Presentation short abstract

This study applies a Religious Urban Political Ecology (RUPE) lens to examine how faith, power, and everyday practices shape sacred urban ecologies. Through participatory and visual ethnographic methods, it reveals how diverse human and more-than-human worlds co-produce urban religious spaces.

Presentation long abstract

Despite the centrality of urban religious spaces in India as socio-ecological zones shaping urban life, the methodological tools required to understand urban ecologies have remained underdeveloped. Religiously-mediated interactions among devotees, tourists, waste workers, administrators, and more-than-human entities such as rivers, waste, and sacred offerings often remain uncaptured due to plural and hybrid nature: simultaneously religiously coded, and embedded within urbanscape. Addressing this gap, the Religious Urban Political Ecology (RUPE) framework that I offer as an analytical convergence of Religious Political Ecology (RPE) and Urban Political Ecology (UPE), is equipped to examine how social interactions, power relations, and situated practices shape urban ecologies. While UPE underplays the role of faith, and sacred imaginaries, and RPE lacks an urban focus, RUPE emerges as a tool for examining the religio-cultural-political mediations shaping urban ecologies. These RUPE dimensions can be methodologically explored through Participatory Urban Appraisal (PUA) and ethno-graphy. While PUA enables grounded, bottom-up engagement with communities whose everyday practices co-produce these spaces, ethno-graphy integrates ethnographic methods with visualisation techniques, capturing intangible and experiential dimensions. Together, these methods allow simultaneous attention to the material, social, symbolic, and ecological registers of religious urban spaces. This methodological synthesis offers a qualitative-cum-visual account of how ecologically plural “worlds” coexist within sacred urban ecologies - the devotion of pilgrims, the situatedness of residents, administrative negotiations, and the agency of the river. By foregrounding these multi-layered narratives, the study advances methodologies debates in UPE and opens new pathways for analysing city-nature relationships and socio-ecological transformations in religious urban contexts.