Planning faith: Religious space, racialisation and urban change
Join us for a conversation exploring how planning can reflect on the complex relationships between faith, race, and urban space.
Planning faith: Religious space, racialisation and urban change
The Bartlett Socially Just Planning Doctoral Network proposes a conversation exploring how planning might more critically reflect on the complex relationships between faith, race, urban space and process of urban transformation.
Religious infrastructure – including places of worship, faith-based community institutions, and other infrastructures (don’t like repetition) supporting daily cultural life – play a central yet often underrecognised role in shaping urban space.
These spaces function not only as sites of spiritual practice, but also support belonging, political organisation, cultural reproduction and economic change. At the same time, they are deeply entangled in processes of racialisation and minoritisation, neighbourhood change, land use conflict, and, in some cases, gentrification.
This event brings together research that examines how religious communities shape space in what is often perceived as the ‘secular city’, and how urban space is a site of active contestation, where here planning, conflicting needs and priorities, racialisation, and urban transformation intersect.
Reflecting on questions such as:
- How do planning systems enable or constrain religious communities?
- In what ways do faith-based infrastructures shape neighbourhood transformation?
- How are race, identity, and capital negotiated through religious space?
- What responsibilities do planners have when mediating claims to faith-based land use and urban belonging?
Join online
This is a hybrid event - to join online please register via Zoom:
Kamna Patel is Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit. Her research and field of practice concerns the relationships between race and development, and builds on three strands: housing, land tenure and citizenship in the urban Global South, reflexive practice and postcolonial scholarship on the teaching and practice of ‘development’, and the application of a race lens to understanding and taking action for equity and justice.
Dr Said Mahathir
Assistant Professor
Ar-Raniry State Islamic University
Said Mahathir is a lecturer and researcher in architecture and urban planning, specialising in Islamic urbanism, religious infrastructure, and spatial ethnography. He completed his PhD at the Development Planning Unit, The Bartlett, UCL, where his research examined how Muslim communities produce and transform religious space in London. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Ar-Raniry State Islamic University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.
Martin Francisco Saps
PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant
King's College London Department of Geography
Martin is a writer, researcher, and urbanist whose work explores how global politics shape everyday urban life. He focuses on how large-scale political forces—such as nationalism, migration, and decolonization—are experienced and contested in cities. His thesis, “Stamford Hill: property, technology, and the making of urban religious life” examines how the younger generation of Haredi Jews in Stamford Hill, London negotiate identity amid the pressures of a housing crisis.
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Ticketing
Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes