ABSTRACT
The focus of this section is on the negotiation of religion in contemporary urban space, with work drawn primarily from a social scientific perspective. Drawing on discussions from the third workshop at UCL this section suggests that negotiations of religion in urban space may take a range of different forms or modalities.1 One key site of analysis centres on the material presence of religion in the urban environ - ment, particularly through the establishment of religious buildings. However, there are also more transient and temporal expressions of communal religious identity in public urban spaces, which also require both negotiation and accommodation. A third site of contemporary negotiation concerns the role of religious actors and institutions in urban politics, governance and welfare. Alongside these examples of more obvious and formal sites of negotiation of religion might be set the more ‘everyday’ urban cultures and practices of religion and faith in the city and the ways in which these require quotidian negotiations between urban residents. In this introductory section I draw out examples of these four modalities of negotiating religion in urban space, suggesting an approach to negotiation that is somewhat different from other perspectives in this volume. In this account negotiation is understood as a relational form of dialogical and dialectic social relations where religious groups and individuals are key actors. They are also multiply positioned as actors, sometimes they may be disadvantaged in relation to existing hierarchies, as suggested by Laborde in this volume, but at other times they may be able to mobilise important networks or shape institutional or political decisions.
