Religion and the urban: historical developments

Taking seriously the proposition that space is condition, medium, and outcome of social relations, the development of religion in lived urban space as “urban religion” acknowledges processes of religious change that have been neglected by both the history of religion and the study of ancient urbanism. Our key thesis is that city-space engineered the major changes that revolutionised Mediterranean religions. Evidently, such a claim is beyond proof in the form of a book chapter. Thus we limit ourselves to plausibilising this claim as a basis for future investigation against the background of actual research and to developing the conceptual tools for such an enterprise. Consequently, we can only indicate lines of research that might be useful for a new approach to prayer as an urban practice with regard to its performance as much as its medial representation and by factoring in space in both regards.