Rebekah Coffman
Sacred Shift Project
sacredshiftproject@gmail.com
Keywords: culture, spirituality, ethics, sacred space, heritage studies, public history, urban planning, adaptive reuse
This dialogue circle proposes a discussion of how we– as architects, designers, historians, artists, preservationists, cultural workers, practitioners, and community members– honor the balance between tangible and intangible heritage in our care for and use of religious material culture. This conversation will be positioned through a framework termed by the facilitator as the “sacred shift,” which looks at the ritual reuse of sacred spaces by multiple faith traditions as a way of balancing community-led use alongside architectural conservation as a form of interfaith heritage. It will first introduce example case studies from London and Chicago that fit this framework. These will then serve as a jumping off point for other considerations for how preservation and use need careful reconsideration in the face of growing pressures of migration, climate change, community identities, financial pressures, and social sustainability in bringing forward sacred traditions for the future.
Since ancient times, how to preserve places of worship has been a fundamental preservation concern. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, heritage bodies have passed guidance, legal frameworks, and charters to create shared definitions of and care for material heritage. In the twenty-first century, topics of intangible heritage and living religious heritage have added complexity to what was before seen as static. In recent decades, these concerns have a growing urgency in the face of significant religious shifts. In countries such as the United States and United Kingdom, statistics of declining attendance and news of building closures in white-majority Christian denominations continually make headlines. Within this, assumptions about so-called “secularization” negate the reality of religious expression in many cities, where global ethnic majority and non-Christian practice is growing.
These growing pressures and shifting professional approaches are held in close tension with community-led practices and efforts to decolonize heritage institutions. In urban settings, emerging religious traditions and migrant communities have prioritized ritual over built form, making their legacies in many ways transient or easily erased. This can be informed by theology and belief (i.e. an emphasis on the spiritual and communal relationship over the built form) as well as from a point of financial and social access. Yet these uses form important, intangible forms of heritage that can often stand in conflict with traditional parameters for material heritage preservation.
Recognizing care for heritage exists within an ecosystem, this discussion circle aims to bring forward how heritage organizations, academic institutions, museums, religious communities, and we as individuals can best partner in preserving religious histories of the past, stewarding community identities in the present, and safeguarding traditions for the future. The format of the discussion circle will be a guided series of reflections. A sample of the reflection topics include:
- Sacred Shift: what is a shared heritage of belief? What do we define as “interfaith”? How do we position “sacred” and “secular” within this? How do we see the tangible/material informed by the intangible/spiritual?
- Heritage definitions: what does a specific term (i.e. preserve, conserve, safeguard, steward, etc.) mean to us? How have we seen this word enacted? How could this definition expand or change in the future?
- Urban pressures: where have we seen or experienced shifts in religion? What conversations do we wish were being had but are missing? Who is centered and who is at the margin?
- Heritage work: what does it mean for us all to see our role in continuing sacred and religious practices as a form of heritage work? Do we see a difference between secular and sacred institutional care for religious heritages? What are the costs and benefits of these differences? Where is the line between personal belief and communal stewardship?
- Heritage futures: what do we see as our shared roles in bringing balance to tangible and intangible heritages for the future? What do we see as unknown knowns beyond our lifetimes?
Proposed outcomes include:
- Encourage reconsideration of frequently used terms as relates to religious cultural heritage beyond material/architectural considerations
- Create a shared understanding of the mutually dependent roles and ecosystems for stewarding heritages
- Co-define a decolonial approach to stewarding transnational diasporic sacred traditions that considers the balance between tangible and intangible
- Imagine what sustainable, equitable religious futures could be, especially in contested urban settings
References
Aulet, Silvia and Dolors Vital. “Tourism and Religion: Sacred Spaces as Transmitters of Heritage Values.” Church, Communication and Culture 3, no. 3 (2018): 237-259.
Barthel, Diane. Getting in Touch with History: The Role of Historic Preservation in Shaping Collective Memories,” Qualitative Sociology 19, no. 3 (1996): 345-364
Biddington, Terry. Multifaith Spaces: History, Development, Design and Practice. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2021.
Coffman, Rebekah. “59 Brick Lane: A History of Adaptive Reuse.” Architecture and Culture 10, no. 4 (2022): 728-752.
