Catholic Territories in a Suburban Landscape. Religion and Urbanization ium, 1945-1975.

This project studies how, in a context of industrialization, urbanization and secularization, the Roman Catholic Church tried to secure a religious presence in the rapidly evolving (sub)urban landscape in Belgium during the post-war period (1945-75). As the Roman Catholic Church can rightfully be considered as a territory-producing actor, we will interpret its impact on the spaces of everyday life by borrowing from the discourse on territoriality in geography and cultural anthropology. The project is structured according to 4 lines of inquiry: Expertise, Territory, Policy & Discourse and Strategy, corresponding to four more or less consecutive phases in the research activities. By examining the interaction between territory, ideology and community in the post war era, this project fills an important historiographical gap in the fields of religion, planning and architecture in Belgium. It maintains in particular that the development of Catholic infrastructure must be considered as a form of implicit urbanism that has fundamentally contributed to the countrys decentralized spatial organization. Further, the project will enable to position the Church authorities in a field of tensions between planned strategic effort and pragmatic circumstantial adaptations on the one hand, and innovation and tradition on the other. Finally, it will also offer an insight in how organized religion manages and marks its presence within a given territory, a burning issue in the light of the ever growing religious diversity in the contemporary urban environment.

Keywords:(urban) planning, religion, suburbanization, (modern) architecture, Catholic culture

Disciplines:History, Urban and regional design, development and planning, Architectural engineering, Architecture, Interior architecture, Architectural design, Art studies and sciences, Theology and religious studies