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On Tuesday, 9 July 2019, KFG post-doctoral fellow and steering group member Asuman Lätzer-Lasar will present a paper as part of the colloquia held at the Max Weber Centre. The paper considers the concept of "place making" in antiquity and combines insights from archaeology, urban planning, history and religious studies to explore the ways in which religious space was shaped.  The choice of location of a sanctuary was mainly dependent on its sacred geomancy, recognized, for instance, through an augurium during the Roman period. However, in dense and crowded places such as a city, there were also other needs and requirements that had to be respected, such as urban topography, infrastructure and accessibility, as well as policy, economy, local legislation, or even traditions. Establishing a place for religious communication, be it a sanctuary, a grave or the erection of a dedication to a deity therefore had to be a negotiation between the religious communicator and the physical and non-physical pre-existing environment. However, even in antiquity the establishment of places of religious  communication in dense and diversely crowded cities cannot have been  taken place as mere top-down processes decided only by elite, ruling  actors without taking any significant and urban-related factors into  account. Lätzer-Lasar argues that the decision-making process, when creating a place  for religious communication, was an interplay of spaces, objects, actors, practices and imagination (, i.e. aspirations and semantics) that lead involuntarily to reciprocity.The paper describes the term “placemaking”, which  derives from the disciplines of urban planning and geography, in order to  elucidate its advantages and disadvantages for the research of ancient  cities and religions. The cocnept is developed into a specific form, "Religious Ancient Placemaking". The paper is a first attempt to make the concept suitable for the discipline of archaeology and enrich it with examples from the ancient city of Rome – because it is an exceptional city that provides a plethora of material and written sources and therefore guarantees a qualitatively broad variety of phenomena – and then to apply the conceptual framework on a specific case study, which will be the Provincia Hispania.The paper takes place from 10 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. on Tuesaday 09 July at the Max Weber Centre, Erfurt. 