What role do religious and ethnic community play in shaping social life in modern urban environments? This research project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, asks in what ways these identities are reshaped by the changing nature of cities themselves. Since the late nineteenth century, many researchers have assumed that urban environments are the antithesis of traditional life, dense worlds of money, markets, and diversity where individuals are atomized and rebuilt into crowds and class-based political movements. Left aside in these accounts is the continued role of urban religious infrastructures in shaping city life. With the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs projecting that urban environments will be home to over two-thirds of the global population by 2050, there is an urgent need for social scientists to reconsider how religious and ethnic forms of community are woven into urban environments, and what role they play in shaping where and how people live, socialize, and experience the city.
Byron Gray, under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Hansen of Stanford University, will explore what role community identities have in structuring property markets, intra-urban migration, and perceptions of urban space. This research project focuses on the 500-year-old Catholic community of Mumbai, India as a window into these dynamics. Predating the city's development from a Portuguese settlement into India's premier global city, the Mumbai Catholic community presents an ideal case study for examining the nexus between religion and the transformation of urban environments. Indeed, over the past 30 years, many members of this 600,000-strong population have abandoned their traditional neighborhoods in the south of the city for its expanding northern wards, a process that has reshaped Catholics' longstanding relationship with the city and one another. Using a combination of interviews, participant observation, archival work, and demographic mapping, this project will map out the legal and social means through which communities assert control over properties and neighborhoods in Mumbai, and the ritual and social practices through which such neighborhoods are made into meaningful community spaces. In addition to testing the hypothesis that religious and ethnic forms of community often act as key forces shaping property markets and the lived experience of urban residents, the project also aims to understand how community identities are themselves transformed when unsettled from existing spatial arrangements. The findings of this study will not only improve understandings of the social and political dynamics of the world's largest democracy, but also more broadly to urban planners and policymakers interested in the complicated nexus between community and changing urban environments.
