Building God's City: The Political Economy of Prayer Camps in Nigeria

The proliferation of religious spaces is a relatively recent development in Nigeria. Nowadays there are more than a hundred religious camps belonging to different religious groups in the country. The most popular of these camps, the Redemption Camp of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, is located 42 kilometres outside of Lagos and measures several thousand acres. Although initially not designed as such, developments in and around Lagos have compelled the managers of the Redemption Camp to present it as an urban alternative to the city of Lagos, which is generally deemed chaotic. The prestige of this camp and its activities have led to expansive urban development that involves the creation of numerous residential estates stretching from Lagos to beyond the Redemption Camp. Based on a recent ethnographic study of the Redemption Camp, this article argues that the process of urban expansion in and around Lagos is propelled by an aggressive form of religious revival that transcends the borders between economics, spirituality and territorial conquest. This article thus illustrates how church‐driven, religio‐urban developments follow a different logic of city making than often presumed by theorists of African cities, who generally neglect the religious forces that inform urban transformations in Africa.     

Building,Marketing and Living in an Islamic Gated Community: Novel Configurations of Class and Religion in Istanbul

This article analyses the development and marketing of Islamic gated communities in Basaksehir, Istanbul. It demonstrates how a blueprint of public–private urban development was appropriated by middle‐class Islamists. The gated communities in Basaksehir—which, at the outset, were not explicitly religious—gradually became attractive to religious actors searching for enclosed urban enclaves where Islamic communities would be protected against perceived moral‐urban threats. While urban‐religious enclaves appear to bear similarities to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the rise of contemporary Islamic gated communities should be understood in light of the recent coming to power of the Islamist Turkish government. In cooperation with this government, housing development agencies approached Islamic investors to find capital for their public–private housing projects. One of the results of this form of urban development is that, contrary to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the Islamic gated communities are homogenous in terms of economic class, catering specifically to the Islamic middle classes. Moreover, people who invest in Basaksehir desire an urban‐religious lifestyle that differs from the ‘traditional' religious lifestyle experienced in ‘traditional' Islamic neighbourhoods. The specific urban‐religious configuration generates a new type of Islam that better fits middle‐class values and a middle‐class lifestyle.     

Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism

The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing states under neoliberal restructuring programmes in the shadow of consumption dreams. Although religious actors and ideologies unquestionably form part of urban groups that are denied access to public and private means to wealth and security, the contributors to this symposium argue that within a global, comparative perspective, the entwinement of religion, state and market reveal more complicated configurations. Through a comparison of Islamic gated communities in Istanbul, Pentecostal prayer camps in Lagos and Pentecostal grassroots movements in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this symposium demonstrates that urban religion should also be regarded as a constitutive force of contemporary capitalism and should therefore be placed at the heart of the neoliberal construction of urban space instead of at its margins.     

Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial Imaginaries,Worlding and Strategic Plans

This article critically examines the expression of global spatial imaginaries in urban policy and planning. Following recent calls to understand how the global is ‘made up' in and through cities, we argue for the usefulness of Roy and Ong's concept of ‘worlding’. By analysing how strategic spatial plans envisage ‘Global Sydney’, the article reveals a constitutive spatial imaginary informed by the articulation of three interrelated elements: global city standards, comparative techniques and extra‐local policy models. Unpacking how cities are selectively worlded through spatial imaginaries, the article advances an approach to urban globality as actively cultivated and differentially produced.     

Dubai in the ‘Middle’

In the early 2000s, Dubai seemed the apotheosis of the global city model. Lauded as an embodiment of globalist ideals, or harshly criticized as a representation of the dangers of contemporary urbanism, it was clearly under the spotlight. Then, like the concept of the ‘global city’ itself, it disappeared from the headlines, to be subject only to sporadic and cynical attention. Today some are heralding a ‘return’ of Dubai from the anonymity of the middle ground of global city hierarchies and rankings. What is often forgotten, however, is that urbanism in Dubai did not stop. On the contrary, Dubai's continuous ‘worlding’ offers a productive opportunity for the encounter of ‘global’ and ‘ordinary’ modes of urban analysis. By unpacking the construction of a global Dubai, this article advocates greater sensitivity to the multiscalar politics that shape its continuity. Stepping beyond rumours of crisis and decline, it aims to connect the global fortunes and everyday processes that jointly characterize the development of global cities. ‘Global’ and ‘ordinary’ urbanism, it argues, are but two registers of how we could, in Warren Magnusson's words, ‘see like a city’.     

The Born‐Again Favela: The Urban Informality of Pentecostalism in Rio de Janeiro

Since the 1980s, the metropolitan spaces of Brazil have seen a significant upsurge of the Christian Pentecostal movement, which today dominates the religious landscape of the favelas. In Rio de Janeiro, the rise of Pentecostalism coincided with the establishment of drug gangs as actors controlling favela territories. Based on an ethnographic field study conducted in a favela complex in the city's Zona Norte, this article examines the role and significance of the Pentecostal churches in Rio's favelas, both in everyday urban life and in the ways these areas are governed. One of my focal points of analysis is the increasing entanglement of actors in the drug industry and church actors. The article posits that the Pentecostal churches' role and significance, their institutional shape and their followers' practices are inextricably intertwined with the favela's social, spatial and political structural patterns. It shows the ways in which the evolving Pentecostal movement has permeated all aspects of the favela's informal way of urban life and government and has produced a new urban religious configuration in which the Pentecostal movement and the favela are intertwined and transform each other.