Urban Religion and the Post-Socialist City: Archives, Icons, Logics and Spatial Transformations (Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place)

This open access book rethinks urban religion in the context of the social, economic and political transformations in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Grounded in extensive ethnographic studies conducted in three major cities in Poland - Kraków, Gdansk and Lublin - this book engages, critiques and expands the framework of urban religion.It disentangles the concept of urban religion from specific religious traditions, instead presenting it as a modality of urban life that is embedded in a vast social field.Through its focus on Poland, it furthermore argues and shows that the Western-centric theories on religion in urban space that dominate the field do not fully capture the religious infrastructures, practices and dynamics that characterize post-socialist regions in Central and Eastern Europe.Engaging digital humanities and using innovative experimental methodologies - including mapping, archiving, assembling, aggregating and scaling - to analyse an extensive data set of more