UNIC Lightning Bites | Religious diversity in the city

Within the framework of UNIC Lightning Bites series focused on Superdiversity Unpacked: Insights for Tomorrow's Cities we explore how superdiversity shapes cities and citizens, fostering new forms of urban innovation, social cohesion, and cultural transformation.

Professor Gorka Urrita, from the University of Deusto, explores the coexistence between people and groups of different religious affiliation or without religious identification, which continues to be a socially relevant element today. Our cities and towns today house a growing diversity of identities and social or cultural groups. Among them, those of religious or philosophical inspiration play a very important role in the lives of many people and maintain formal or informal relationships with both institutions and public space considered in a broad sense.

Regional and local institutions, being the closest to citizens, are faced with the need to manage growing demands for accommodation for religious reasons or the responses to such accommodations by other social groups. In the local space, actors and dynamics converge, which in a constant relationship condition the enjoyment of rights and the social and neighbourhood climate.