Heterarchy and the Urban: Re-Envisioning Order to Account for Change

Transferred from neurophysiology and cybernetics to the humanities and the social sciences, the notion of heterarchy has contributed to changing the way in which power structures other than hierarchies are seen as patterns for order in complex societies. Challenging the conflation of order with ranked order, heterarchical thinking has affected and refined the very idea of social complexity. New models for cultural evolution appear when hierarchy is uncoupled from complexity and heterarchical relations are observable throughout the historical development of a society as well as at different levels of a social system. This article seeks to enrich the Religion and Urbanity approach by introducing the concept of heterarchy and demonstrating its relevance to the study of urban religion