Making New Faith In/Visible: Religious Movements and Urban Space

The visibility – and invisibility – of religious movements has been an important aspect in different fields of research, however not been considered systematically in studies on the reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity. This article explores how new religious groups in Europe, South and Southeast Asia make themselves or are made in/visible in towns and cities. It brings together sociological, historical and cultural studies perspectives.

Case studies – spanning from Antiquity to our time – allow overall observations about the modes of appropriating urban space, about visibility as premise of social interaction and the perception of difference, about strategies employed to display or hide religious mindsets, and about the political conditions of religious change. These observations confirm theoretical concepts regarding the interrelatedness of visibility and invisibility and the character of in/visibility as a relational phenomenon. In particular, the observations about various cases show that in/visibility generally depends on multifarious factors: first and foremost, the individual interests of religious groups in becoming visible, in addition to political circumstances and even the particular cityscape. At the same time, these case studies stress the fact that visibility can be conveyed in many ways, that it is not necessarily permanent, and that it can quickly increase or diminish.