Belonging and Success: Religious Vitality and the Politics of Urban Space in Cape Town

Abstract

This chapter analyses how, the South African city of Cape Town, religious vitality produced by religious practices that are bound up with the ways in religious spaces and urban spaces mutually constitute and configure one another. It also pinpoints the complexities arising from the challenges of belonging and success as they take shape in the townships of Cape Town. The practices within which these challenges acted upon as both embedded in and generating local forms of religious vitality opens up a conceptual space for thinking about how religious spaces and urban spaces intersect. To differentiate South African cities from other cities on the continent is that here organized religion ties in with non-religious traditions of civic engagement and activism. Moreover, it re-channels the remnants of a not-yet fully sobered up nationalist discourse on collective progress, which promises both belonging and success, but repeatedly fails to fulfil the expectations it raises. Keywords:Cape Town; politics; Religious vitality; South Africa; urban space