Religious Actors With or Against The State in City Making & Urban Planning

The first two workshops in the USF seminar series brought together researchers from different disciplinary fields to discuss the role of religious actors and organisations in the production of cities in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa.

Based on these discussions, some questions deserve to be explored in greater depth and can serve as a basis for a more systematic comparison between these cities, and with other regions of the world. These questions can also support the development of an initial glossary on the main components and/or attributes of the processes of production of urban space and urban planning practices that are based on faith values.

Given the active, variegated and impactful roles of religious actors in the past and recent years in urban development processes and city making practices, we invite participants to consider the following four sets of questions:

Actions and values of religious actors in urban planning and urban service provision:

In what ways various religious actors have been contributing to and/or interfering in governing urban problems and spatial inequalities through their own framework of values (provision of housing/ land/ basic services)? What are the most salient religious values that are put forth in the programs they elaborate for urban development?

Relations of religious actors to multi-level state actors: Perceptions, attributes and variations:

How are urban development activities of religious actors and organizations recognised by the government and policy makers, if at all? How does the local and national public sector perceive religious groups?

How do religious organizations overlap with, compete with, complement and/or replace state-led urban policies? And how do these relations vary across local, national and transnational geographies? (for example, housing policy, services provision, cultural heritage and protection of sacred sites, urban security and controlling urban violence).

Impact of religious actors on advancing social and spatial justice in urban planning practice:

To what extent have the engagement of religious groups/organisations with communities, state institutions and international organizations been contributing (or not) to advancing participatory urban development, area-based approaches and experiments at urban commoning?
How are the spatial and redistributive activities of religious organizations impacting the right to the city and social and spatial justice in cities?

Theorizing religious actors in urban planning scholarship:

What are the key questions, frames, and methods needed for a more rigourous and productive theorizing religious actors in urban planning disciplines, that can help challenge the predominant binary and rigid analytical categories of ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ sectors (and actors)?

Speakers

Mona Harb (AUB – Lebanon)

Pascal Menoret (Directeur du Centre d'Études et de Documentation Économiques, Cairo)

Jennifer Robinson (UCL Geography department)

Babak Manouchehrifar (Princeton University)

Asseel Alraqam (University of Kuwait – Sciences Po)

Nada Moumtaz (University of Toronto)

Sara ElKazaz (SOAS)

Noura Wahby (American University in Cairo)

Camila Saraiva (ABC, Sao Paulo)

Severine Deneulin (Director of International Development, University of Oxford)

Carly Machado (Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro)

Itaque Barbosa (Zumbi dos Palmares University, and Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning)

Martijn Oosterbaan (University of Utrecht)

Sertac Sehlikoglu (UCL Institute for Global Prosperity)

Hannah Sender (UCL)

Azadeh Mashayekhi (UCL)

Vafa Dianati (UCL, DPU)