CFA: Session: “Beyond Transcendence. Understanding Networks of Religious Belonging between Local Urban Parishes and Global Institutions since the Turn of the 20th Century”. European Association for Urban History (EAUH) Conference “City Networks in Europe and Beyond”, Barcelona, 02.-05.09.2026.
It is well known that the history of the European city has been closely linked to Christianity over the centuries. There is a strong awareness for the impact of parish structures and Christian institutions – usually of a domineering denomination – on the development, transformation and resilience of the urban fabric both socially and architecturally. In recent decades, there has also been an increased understanding of religious diversity, which is lived in parallel to the dominant pattern as a matter of course. While this has stimulated both discourse and research – above all on conflicts of interpretative sovereignty – the perspectives of fields such as religious studies, sociology or architecture and urban planning still largely develop with only few overlaps. However, they all contribute to understand the social and institutional networks within the city and beyond that anchor and are anchored in places of worship and religious belonging.
The panel aims at linking the different approaches to the study of religious bodies and their interaction with the urban and at gaining a comprehensive insight into the different scales applied to connect local communities to their cities, to regional religious infrastructure and global faith systems. We seek to understand how religious bodies and their social networks contribute to the resilience of their social and built environment.
We invite scholars from various disciplines, including but not limited to urban history and urban planning, sociology, religious and cultural studies and architectural history, to present case studies of cooperation independent of religion or denomination, both intra-confessional, between denominations or between religious bodies and the secular world.
This might include cases of handing down, sharing and/or inheriting spaces of worship or parish buildings (with or without heritage status) and networks of ecumenical cooperation up to inter-faith initiatives or address the challenges of space making for communities consisting of commuting faithful.
Among others, the contributions can touch on questions like which goals or missions the networks are working towards, who the founding and supporting actors are, what makes the network an urban affair or in which way they are religious. The contributions might also address how networks affect the appropriation and utilisation of architecturally defined spaces, for example with regard to symbolic forms or the renunciation of such.
Session organisers: Beate Löffler (Dortmund), Veronika Eufinger (Hannover)
Submissions (no more than 450 words) + CV should be made via the EAUH site: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/call-for-papers/
An overview of the individual sessions is available here https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/sessions/# and the specific session here https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/sessions/#session87
Submission deadline: October 22, 2025