Urban History

Ambivalences of Religion: The Constitutive Tensions Within Religion in Urban Space
The concept of ambivalence - in difference to diffusion, histori-cal dialectics, development, or progress - takes a synchronic stance and observes tensions and contradictions. It stresses conflict and constitutive ambiguity, bi-polar orders, bi-valence at any given moment. The opposition in a religious or urban ambivalence is neither dissolved in good and bad religion, good and bad urbanity nor are such ambivalences seen as ephemeral and transitory. When using such a concept in a research approach, complexity is predicted as a condition for survival of a city or religion rather than a critical state.
Even a quick glance at research literature demonstrates that cities and religion are characterised by contradictions or tensions. Even synchronously, and even in individual actors’ conceptions of urbanity or religion, both are internally com-plex and charged with tensions, and do not interact as two monoliths.
The complexity of urbanity can be seen as constitutive of the ambivalences of the urban as a field of tensions that can be examined in terms of actors, positions, strategies and phe-nomena.
Religion can likewise be described by ambivalence. Religious ambivalences have been described, for instance, by Jonathan Z. Smith with the conceptual pair of locative and utopian, Thomas Tweed as dwelling and crossing and Jörg Rüpke in the concept of the duplicity of religious (and divine) agency mutually constituting each other.
As in the case of the urban, further ambivalences that do not just occasionally occur but are constitutive for what is em-braced by religion as an academic classification or people’s practices. Aiming at sharpening and perfecting a heuristic grid for the study of the mutual formation of religion and urbanity, the contributors will develop concepts of religion that are addressing material, socio-spatial, temporal, and power-related issues with a view on religious complexity in general and religious ambivalences in particular. The ultimate aim is to better grasp the entanglement between religion and urbanity and the ways urban and religious practices and ideas can change through the interferences of these internal tensions.