not only played a theological card, but have often reinforced senses of alienation and distinctiveness (some, admittedly, embraced by religious outsiders).

But that does not mean returning to a neglect or indifference. Not at all. Klassen’s portrayal of the all-important role of ice-skating as a civic practice and way of being Canadian offers a sympathetic and radical orientation – one that I wager might not easily be ‘read’ as being about religion or planning at all. Beginning with the bodies of skaters, the news on the radio, the scraping of blades over ice, Klassen’s essay touches a wide range of governmental, religious, civic plans and purposes that support the bodies that skate together in public rinks. These projects support, furthermore, a wide range of imaginations of being together – she takes on nostalgia and nationalism, sees particular religious “affordances” as a mixed bag in multi-religious and multi-sovereign layerings, identifies the shape of skating as taking place in the body, moving through the bleak histories of colonization, reverberating storytelling, reflexive calls for justice, the power of the economies of national sports. No one would see ice skating as a religious activity – yet to tell that story of ice-skating as a civic good it would be wrong to remove religion from the equation. Her sense of secularity here is one that does not foreground or seek to ‘manage’ religion (nor does she try to ‘spiritualize’ skating or make it a universally ‘spiritual’ activity!). Religion is a part of this fabric, a part of this story – religion might in fact ‘haunt’ the story. But it is also not cordoned off – religion moves in and out of the scene, its roles are recognized as part of the dynamic flow of the shaping of this civic activity in such a way that does not consign its roles to the past, and that therefore might be ready to engage them in different ways in the future.

My daily walks yield other stories of religion – not just sights but sounds and sensoria, not just local religious activities but also transnational networks and interactions, not just communities and buildings but environments and flows. My aim in identifying religious ‘stuff’ on my neighborhood walks has not been to show that there is ‘more’ religion than meets the eye, or to argue that the answer to the problems posed by religion is to merely expand the number of religious projects that fit within the frame already in use. The growing field of secularism studies, to which this symposium contributes, calls not for seeing or thinking about a wider range of religion within the same frame of plurality, but rather calls for different attention to that frame, and to consider the consequences of seeing the work of religion as it often is involved in the projects of pursuing (powerful, important, necessary) a better, more just, even more holy world. Recognizing a ‘deeper’ and more challenging range of religious diversity and nonconformity, refusing to cordon off actors and projects that do not fit within given norms of seeing religion, means indeed to see religion differently. It also means seeing planning differently.

Notes on Contributor

Courtney Bender is Professor of Religion at Columbia University. A sociologist and ethnographer by training, she is the author of two monographs, Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver and The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination and co-editor of several volumes on religion, secularism, and contemporary life including with Pamela Klassen After Pluralism: Re-Imagining Religious Engagement. She is completing a book, focused on archival sources, that traces the impact of an enduring secular image of the “future of religion” in architectural, military, and planning projects in the American twentieth century.

Editors’ Afterword: Beyond Simplistic Dualities in Thinking about Religion and Planning

Babak Manouchehrifar^a and John Forester^b

^aDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; ^bDepartment of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Our cities contain multitudes of moral/spiritual lives – ways of living in the world as believers or unbelievers. The varieties of religious lives, spiritual quests, and types of atheism (Bender, 2010; Gray, 2018; Taylor, 2002) defy any dichotomy between peremptory ‘religious’ authority and self-sufficient humanism, and they populate a spectrum of middle-ground positions that “sit uneasily in a secular, disenchanted world” (Taylor, 2007, p. 518). Those with dogmatic rational views disparage these middle positions for their ad-hoc assemblage of affinities and practices; and those with strict religious views chastise them for representing flattened or trivialized forms of life that miss the sublime and lack authenticity. Regardless, “much of today’s spiritual/religious life,” especially in urban settings, “is to be found in this middle ground” (Taylor, 2007, p. 512).

Some adopt individual pursuits; others join powerful communities. But all see the places of their moral/spiritual lives as having a certain ‘good’ shape and meaning – whether rooted in reason, science, art, nature, God or gods, or other sources of awe and inspiration. In these pursuits, they all make demands – and use – of the institutions that deal with space/place, including urban planning.

