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In Religious Studies, the‘spatial turn’ as advanced by Kim Knott has rapidly been taken up by otherscholars who have given her ‘spatial analysis’ of ‘the location of religion’ aprogrammatic role. More recently, anthropologist Stephan Lanz has proposed acomprehensive definition of ‘urban religion’ as ‘a specific element ofurbanisation and urban everyday life … intertwined with … urban lifestyles andimaginaries, infrastructure and materialities, cultures, politics andeconomies, forms of living and working, community formation, festivals and celebrations’(Lanz 2014, 25). ‘Urban religion’ is furtherspecified as ‘a continual process in which the urban and the religiousreciprocally interact, mutually interlace, producing, transforming and definingeach other’ (26). Lanz enlarges the class of agents that are of interest byinvoking ‘subaltern urbanism’ and characterising religious practices as a‘“prescriptive regime” (…), where technologies of power and technologies of theself intermesh in its practice of governmentality’ (28). The interest here isin practices involving the mediation of the urban and the religious, thusopposing the idea that the character of the city is principally secular.Lanz’s definition is deictic rather than delineative. It draws attention to the thoroughness of the interaction between the urban and what people think of as religious actions. The object defined by ‘urban religion’ is a process in which these religious practices and the urban are both involved, a context in which religious actions take place, rather than an identifiable subset of ‘religion’ (or the ‘urban’). The boundaries of the object under scrutiny are only implicit in the framework of the ‘Global Prayers’ project in which Lanz is a leading participant. They are spelled out more clearly in a review of the field (Garbin and Strhan 2017, 6-11). Apart from older issues concerning, for example, the role of religion in welfare and justice, two further related, but not necessarily convergent, processes define urban religion. The first is the rise of the post-secular. Despite the range of scholarly perspectives on the recent developments in the variety of secular-religious divides and their associated regimes, all are in agreement that there has been a pluralisation of options, to the extent that religion is now regarded as a central element for the phenomenon of ‘super-’ or ‘hyper-diversity’. This diversity is the result of the crossing of many different dividing lines and of the complex processes of situational salience of one category or the other (Aspinall and Song 2013). On the other hand, globalisation is not only a major force for urbanisation and pluralisation by way of the many types of migration, but also in the presence of flows that involve and trans-localise cities. With regard to religion, trans-local contacts and the trans-local presence of an ever-growing number of ‘universal’ religions shape local religion – as much as cities – without denying the importance of locality. Here, we need to both accommodate and account for a multi-layered ‘glocalisation’ that shows very different and, at times, quite contrary effects, sometimes questioning and sometimes reinforcing local religious or urban power (Garbin and Strhan 2017, 15-18). Further, it is important that we not lose sight of the broad range of ‘deviant’ forms of religious practices and beliefs that are frequently set aside as mere ‘folk religion’.The concept of ‘urban religion’ thus opens up a wide field of urgently needed research. Some qualifications are, however, necessary. We can summarise and enlarge upon the observations of Garbin and Strhan by identifying three important implications and consequences of the dominant use of ‘urban religion’. First,the real object of study is not religion at all but globalisation, with‘religion’ serving as a ‘lens’ through which to examine globalisation. Thisinterlacing of globalisation, cities, and religion does not open up a space forhistorical research, even if historians of religion have been willing to employthis concept in examining specific premodern instances of translocality,universalisation, regionalisation, and localisation, as well as theinteractions among them. The underlying theories of Modernity, even ifnon-Eurocentric, put astop sign here as they condition the concept of ‘urban religion’ in such a way as to make it of only limiteduse for studying the pre-modern world. Thiscontemporary use of religion has a second implication. Religion is neverclosely defined in this context by reference to its spatial properties. Rather,it just happens to be confronted with, and has to employ tools to deal with,space. It is only in the discourse on ‘iconic religion’ that scholars have comecloser to addressing this problem (Knott, Krech andMeyer 2016). Thevariability of post-secular religious pluralism seems to exclude thepossibility of a more specific relationship between religious practices and thespaces within which they occur. Finally,and rather surprisingly, ‘the city’ or ‘the urban’ is treated as a given bythese scholars, unquestionable in the face of global megalopolises with theirpopulations in excess of eight or ten million inhabitants. Cities are notregarded as culturally produced orders that construct differences – urban andnon-urban, religious and secular – which ‘make a difference’.I suggest, however, to focus interest on religion andon religious transformations. It is the historical dimension of religious,rather than urban, transformations that has been overlooked in considerationsof their mutual entanglement. ‘Religion’is not a given but is, rather, construed as both the theoretical object thatunderlies empirical historical research as proposed here, following Jonathan Z.Smith’s conception: ‘The generic category supplies the field with a theoreticalobject of study, different from, but complimentary to their particular subjectmatters’ (Smith 2001, 142). The researchbriefly reviewed above, with its interest in the relationship between religionand the urban, suggests that the concept of ‘urban religion’ should provide auseful starting point, even if it is in need of considerable modification. Asis the case with ‘visible religion’, ‘material religion’, or ‘iconic religion’,the language of ‘urban religion’ preconditions an approach to religion from aparticular angle. As we have seen, urban religion does not focus on theaesthetic or, in terms of practice, on the media properties of religion but,rather, on a specific spatial setting, namely religion in the city and, in particular,post-secular religion in the contemporary globalised city.&#160; ‘Urbanreligion’ offers a loose umbrella term that may be helpful in connecting analmost exclusively presentist line of research with much longer-term processes.However, if it is to be used as an analytical instrument of a contingentconstellation (religion that happens to be urban religion) rather than as atheorised concept of religion (religion if seen as urban religion), thisapproach needs to be supplemented by a more fundamental reflection on religionas a spatial practice. Only on such a basis can it be put to use in a searchfor the most fruitful perspective from which to approach religion and ‘thecity’.And such an approach promises results. When viewed from a historical perspective, religion can be seen to have been responsible for dramatic developments in the history of cities, playing important roles in waves of immigration, transformation, and ghettoisation, as well as in the founding and destruction of cities. We can say with certainty that religion has been a decisive factor in the development of the concept of citizenship, as well as in justifying the expulsion of large groups. It has also contributed to the monumentalisation of city centres and has given importance to places outside the centre. And yet, even when pursuing this type of historical research, little attention has been paid to the urban character of religious ideas, practices, and institutions, or to the role of urban space in shaping this very ‘religion’. It is exactly this shift in perspective, this double focus on the reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity that is suggested by our new take on ‘urban religion’.ReferencesAspinall, P.J. and Song, M. 2013, 'Is race a 'salient...' or 'dominant identity' in theearly 21st century: The evidence of UK survey data on respondents' sense of whothey are', Soc Sci Res 42 (2), 547-61.Garbin, Davidand Strhan, Anna (eds.) 2017, Religionand the Global City (Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place), NewYork: Bloomsbury. Knott, Kim,Krech, Volkhard and Meyer, Birgit 2016, 'Iconic Religion in Urban Space', Material Religion 12 (2), 123-36.Lanz, Stephan2014, 'Assembling Global Prayers in the City: An Attempt to Repopulate UrbanTheory with Religion', in Jochen Becker et al. (eds.), Global prayers: Contemporary manifestations of the religious in thecity (MetroZones 13), Zürich: Müller. 16-47.Smith,Jonathan Z 2001, 'The History of the History of Religions' History', Numen 48 (2), 131-46.The text is based on the introduction to my book “Urban religion: A historical approach to urban growth and religious change”, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020.— Jörg RüpkeJörg Rüpke is a scholar of religion, focusing on the ancient world. He is the co-spokesperson of the KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations”.