ABSTRACT
This chapter explores issues of religion and spirituality beyond organised faith systems and designated places of worship, and how this affects gender and urban life. It explores the gender implications of the concept of ‘municipal spirituality’: a notion that local government (and hence planners) both could and should promote and defend places whose value is intangibly spiritual, through shared belonging, or places which offer some sorts of connection beyond the material. These include many public assets such as libraries, parks, community centres and cemeteries, places whose value is not only the instrumental service they provide. Urban planning has a poor track record in dealing with issues of religion and of gender. Professional planning very much conceives of itself as a secular, rational and objective practice. However, as this paper argues, this can make the articulation of the value of places of ‘municipal spirituality’ very difficult, giving planning limited grounds to develop or preserve such spaces. The gender implications of this are then explored, drawing on both classic and contemporary analyses of how urban space is gendered, considering ways that ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘community’ are conceived, and how this devalues and renders invisible both more typically female experiences of everyday life and deeply held emotional and spiritual attachment to place.
