Religion and the Built Environment

2020-2021

By Linda Arntzenius

In 2017, CTI began a five-year Inquiry on Religion & Global Issues, creating insight into the linked concerns of migration, violence, economic inequality, the built environment, and the natural environment. Now, in this fourth year of the Inquiry, a team of CTI scholars are looking at a subject that many of us give little thought to—the built environment—its impact on human health and well-being as well as the assumptions and values that undergird contemporary structures and cities. It’s a subject with intrinsic relation to theology that goes beyond the sacred spaces across the globe.

“Studying the relationship between religion and the built environment is a complex endeavor, calling for careful, slow scholarship across disciplines to deepen our mutual understanding,” says CTI Director Will Storrar. “This research workshop offers the rare opportunity to distill fresh thinking on the different dimensions of religion and the built environment.”

Presented with the conjuncton of architecture and religion, the layperson might think of Notre Dame and the great cathedrals of Europe, of the Hagia Sophia, the Dome of the Rock in the old city of Jerusalem, or perhaps the Mahabodhi Temple in India where Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi Tree.

There is much more to be said on this relationship.

According to architect and historian Kyle Dugdale, the author of Babel’s Present (2016), it is a commonplace of urban history that the cities of antiquity belonged to their gods. “It would be inconceivable to study the ancient city without paying attention to the relationship between religion and the built environment,” he says. And what applied in antiquity is equally true today, although the close relationship may not be so clear. Architecture tells the story of who we are from Athens with its multiple gods to the great Gothic cathedrals to the one God of Christianity. And, argues Dugdale, today’s cityscapes are still filled with gods. “We just don’t see them, perhaps because we believe they are dead, but they tell us of our aspiring identities; who we want to be.”

As a participant in the workshop on Religion and the Built Environment, Dugdale—who has taught history, theory, and design at Yale School of Architecture and at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation— argues that newer gods have replaced the old and the consequences are not always positive. His research on “The City and its Gods” is a warning bell for the increasingly critical need “to bring a theologically-informed intelligence to bear on the challenges of the contemporary city.”

A telling example of this can be seen in the evolution, over the last century, of Auckland City in New Zealand as described by Murray Rae of the University of Otago. The city is built on a series of volcanoes with isthmuses projecting like fingers into the harbor. Each isthmus is a prominent site and what has been built there reveals what was regarded as important in its time. The first is the site of a memorial to Michael Joseph Savage, the New Zealand prime minister who introduced the Welfare State, calling it “applied Christianity.” On the next is a museum housing national treasures and a war memorial. Next is the Anglican Cathedral, then the University of Auckland, signifying the importance of religion and education. But what has become even more dominant, says Rae, are the high-rise buildings of the commercial district, which are beginning to dwarf all others, especially the tallest: a sky tower that rises above the casino.

“This tells us that what we value today is commercial interest and the gambling industry,” says Rae. “It’s a sad tale of evolution of the culture away from Christian values to the glorification of the commercial world. It shows a spiritual degradation, if you like. We need to be aware of and think about these things.”

Rae’s CTI project, “The City as Redeemed Sociality,” is an exploration of what makes a good city and how the built environment can contribute to that ideal. “The question for us now is how do we build cities today that give a foretaste of the biblical ‘heavenly city,’ one that serves the well-being of all.”

The International Team

Rae and Dugdale are two of this year’s eight workshop participants, five men and three women, from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, and the United States. The others are Stephan De Beer, Elise Edwards, Tammy Gaber, Nesrine Mansour, Martin Radermacher, and Whare Timu.

The topics raised by their many interests and expertises range from Confederate monuments to Black Lives Matter; from the gods of the cities of the ancient world to the idols of today’s urban landscape; from the Western canon to more exclusive teachings that acknowledge diversity of experience and belief; from Māori Whare Nui to mosques in the sub-Arctic; from real-life projects to the emerging phenomenon of digital religion and its virtual space design.

