Ideologies and Infrastructures of Religious Urbanization in Africa: Remaking the City

Description

How do urbanization and development intersect with religious dynamics to shape contemporary African cityscapes? To answer this timely question, contributors from across Europe, North America and Africa are brought together to explore mega-cities including Lagos, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa as powerful venues for the creation and implementation of religious models of urbanization and development. This book interrogates how religious socio-spatial models and strategies engage with challenges of infrastructural development, urban social cohesion, inequalities and inclusion. Chapters explore how faith-based practices of urban and infrastructural development link moral subjectivities with individual and wider aspirations for modernization, change, deliverance and prosperity. The volume brings together ethnographically rich and theoretically grounded case studies of religious urbanization across the African continent. It advances discussions of the ambivalent role of urban religion in development and documents the complex, multifaceted socio-cultural and political dynamics associated with religious urbanization in Africa.

David Garbin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent, UK. Gareth Millington is Reader in Sociology at the University of York, UK. Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.

A fascinating study on how organized religion and infrastructures are implicated in remaking material well-being and hope, in not always positive ways, in African cities. A real opening in urban studies. * Ash Amin, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK * This edited collection is an invaluable addition to the ongoing understanding of the relationship between religion, religious organizations and social transformation. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of disciplines, including urban sociology, urban management, anthropology, social geography and religious studies/spatial theology. * Asonzeh Ukah, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa * An excellent examination of the operations of religious urbanization. The collection carefully reveals how faith-based organizations combine the moral and infrastructural, with important consequences for urban development, city institutions, markets, districts, and urban imaginaries. * Colin McFarlane, Professor of Geography, Durham University, UK *