Religioni e spazi ibridi nella città contemporanea: profili di metodo e di storiografia

Religious places are a privileged observation lens in analyzing the super-diversity of the urban fabric. Besides being worship places, they are multiform spaces of cultural, social, and economic practices. In Italy, due to the absence of an adequate legislative framework, such religious places are often at the crossroad between visibility and invisibility, formality and informality, as well as functional specialization and hybridization; which make up the theme of reflections of this paper. The paper proposes two dynamics of hybridization in order to foster and facilitate interdisciplinary research. The first one, the so-called “multi-religious places” or “shared places”, refers to places that were previously secular but have become temporarily religious places as well as to those places which pass from one religion to another in terms of shared place, temporal partitioning or overlapping. The second one refers to religious places, predominantly of historical and artistic interest, in which the worship activities were ceased and are used by communities for various activities, including hybrid functions.