Problem addressed. Religion in public space has become a flashpoint in diverse cities. Visible signs of minority faiths regularly reach courts and city halls over questions like locating places of worship, minaret height, school-display rules, or clothing in public spaces. Across Europe, restrictions on such manifestations have grown over recent decades, with policymakers struggling to balance public opinion, religious freedom, integration concerns, and public order.
Yet despite the political stakes and evidence that religious cues can shape attitudes, social science has rarely measured how everyday exposure to religion in streets and neighborhoods affects belonging, place attachment, identities, trust, and civic life.
Importance to society. Public religion can foster trust and “acts of citizenship,” others to heighten intergroup tension
help people feel recognized and included and foster trust and “acts of citizenship,” yet it can also foster isolationism and heighten intergroup tension. Understanding when, for whom, and why visible religion fosters engagement or alienation is crucial for urban planning, integration policy, and democratic cohesion.
Objectives. Most studies treat “religion” as an individual trait (beliefs, attendance, identity) or a national policy context, overlooking spatial visibility in ordinary places where people live and move.
This gap raises concrete questions: Do visible religious cues help immigrants engage locally, endorse shared civic norms, and feel they belong, or do they increase alienation or out-group antipathy? Do effects differ by minority-religion tradition (e.g. Islam vs. Judaism), by people’s own predispositions, or by the host city’s model of state-religion relations (e.g. Paris vs. London)? Under what conditions do such cues matter most, for whom, and why? What are the effects of exposure to minority religion on majority-religion host society members sharing the urban space? What are the consequences for coexistence? For policy? ReligSpace was designed to tackle exactly these questions with comparative, causal, and spatially explicit methods.
Thus, the overall objectives of ReligSpace were: (1) to develop a theoretical framework explaining how religion influences acculturation and urban coexistence; (2) to empirically identify the causal impact of micro-level religious contexts on acculturation and coexistence; and (3) to examine the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of potential effects
