Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores how religious buildings and symbols in precarious urban settlements shape people’s imaginations and aspirations for the future. These aspirations include visions on what constitutes a good life and a good community in the face of (perceived) moral degradation and violence.

Paper long abstract:

In Jakarta and Rio de Janeiro, residents of informal and precarious settlements organize themselves through a variety of social and spiritual networks. These networks materialize in the urban environment through buildings, objects, and images that serve as important reference points not only for dealing with pervasive precarity and uncertainty but also for enacting moral aspirations about a good life and a good community. For instance, in Jakarta's kampungs, enclosed settlements spread across the city, buildings such as the mosque and the watchhouse (gardu) play a pivotal role in enabling residents to navigate the fragmented and pluralized urban landscape. Moreover, these buildings form a critical part of the urban religious infrastructure, which shapes the ways in which future moral aspirations are materialized and political subjectivities are remade. In Rio de Janeiro, informal settlements known as favelas form part of an urban environment characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability due to territorial disputes and police violence. Mural paintings of Christian-Jewish symbols, commissioned by a local drug trafficking gang, draw on these popular imaginations of the city as a site of struggle and suffering. At the same time, the murals also offer an alternative vision of the future of the favela as a space of divine exception and promise. Our findings are the result of one year ethnographic fieldwork in Jakarta and Rio de Janeiro and form part of a broader project that examines the role of religion in urban governance configurations in megacities of the Global South.