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Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Placing Timelines -- 1 Biocentric Eutopias in South Asia -- 2 Ecotopias, Theosophy, and the South Indian City -- 3 Utopian Settlements and Californian Vedanta -- 4 Highways, Thresholds, and an Indian New Age -- Conclusion: Designing and Dwelling in Place -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

In the city of Bangalore, India, the main annual festival of the Karaga draws its ritual personnel from a network of wrestling houses, where concepts of the conservation and channeling of bodily fluids underlie training. These concepts are, in turn, linked to an older model of urban planning in which artificial water bodies and gardening were integral components of the built environment. As the city's population has grown and its economy shifted toward manufacturing and high technology, a different model of planning has slowly destroyed the older ecological system while inserting large sports complexes as important urban nodes. There is a simultaneous movement to link sports, beauty contests, and media as entertainment, with a concomitant redefinition of the body.

© The Author(s) 2018. This introduces a roundtable on the articulations of religious practices and imaginaries with the creation and remaking of urban landscapes in Bangalore (India), Vinh City (Vietnam), and Houston and New Orleans (United States). While recognizing that urban expressions of religion are articulated with political and economic forces, this collection shifts the focus to the spatial, material, and sensory media with which the religious and the spiritual are enacted within urban life worlds. We aim to advance a critical intervention in the analysis of religion and spirituality, but also to map the ways that different publics create designs for and of urban life through religious and spiritual practices that may celebrate, interrogate, or challenge modernist, liberal, or postcolonial/postsocialist programs and geographies.

AbstractThis article introduces a symposium on religion and the formation of modern urban space in Asia and Africa. Both the spread of new religious movements and the articulations between religion, globalization and neoliberalism have prompted new analyses of the shifting geographic and social boundaries between 'religious' and 'secular' institutions, practices and discourses, and about the meaning of 'religion' itself. We reinscribe work on urban religion within a discussion of 'modernity' by dealing with the socio‐spatial mediation of religion and its role in redefining public spaces, practices, norms and discourses in contemporary cities. Individual articles map the spaces engendered by religious imaginaries and the forms of mobility and networks that religion relies on and constitutes, and they identify and analyze the roles played by mass media in religious practice and institution building, as well as the embodied nature of urban religious experience. They demonstrate how urban studies can be 'pluralized' and 'vernacularized' through analyses of how the urban realm is constituted in part through religious practice and meaning. Our attention to the articulation of religion with cities in Asia and Africa will also help to foster a new theoretical vocabulary within religious studies that is attentive to the historical, cultural and spatial contingencies of religion as a category of analysis.RésuméCet article présente un symposium sur la religion et la formation de l'espace urbain moderne en Asie et en Afrique. La propagation de mouvements religieux nouveaux, ainsi que les articulations entre religion, mondialisation et néolibéralisme, ont suscité des analyses originales sur le décalage des frontières géographiques et sociales entre les institutions, pratiques et discours "religieux" et "laïcs", et sur la signification de la religion elle‐même. Nous réinscrivons les travaux sur la religion urbaine dans une discussion sur la "modernité" en abordant la médiation socio‐spatiale de la religion et son rôle dans la redéfinition des pratiques, normes, discours et espaces publics dans les villes contemporaines. Les différents articles recensent les espaces générés par les imaginaires religieux, ainsi que les formes de mobilité et de réseaux que la religion élabore et sur lesquelles elle s'appuie ; de plus, ils identifient et analysent les rôles des médias dans la pratique religieuse et la construction de l'institution, et s'intéressent à la matérialité de l'expérience religieuse urbaine. Ils montrent comment les études urbaines peuvent être "pluralisées" et "vernacularisées" par le biais d'analyses sur la façon dont l'univers urbain se constitue en partie par la pratique et la signification de la religion. De plus, notre intérêt pour l'articulation de la religion avec les villes d'Asie et d'Afrique contribue à alimenter un nouveau lexique théorique pour les études religieuses, qui veille aux contingences historiques, culturelles et spatiales de la religion en tant que catégorie analysée.