Nevertheless, a simplistic religious/secular duality has had a firm grip on the planning imagination – a kind of either/or binary that Foucault has called “the blackmail of the Enlightenment” (1984, p. 42). It should occasion no surprise, then, that urban planners have come into increasing confrontation with religious/spiritual communities, or that planners may often misconceive emergent forms of faith-based, progressive activism by leaving out their theological thrust – or, even worse, treat them skeptically as insincere and sanctimonious. Religion might have existed outside of planning mythology, but it has long shaped planning’s social and practical reality – for good or ill.

Contributions to this Interface challenge such misunderstandings by shedding light on the qualities of spiritual/religious life that often go unmarked or unmoored in urban planning. They urge planners to engage constructively with justice-oriented movements that are rooted in faith, beyond the Rawlsian fear that faith-oriented calls for justice may preclude the possibility of a pluralist public sphere, or the Habermasian urge that such calls be translated into secular terms when entering into the public realm. Put succinctly, our contributors imply that as circumstances change, so should the questions we ask.

Since the late nineteenth century, planners have tried to understand the structures of the (post-) industrial city using terms such as efficiency, beauty, morality, equity, and justice. These concepts provoked complicated arguments, deeper understandings, and resulting confusions too (e.g. equality with sameness, inclusiveness with diversity, impartiality with indifference, and difference with divergence). Today, “in an age of triumphant physics” (Kirsch, 2020, p. 72), with “no hitching post in the universe” as Einstein said, when coding and modeling are decoding and redrawing the map of reality, when big-data analytics claims to be demystifying our world – must urban planners bother with images of transcendence?

Our contributors ask us to reject this dualistic variation of the age-old debate between science and religion – not because it is too complex, but because it is too reductive of the complexity of the world we inhabit. But how can urban planners – who work at the contentious interface of civil society, state, and market – engage constructively with religious, spiritual, or secular sensibilities of urban communities, given that their professional codes of ethics require them to separate personal values from public commitments? (We know, of course, that both adamantly secular and fervently religious planners and policymakers have violated these ethical codes.)

Our contributors, especially Thomas and Hoch, encourage us to move beyond this question as well – less because it is too simplistic, but more because it seems anachronistic given the dramatic changes in urban contexts. They argue that planners can instead begin with substantive planning domains (e.g. land-use, housing, public health) and with central, even constitutive, normative issues (e.g. social justice, equity) and, from there, appeal consciously and reflexively to religious and nonreligious inspirations to better address these issues and advance shared causes. Their suggestion, however, may still alarm those who think that blending the political and the professional with the more personal is a dangerous move, especially in a profession that involves constantly straddling embattled social and interconfessional fault lines. How to address this ‘conscientious objection’ of many urban planners?

Spatial planning not only allows social differences to express themselves (Miller, Carmella, Day); it also enables doctrinal claims of superiority (be they religious, atheist, racial, or cultural) to manifest themselves spatially (Klassen, Thomas, Huang). No profession has been more committed to promoting diversity spatially than urban planning has been, but spatial issues have been among the most troubled – and troubling – concerns for racial and religious diversity, both practically and legally. In a broadly liberal-political context, wary of state sanctioned ‘religion’ yet welcoming constitutional regimes of rights and responsibilities, planners seek spatial interventions to be religion-blind so that all citizens, irrespective of their views towards religion, have the same opportunity to influence and benefit from planning and policy outcomes. Socially, however, we understand that people do not want their religious, spiritual, or secular identities to be ignored in planning processes. Social differences, after all, do not simply exist ‘out there’ as a primordial given; they are also, and importantly, created by relations of power and means of legal codification, including planning procedures. As ‘all lives matter’ threatens to erase differences with the rhetoric of formal equality, so ‘all religions matter’ may threaten the same fate: the recognition of the poorer, less organized, and less White will suffer.

Urban planners have not been blind to these challenges, but neither have they devised effective strategies of addressing them. ‘Do something’ may be an almost mystical incantation of the planning vocation, but knowing ‘what to do,’ aside from not discriminating against particular religions, remains an elusive planning mystery. Many planners might celebrate the possibility of a more religiously diverse public sphere. Many might like to take credit for having religiously diverse cities. But few seem to consider either the authoritative – but not authoritarian (see Huang’s essay) – planning tools that might achieve this end or those that have been used to prevent it. Planners appear to want religious diversity in theory, but not to know yet how to achieve it in practice. Too often, common pluralist and multiculturalist accounts of the city celebrate diversity as both “potentially unruly” but also as aesthetically reassuring when not threatening “to be ungovernable” (Honig, 1996, p. 258). But this outlook can alienate practicing planners who see such views as naively rosy and ignoring the messiness of dealing with these issues less abstractly.

