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Abstract
Planetary urbanization is a reality rather than a vision. Digitalization, physical connectivity, services for the body and integration into the body politick are part of planning that future across the globe. Religion is not.

In research over the past decade we have demonstrated that religious practices and imaginations had been a facilitator rather than an antagonist to urbanization over the past 6,000 years. Religion has provided tools for intensified interaction and ethics for living closely together. Vice versa, religious networks and even religions have formed and changed under the influence of urban ways of life. Yet, the result seems paradoxical. Urbaneness and religiosity have gained profiles that tend to stress the other side’s irrationality or secularity.

Today, religious actors seem to withdraw from the city or to support anti-urbane regimes. Have the urban and the religious parted ways? Is their co-evolution a past over and done with? A past perfect? Current research is deeply divided but thinking of religion as urban religion with a history will change the terms of that debate. 

Moderator: 
Professor Rubina Raja

Discussants: 
Professor Cordelia Heß
Associate Professor Thomas Brandt Fibiger