Video of a lecture.

Globalization and the compression of space and time have fundamentally changed the standard relationships between peoples and places. Across the world, despite these changes, national, communal, and religious allegiances have often only become stronger. Some scholars argue that these strengthened ties are an important means of resistance against the hegemonic forces of globalization. Others interpret the rise of fundamentalist practices as articulating alternative forms of non-Western modernity. Many observers believe that the most powerful cause of this religious resurgence was the social, economic, and cultural modernization that swept across the world in the second half of the twentieth century, challenging deep-rooted understandings of modernity, tradition, and identity. In particular, some scholars argue that at the national level, people who migrate from the countryside to the city were often separated from older social networks. As they battle for economic survival, they become exposed to new sets of relationships and experiences, and become caught up in the trauma of modernization and the search for identity. Religion, be it mainstream or orthodox, seems to meet some of their needs.

Religious groups, and more recently those affiliated with orthodox ideologies, have also been increasingly called upon to provide social services in these marginalized communities, as their needs have been left unattended state bureaucracies. And when traditional religious ideas do not meet people's needs, they frequently turn to more radical and reactionary ones. Participants in new religious movements usually come from all walks of life, but they have overwhelmingly been residents of urban areas. The religious revival and the subsequent radicalism that has grown from it may thus be seen as an urban phenomenon.

My aim is to understand the urban processes by which religious movements transform into fundamentalist ones, possibly engaging in tactics of control that reshape the life and form of cities. After an overview of the territorial character of fundamentalism, I venture a definition of "fundamentalist" urbanism. I conclude by asking if we are returning to an era of a "medieval modernity"? As I have argued elsewhere, "If the 'feudal' is a system of political, economic and social relationships and if the 'medieval' is a system of ordering space, then the seemingly oxymoronic phrasing of 'medieval modernity' indicates how the medieval lurks at the heart of the modern, how the feudal exists within capitalism as best exemplified by the "Fundamentalist City".