Sacred spaces in profane buildings : the spatial implications of religious pluralism in the contemporary western urban context

Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings The spatial implications of religious pluralism This research uses as time frame the present and aims to highlight some extremely marginal urbanized and micro scale, almost invisible spaces of the city and make them relevant for urban studies and spatial planning practices. The intention is to focus the discussion towards specific places (what I call “Sacred spaces in profane buildings”) scattered around both city centers and peripheries, and situated in specific geographic and social contexts (Europe and North America) and subject to informal strategies and illegal or semi-legal constructions. Therefore, the focus of the investigation is on places to worship that are informally built inside former garages, warehouses, shops and apartment buildings that suffer from serious planning deficits. The thesis attempts to describe and map the nascence of a new religious architecture and communities, becoming manifest in the contemporary urban context. With Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings are intended places of worship in non-traditional sites, in buildings that have undergone a transformation of function . Many of these spaces are invisible from the outside. The interiors are what has been altered most to accommodate the needs of a particular religion’s worship practices. The word “profane”, which litterally means outside the temple , in this context refers to buildings being non-traditional or non-sacred from the beginning, not in a location that is precisely chosen and central, with an architecture that makes it highly visible. In this logic, the articulation of a produced space and how its architecture is modified according to different cultural needs is the subject of interest: a spontaneous invisible architecture connected with nostalgia, identity building, transnational connections and occasional collaborations. The research is a transversal investigation of architectures, policies and the multitude of individual practices through which each religion inhabits and transforms the contemporary Western city. In this context, in most of the cases, a partial image of the religious landscape is manifest. The thesis does not take into account the new places to worship belonging to minorities already built and approved by their corresponding municipalities. The research instead, involves the ways in which the urban environment is shaped by the modes of temporary religious expression, from storefront churches to backdoor shrines, from fourth-floor apartments to street themselves. The sites that become the settings for urban religion expand our understanding of the concept of sacred space and force us to recognize the limitation of confining sacred acts to Churches, Synagogues, and Temples . From the urban point of view, cities either provide an illusion of secularity (by identifying sacred spaces as “community centers”) with regard to new religious constructions or present existing religious buildings prominently as historical artifacts. New religious manifestations through architectural or urban interventions are contested and building permission is only easily obtained in the spaces of uncharted periphery. Yet, religious spaces exist at the very center of each community. They tend to evolve far from houses of worship to and become authentic community centers with different kinds of educational and social services, fellowship and recreational activities, ad task-specific associational networks. They indeed become schools of democracy and the centers of associational life of the immigrant communities . The architectural improvisations that respond to this increased demand of sacred space in the contemporary Western city constitute my subject of interest. I am moreover interested in the urban scale implications of the phenomenon: the distribution of religious activity throughout the city and how this maps onto a contemporary urban reality of displacement and adaptation. It reveals a complex relationship of religious praxis, cultural identity and urban life. The quality and form of the sacred space in contemporary Western cities have completely changed so as regulatory requirements related to the need to move from a mono-religious city to a pluralist one. The thesis, by interlinking a series of significant case studies that demonstrate the return of the religious in the selected contexts unveils how this kind of religious spatial needs, creating pressure on the policies could push the planning instruments ahead. Its purpose is to generate new knowledge about a social phenomenon with huge implications for the future planning policies that has so far received scarce attention in both architecture and urban planning. The thesis aiming to raise awareness on a topic almost neglected by planners creating new knowledge, tries to rethink the relationship between religion and planning to become (useful) for academics, architects and city planners. Moreover, specific contributions of the thesis include the redaction of unpublished maps and visual documentation made by the author trough an ethnographic research activity.