Religious Gentrification as Heterarchies of Urban Planning

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which religion(s) and religious groups are increasingly contributing to changes in the politics of planning of cities and challenge the hierarchical modern planning order. Following the notion of heterarchy as suggesting a diversity of relationships among elements in a system, the argument is made that the religious-cum-ethnic component is becoming part of an urban habitus that influences and redefines modern urban planning. Taking the case of a recently developed gentrified religious Jewish neighborhood in Acre, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious town in northern Israel, the article follows the ways in which urban planning is being shaped by three interrelated processes: the production of space driven by forms of capitalism intertwined with local heterarchical projects of space and power; a set of social struggles over urban space; and the framing of religious and ethnic urban identity.