Planning’s lack of adequate attention to spiritual/religious forms of life does not indicate a lack of sympathy for these forms of life. But it does suggest a lack of disciplinary imagination of what it entails to live these lives in a diverse urban setting, both socially and spatially. As Bender astutely observes, the issue is not that urban planners don’t ‘see’ religion, but that they see it in certain forms and under certain circumstances more than in others. Urban planners, in their professional capacity, often see religious spaces less when they are in use, and people of faith far less when they are actively engaged in worship (Cep, 2020), but more when religious groups’ spatial proposals, or objections to other proposals, are uttered in public meetings, planning offices, and increasingly in courtrooms. Zoning ordinances do include – that is, they ‘see,’ even exalt – religious uses of land; but the religion seen is often the one that is defined in relation to, and through the gaze of, planners rather than those who use these lands. Our contributors, especially Klassen and Bender, help us ‘see’ religion better – not simply more of it, but more deeply: beyond the one-knows-it-when-one-sees-it ‘theo-meter’ to the variegated ways that religion manifests itself throughout the built environment.

To consider religious difference in planning involves “risks both in attending to and in ignoring differences” (Young, 1990, p. 174). Traditionally, we have sought recourse to the normative powers of ‘the secular’ – especially legal powers of the modern nation-state (Asad, 2003; Mahmood, 2015; Sullivan, 2005) – to avoid both risks at once in urban planning. We thus adopted the notion of ‘religious indifference’ as our disciplinary ethos to affirm the impartiality of planning interventions, and embraced the notion of ‘secular city’ to bear witness to an inevitable modernity (Manouchehrifar, 2018). These views have been challenged recently for failing to account for the dynamics of planning in action and the organization of social life in urban communities. As the attraction of the secular has diminished gradually, the appeal of the postsecular has grown exponentially. But which accounts of the postsecular best suit contemporary planning practice? Will the appeal of the postsecular not face the same fate that planners’ recourse to the secular did? Above all, what does a newly imagined postsecular city imply for effective planning ‘action’?

Lloyd’s contribution is particularly helpful here. He argues that planners need to move beyond the conventional views of the ‘secular city’ – as either a complete, but simple, epistemic break from the premodern (i.e. religious) city that supposedly preceded it, or as a confessionally plural, but still theological, continuation of it. But doing so, by itself, does not quite address planners’ distinct normative needs. To take religion seriously in planning, Lloyd suggests, requires particular attention to where the normative aims of planning overlap with “the normative palate of postsecularism,” namely, in action, not in abstraction; on firm ground, not in thin air. Our contributors seem to address this challenge by unanimously suggesting that ‘social justice’ is the principal criterion, or source of inspiration – or both – for evaluating and conducting postsecular forms of planning practice. Yet, the questions of action and implementation, of practical translation and institutional negotiation – i.e. the questions of politics and organization – remain to be explored and addressed empirically in future research and practice.

Reflecting on these contributions, one may understand, but not agree with, the adamant opposition, often on principle, of planners with exclusively humanist worldviews who, in their dismay at the proximity of piety to zealotry, rule out discussions of religion in planning as a disciplinary overreach or a seductive leap of faith leading into a vortex of unreason. That religious doctrine has been used to serve segregation, racism, and exclusion in urban planning, history amply attests, and Klassen aptly demonstrates; but, of course, so have religion and spirituality been used by many urban planners – whether subtly (e.g. Norman Krumholz) or manifestly (e.g. Benjamin Marsh, Lewis Mumford, and June Thomas) – to fight inequality actively and subvert racism practically. Nevertheless, many urban planners might support such discussions in principle, but consider them impracticable, fearing that considerations of transcendence in a profession that deals with earthly – and earthy – phenomena will be fraught with practical impossibilities. But, as Thomas and Hwang argue, this longstanding position in planning overlooks the ways that such practical inattention (Forester, 2020) has perpetuated, spatially and locally, structured forms of injustice and exclusion in our cities.

