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Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations Blog

„Healthy Living” Stufu Podcasts (1/2)

Physical and mental health is (and was) an essential dimension of the liveable city. I explored this idea in a Studium Fundamentale (“Stufu”) which I offered in the summer term 2025 with my colleague Dr. Colleen Kron. This Stufu entitled “Healthy Living: History of Spatial Design for Health and Well-being” was opened to students in pedagogy and education, history, religious studies and other Bachelor’s programs of the Erfurt University…

KFG Closing Conference 2026

The KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (FOR 2779) is organising its closing conference “Religion and Urbanity New Research Paradigms for a Global Perspective?” on the 1-5 June 2026 in Erfurt. Since 2018, the research group “Religion and Urbanity” has challenged established views about urban structures, religious groups and their reciprocal formations. Over 100 Fellows have come together for longer and shorter stays, conferences, workshops and discussions. As the project is slowly coming to an end in the winter term 2026/27, it is time to look back and at the same time look to the future. What has this research perspective achieved? Has it changed the research landscape in the long term, and what needs to be modified and expanded? How can these topics be explored in greater depth or transferred to other areas?

Kalimpong as Tibet’s Penumbra: Shangri-la, Lhasa, Delhi and Beijing

My interest in writing the hook-ups between the Chinese, Tibetan and Indian towns/cities was to map out the exchanges— politico-historical as well as socio-cultural— between them. Setting up my theodolite, taking measurements as it were,  Kalimpong the border town offered a unique vantage point in the eastern Himalayas…

Summer School Report: Performing Religion in the City – Urban Spaces, Interactions and Media

Amidst the plastered narrow alleys of Erfurt’s city centre, fittingly emblematic, it was a piece of light-coloured sandstone that inaugurated the Summer School Performing Religion in the City. Placed on the seminar tables of Erfurt’s International Meeting Centre by co-convenor Isabella Schwaderer, the stone fragments represented the material grounding of Erfurt as a city and its religious life. Retrieved from a ridge close to Gotha, the stone was used to build Erfurt’s landmark, the Erfurt Cathedral, and thereby, symbolically, foreshadowed the Summer School’s theme…

Reading Religion Economically

The relationship between religion and economy involves materiality, spatiality, and temporality—and not a little imagination. Neither seeing religion as separate from the economy, nor as a superstructural projection of existing class relations, nor again as a commodity subject to rational selection within a “marketplace” of offerings, I propose to reread some “religious” texts and rituals in broadly economic terms and to reflect on the nature of religion more broadly…

„Religion, Urbanity and Sound “– 15th City Walk

Walking around in cities can be connected to hearing multiple things: People chatting, the tram and other vehicles passing by, church bells ringing, maybe even a melody coming from street musicians or an organ playing when passing a church. On our 15th City Walk on the 23rd of October, we explored how those and other sounds and music have an impact on Religion and Urbanity…

Conference Report: KFG Annual Conference “Making Boundaries”

While the topic of boundaries has received considerable scholarly attention, this conference focussed on the dynamic processes of making, maintaining and modifying or crossing boundaries and brought together scholars from various disciplines discussing case studies from Europe, the Mediterranean and South Asia from Antiquity to today…

Exploring Urban Religion in Poland: The Urban Religion Archive and the Religion Urbanity Mapping Project

This post introduces the Religion Urbanity Mapping (RUM) project. It started in 2021 with a dual focus. First, to rethink the concept of urban religion; and second, to apply this reframed concept in exploring the relatedness of religion and urbanity in the post-socialist CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) context. To date, the latter focus has been overlooked by urban studies and in the study of religion…

The Jewish Town of Izbica: History Inscribed in Space

In June, together with other members of the Urbanity and Religion research group, I went on an excursion to Mühlhausen. Our main aim was to visit the Thuringian state exhibition Freiheit 1525. 500 Years of the Peasants’ War. However, we also had time to take a walk through the beautiful historic town. As we were exploring the town, I came across a Stolperstein in memory of Leopold Löbenstein, who was deported in 1942 and, presumably, died in Izbica. This small town, located around 250 kilometres south-east of Warsaw, served as a transit ghetto during the Second World War, to which many Jews from Western Europe were deported…

Conference Report: Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead

Dealing with the dead and death is a topic that attracts scholars of every period. The universal question of transitioning from one state-of-being into the other represents a basic process applicable to every human being. As we all die one day and become part of the dead, their whereabouts and treatment will eventually affect every one of us. That is why this conference’s topic Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead has a natural attraction to it because all of us will die one day and join the ranks of the dead…