Urbanisation and City-making in African Christianities: Remapping the ‘New Jerusalem’

The article discusses the making of Christian city-like spaces in the African context, shedding some light on processes of religious urbanisation and territorial remoralisation. The article first offers a contextualisation of these processes by focusing on much-discussed Pentecostal models of enclaved urbanism in particular in Lagos, Nigeria. Here the article explores the links between the formation of moral enclaves, the quest for infrastructural autonomy and the making of ‘alter-city’ landscapes, discussing the relevance of neo-Lefebvrian theorising of multi-scalar urban processes for an understanding of this type of religious urbanisation. Taking as case study the ‘New Jerusalem’ being built by Kimbanguists in Nkamba (in the DRC), the article then points to a need to pay attention to what the city (and the idea, the image of city) often conceals: the process of urbanisation, while discussing how the city’s ambivalent imaginaries and counter-imaginaries have not lost their relevance in an age of ‘planetary urbanisation’.