It is more difficult, though, to understand the normatively tangled, even pretzeled views of some ‘progressive’ planners who present themselves as value-committed and justice-oriented activists advocating on behalf of unrepresented and underserved communities in general, but who nevertheless cloak their commitments and practices in the ascetic linens of value-free, indifferent technocrats the moment that an element of religion arrives on the planning scene. Their insurgent radicalism has challenged planning’s historical service to the more affluent and powerful. But their insistence on a hierarchy of the urgent issues of (in)justice (e.g. economic, racial, gendered), in which religion is a sidebar not a principal core, preserves planning’s secular conventionality – and not only because it is intended. These planners often sequester spiritual/religious commitments from the issues they consider urgent and real, even if we know that religion and spirituality are often in the mix. This bold analytical abstraction, to be sure, justifies their apparent political-economic and lived realism – and vice versa. But the dismissal of religion and spirituality in the name of realism misses a crucial point, that realism is not the same as reality. This irony, of course, has a long history, duly noted by Max Weber: “The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy” (1946, p. 355).

Most of our contributors exhort planners to join hands with progressive, faith-based advocates to address issues of justice and injustice more effectively. But the practical irony remains that progressive planners’ potential allies in their fight against injustice are, in fact, often their ideological foes in their fight to keep religion out of the public sphere. Our commentators imply that we have apparently underestimated planning’s crucial power – or, at least, its heroic failures – to actualize faith-motivated calls for justice in distinctive ways that other professions cannot. But it is still difficult to entertain this possibility when our discipline lacks a coherent (historical and practical) account of what such calls for justice actually involve. It remains to future research to offer empirical accounts of such possibilities.

By this Interface, we put to the test Richard Rorty’s dictum that religion is a ‘conversation-stopper’ (1994). We hope, though, that the interdisciplinary conversation launched here withstands the test of time.

ORCID

Babak Manouchehrifar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8849-4268

John Forester http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4109-1765

Notes

1. See Sandra Barrera, “Mitchell’s Dark ‘River’ Flows with Holiday Tradition,” Los Angeles Daily News, 2 December 2006, https://jonimitchell.com/library/view.cfm?id = 1483.

1. EBC is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by Saul Alinsky.

1. It is impossible to give details here about efforts within planning to promote social or racial equity. APA offers some materials and sessions. AICP offers “Ethics Case of the Year” scenarios that do not engage deeply in racial justice issues. At least one state chapter, Michigan Association of Planning (MAP), has created a tool designed to help local planners assess their own plans for social equity (Loh and Kim, 2020).

2. The ‘Golden Rule’ urges us to treat everyone as we ourselves wish to be treated. Variations exist in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Baha’i, and other faiths.

3. Cf. footnote 1, above.

4. Vocal and organized proponents, particularly activists of color, can stir organizational leaders to do the right thing, such as the Planning and the Black Community and the Latinos and Planning divisions of APA. Within the ACSP the author served as founding co-chair of the Planners of Color Interest Group (POCIG), whose major efforts encouraged its parent organization to address racial justice issues. This has led to mentorship programs for junior faculty of color, training sessions for faculty administrators, and pipeline initiatives designed to recruit scholars of color, all supported by ACSP. POCIG has also held the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) accountable for assessing support for diversity in individual academic planning programs. As of the writing of this piece, POCIG is proposing to PAB an ambitious set of revised PAB criteria that more closely reflect the need for social and racial justice.

1. Courts are instructed to construe the statute “in favor of a broad protection of religious exercise.” 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000cc-3(g). Religious exercise is defined to encompass “any exercise of religion whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief […] The use, building, or conversion of real property for the purpose of religious exercise shall be considered to be religious exercise of the person or entity that uses or intends to use the property for that purpose.” 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000cc-5 (7)(A)(B).

2. The U.S. Supreme Court has noted that in the context of repairing distressed areas, the public welfare represents values that are “spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary.” Berman v. Parker 348 U.S. 26, 33 (1954).

1. Beginning in 1979, a limited number of temples reopened for religious services. This included temples, such as Han Buddhist Temple, whose important historical status were recognized by the central government in 1983 which made it easier for the temple to gain assistance from the municipal government for restoration. As with religious revival elsewhere in China, local governments, particularly the district governments, played a critical role in the temple’s initial revival by assisting in the return of some of the temple’s land in the original sites.

2. See: Several Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Strengthening the Management of Urban Planning and Construction, at: http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2016-02/21/content_5044367.htm.