UC Davis

This introduces a roundtable on the articulations of religious practices and imaginaries with the creation and remaking of urban landscapes in Bangalore (India), Vinh City (Vietnam), and Houston and New Orleans (United States). While recognizing that urban expressions of religion are articulated with political and economic forces, this collection shifts the focus to the spatial, material, and sensory media with which the religious and the spiritual are enacted within urban life worlds. We aim to advance a critical intervention in the analysis of religion and spirituality, but also to map the ways that different publics create designs for and of urban life through religious and spiritual practices that may celebrate, interrogate, or challenge modernist, liberal, or postcolonial/postsocialist programs and geographies.