A New Urban World

Andrew Davey describes the dynamism that characterizes twenty-first-century urban life:

You only have to walk down the streets of any major city to encounter the world… You will see goods displayed that have been made in the factories and sweatshops of the South... Magazines and newspapers will combine the issues of communities thousands of miles away and those in the immediate locality… The experience of such a street…is becoming the reality in numerous small and provincial towns and cities, as well as those places previously thought of as cosmopolitan cities. ¹

A new understanding of the city is needed if twenty-first-century urban theologies are to grasp the contradictions, pressures and fluidity described by Davey. The urban landscape has been transformed over the last two decades but Harrison’s apocalyptic judgement of Thatcher’s Britain continues to ring true for those surviving in the “fourth world” of the new network society: “The inner city is...the place where all our social ills come together, the place where all our sins are paid for.” ² If twenty-first-century urban theologies are to resource a contemporary preferential option for the oppressed then it is essential that we look at the metropolis through the eyes of those who are most marginalized. In order to do that, urban theologies need to re-learn the way cities work in this new century and listen with critical openness to the prophetic voice that is being sounded within social theory, urban studies and cultural studies. Is urban theology ready to listen to this voice? This book argues that we ignore the voice of contemporary social theory at our peril and run the risk of marooning urban theologies in the backwaters of a declining urban church if we do not have ears to hear and eyes to see a fresh articulation of the divine bias to the oppressed. ³