About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
List of Tables
Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction, David Garbin (University of Kent, UK), Simon Coleman (University of Toronto, Canada) and Gareth Millington (University of York, UK)
Part I: Religious Infrastructures of ‘Development’: Visions, Discourses and Scales
2. Thickening Agents: Muslim Commons and Trajectories of Popular Urbanization in Dar es Salaam, Benjamin Kirby (University of Leeds, UK)
3. Territorialized Visions of Development and Urban Christianities in the Congo, David Garbin (University of Kent, UK) and Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot (GCRL/CNRS, France)
4. The Aspiration to Transform: Pentecostalism and Urban Citizenship in Cape Town, Marian Burchardt (University of Leipzig, Germany)
Part II: Territorialisation, urban change and religious time-spaces
5. Mouride Imaginaries of the Sacred and the Time-Spaces of Religious Urbanisation in Touba, Senegal, Kate Kingsbury (University of British Columbia, Canada)
6. Building Churches for the City-to-Come: Pentecostal Urbanization and Aspirational Place-Making in ‘Rurban’ Areas of Southwestern Benin, Carla Bertin (EHESS, France)
7. Religion, Urban Change and Planning Control in Lagos, Taibat Lawanson (University Lagos, Nigeria) and Gareth Millington (University of York, UK)
Part III: Moral subjects, Remoralised Spaces and the Politics of Knowledge
8. The Dark Side of the City: Urbanisation, Modernity and Moral Mapping in Zambia, Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
9.Religiously-Motivated Schools and Universities as ‘Moral Enclaves’: Reforming Urban Youths in Tanzania and Nigeria, Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) and Marloes Janson (SOAS, University of London, UK)
10. Managing the ‘Sensible Secular’: Disciplining the Urban in a Nigerian Christian University, Simon Coleman (University of Toronto, Canada) and Xavier Moyet (University of Toronto, Canada)
11. Notes on African Religious Everyday Life in an Urban (Post-)Pandemic World, David Garbin (University of Kent, UK), Simon Coleman (University of Toronto, Canada) and Gareth Millington (University of York, UK)
Afterword, Caroline Knowles (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
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.
Review :
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.
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.
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.
