Book review: The Fragmented Politics of Urban Preservation: Beijing, Chicago, and Paris

The notion that over time modern industrial society would see the withering and disappearance of religion has long been taken as both true and banal. Associated with the work of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, this theory, known as the secularization thesis, has come in for wide critique. This fascinating collection of essays begins on the ground cleared by this earlier critique. The Sacred in the City, edited by Liliana Gómez and Walter Van Herck, brings together considerations of religion and the city (considered as place, as built environment, and as sociological reality), examining how they interact with and influence each other. In an effort to be both broad-based in their investigations and precise about what they are discussing, Gómez and Van Herck suggest that the central focus of the book is not “religion” as such, but “the sacred,” as a more encompassing term. The former bears connotations of “belief structures, institutions [and] hierarchies,” whereas the latter “is more connected to an embodied attachment to symbols, buildings, monuments and other cultural manifestations” (p. 3). This attention to the sacred in the city allows the collection to examine an “important relationship through which the comprehension of emergent contemporary cultural and political phenomena may be possible” (p. 6). The contributors agree that the sacred did not disappear as society was modernized (contra the secularization thesis), but instead has existed within modernity, often in subtle or surprising ways (p. 5). As an example of this persistence the editors cite James Holston’s discussion of the modernist city of Brası́lia and its intentional use of a cross in order to give the new city a “legendary foundation” and hence, legitimation (p. 2, citing The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique, 1989). The symbols and monuments which characterize the sacred persist—although their meanings and use may change, sometimes dramatically. The book is arranged in four sections, moving from the more general and theoretical to the more specific and concrete. The first section brings several philosophical, critical, and political perspectives to bear on the intersection of space, place and the sacred. The next section considers more closely the interactions of religion with the built environment and the phenomenon of urbanization. The penultimate section examines specific aspects of Western Christian material culture, including images of the Tower of Babel, a medieval map of the world, and the contemporary Chapel of Silence, located in a shopping mall. These chapters reveal ambiguities and surprises in people’s responses to and negotiations of the city through the sacred. The final group of essays explores four specific contemporary urban spaces found in Israel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cuba, and Ukraine, in to order assay people’s interaction with the sacred in these contexts. Throughout the book, the authors show, in various ways, the continuing relevance of the sacred to the city and contemporary investigations of it. In some cases, rather than fading away, as predicted, the authors show that the sacred continues to serve political ends of legitimation for city and state: for example, the design of Brası́lia, noted above, or the efforts of Ukraine to reclaim its national identity in part through sacred images, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Other chapters show that sacred symbols and stories continue in meaningful ways (and in sometimes surprising reformulations) to aid the personal task of reflecting on matters of life and negotiating one’s place in society. Peter Nynäs and Anne Birgitta Pessi engage with this through an examination