ReligioCity in Acre: Religious Processions, Parades, and Festivities in a Multi-Religious City

Abstract

This paper proposes the notion of ReligioCity as an analytical category to account for religious urbanism and urban influences on religion(s). This theoretical notion allows us to explore the ways religion and urban space are transformed together by current socio-political processes, but also to examine the ways the city’s landscape encompasses new expressions of religious materiality in the urban environment. Taking Acre, a small multi-religious and multi-ethnic city in the north of Israel the paper explores religious processions, parades, and festivities as public rituals which encompass ways of being in the city and of taking temporary control of specific city spaces while engaging with urban infrastructures. In what ways these spatial religious manifestations are dictated by urban infrastructures and at the same time influence the city and how they serve as forms of being in the city for participants? The argument is that these religious manifestations and spatializations are ways of placing religion as an identity marker, with the possibility of sustaining, projecting or even reinventing a sense of self and community in the changing landscape of cities.