Embedded in all of these lie practical questions about the built environment and how it might serve human well-being and help us toward a more responsible habitation of our world. Here are just a few examples. Stephan De Beer, Associate Professor of Practical Theology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where he directs the Centre for Faith and Community, is working on “A Faith-Based Housing Agenda: Co-Constructing Flourishing African Urban Futures,” which reimagines theological education for urban change as well as the challenges of homelessness, housing, justice, and myriad fused interests in a context lacking religious discourse and faith-based action. It’s an ambitious and challenging project for which De Beer is well-qualified. He led an ecumenical nonprofit on inner-city community development and social housing for almost two decades and is a founding member of the South African National Homeless Network on Street Homelessness, which informs national, provincial, and municipal policies. His research draws upon case studies from multiple African regions.

With a doctorate in architecture and a background in environmental design, Nesrine Mansour studies sacred architecture in the context of digital religion, an emerging phenomenon of which her work promotes awareness. Her CTI research project, “Religion and the Sacred Virtual Built Environment,” brings together the digital built environment with theology and computation in a novel way—a digital ethnographic inquiry in an era of rapid digitalization and globalization.

Martin Radermacher, Chair for the Study of Religion at the Center for Religious Studies (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany), is the author of Devotional Fitness: An Analysis of Contemporary Christian Dieting and Fitness Programs (2017). His research project, “Dignity and Atmosphere: Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Religion and the Built Environment” investigates how built environments foster and restrict the notion of dignity that has deep roots in religious tradition.

CTI’s participant selection process generally finds individuals who welcome opportunities to be pulled out of their comfort zones. Noting the remarkable breadth of the topics gathered under the umbrella of religion and the built environment, Whare Timu (see sidebar) says he expects to learn a lot while also bringing value to the overall discussion from his experience as a practicing architect. “Architects like to think of ourselves as crusaders for better living, quality design, community, and sustainability,” he says.

What is needed, suggests Rae is “to recover a broadly shared narrative about human well-being and about how we might inhabit the world equitably, wisely, and sustainably.”

Socially Distanced Scholarship

At the heart of academic life at CTI is a weekly meeting at which members present and discuss their works in progress. After close readings of each other’s research papers, members quickly develop the understanding that sparks new ideas and nurtures relationships of trust and respect. Key questions to be addressed are distributed in advance, overlapping concepts are noted, questions are flagged for future discussion and development.

The challenge of the current global pandemic “adds a sense of moral urgency to the work,” says Center Director William Storrar. With in-person meetings no longer possible, center members are “meeting” online. Gone are the serendipitous encounters in the corridor or lounge, the felicitous informal chat that so often ignites insight. Digital gatherings, however, have their own advantages. Conducted in two or three hour sessions, they are highly focused, offering disciplined participants an opportunity to cut right to the chase. Since one must come to the table fully prepared, there is an immediate step to a level of dialogue that often comes only after two or three face-to-face in-room sessions.

“There is an intimacy and focus that the medium requires,” says Elise Edwards of Baylor University. “Having too many in one day can be exhausting because of the attention you are giving, but they allow for deep connections to be fostered across state and international lines.”

Echoing Storrar’s thoughts on the sense of moral urgency during the pandemic, Rae observes that COVID-19 “has concentrated our minds even more acutely on questions of human well-being, the equitable distribution of resources, the way we organize ourselves politically, the folly of Western individualism and how costly that is in moments such as we are experiencing now. We have a great deal to learn about being our brothers and our sisters’ keeper and about what loving our neighbor means in these kinds of circumstances, and, unfortunately, it has to be said, we are not doing very well.”

Furthermore, says Rae, “our built environment has not only been damaging to our natural environment, it has very often served the interests of the well-off as opposed to the poor and the marginalized. These are the communities that are suffering more during the pandemic, so concentrating our minds on issues of justice and human well-being and inequity is going to be a very important part of life as we work together during this CTI workshop.”