Coffman, Rebekah. “Sacred Shift: creating, constructing and conserving sacred space at 59 Brick Lane.” Society of Architectural Historians Conference Paper, 2023.
Coffman, Rebekah. “The Sacred Shift: Architectural Conservation through Ritual Reuse.” Master’s Thesis, NYU, 2018-2019.
Djabarouti, Johnathan. “Listed Buildings as Socio-material Hybrids: Assessing Tangible and Intangible Heritage Using Social Network Analysis.” Journal of Heritage Management 5, no. 2 (2020): 169-190.
Djabarouti, Johnathan. “Stories of Feelings and Things: Intangible Heritage from Within the Built Heritage Paradigm in the UK.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 27, no. 4 (2020): 391-406.
Donofrio, Gregory. “Preservation by Adaptation: Is It Sustainable.” Change Over Time
Fincher, Ruth, Kurt Iveson, Helga Leitner, and Valerie Preston. “Planning in the Multicultural City: Celebrating Diversity or Reinforcing Difference?” Progress in Planning 92 (2014): 1-55.
Fisher, Thomas. “Toward a Multicultural Architecture.” Faith & Form (Spring 1996): 6-7.
Hafstein, Valdimar. Making Intangible Heritage: El Condor Pasa and Other Stories from UNESCO. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018.
Hammett, Jerilou and Maggie Wrigley, eds. The Architecture of Change: Building a Better World, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.
Harrison, Rodney, Caitlin DeSilvey, et. al. Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press, 2020.
Hartson, Taylor E. “Converted Structures: Exploring Material Expressions of the Sacred and Secular.” Review of Religious Research, 63 (2021): 435-459.
Hegner, Victoria and Peter Jan Margry, eds. Spiritualizing the City: Agency and Resilience of the Urban and Urbanesque Habitat. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2016.
Hicks, Rosemary E. “Religious Pluralism, Secularism, and Interfaith Endeavours.” The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (2013): 156-169.
Hwang, Jackelyn and Robert J. Sampson. “Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods.” American Sociological Review 79, no. 4 (August 2014): 726-751.
James, Luke. “The Symbolic Value of Expertise in International Heritage Diplomacy.” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism 13, no. 1 (2016): 82-96.
Loury, Glenn C., Tariq Modood, and Steven Michael Teles. Ethnicity, Social Mobility, and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Martin, Jerry L. Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.
Metcalf, Barbara Daly, ed. Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.
Murphy, James. “Beyond ‘Religion’ and ‘Spirituality’: Extending a ‘Meaning System’ Approach to Explore Lived Religion.” Archiv für Religionspsychologie / Archive for the Psychology of Religion 39, no. 1 (2017): 1-26.
Pew Research Center. “Modeling the Future of Religion in America.” 2022.
Pew Research Center. “Religious Landscape Study.” 2023- 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/.
Phan, Peter C. and Leo D. Lefebure. Theology Without Borders: Essays in Honor of Peter C. Phan. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2022.
Salter, Phia S. and Glenn Adams. “Provisional Strategies for Decolonizing Consciousness.” In Felice Blake, Paula Ioanide, and Alison Reed, eds. Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk about Racial Justice Matters. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2019: 299-323.
Stone, Sally. Undoing Buildings: Adaptive Reuse and Cultural Memory. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Stovel, Herb, Nicholas Stanley-Price, and Robert Killick, eds. Conservation of Living Religious Heritage: Papers from ICCROM 2003 Forum on Living Religious Heritage: conserving the sacred. Rome: ICCROM, 2005.
“The Global Phenomenon of Multifaith Worship Spaces.” Center for Architecture. https://www.centerforarchitecture.org/digital-exhibitions/article/the-global-phenomenon-of-multifaith-worship-spaces/case-studies/.
UNESCO. “About Intangible Heritage: What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage?” UNESCO. https://ich.unesco.org/en/what-is-intangible-heritage-00003.
Van Den Hemel, Ernst, Oscar Salemink, and Irene Stengs. Managing Sacralities: Competing and Converging Claims of Religious Heritage. New York: Berghahn, 2022.
Verkaaik, Oskar, ed. Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.Zelinsky, Wilbur and Stephen A. Matthews. The Place of Religion in Chicago. Chicago: The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2011.
