How is the sacred embodied in Greater Paris today? By examining the relationship between the Paris conurbation and the sacred, we can bring together the views of historians, geographers, sociologists, architects and urban planners. They all observe the same contradictory tensions.
Whereas in the 1980s and early 1990s, geographers and sociologists were looking to see how the city would emerge from the religious sphere and how civic sacralities would be swept away by post-modern individualism, today we see that not only does the sacred continue to make the city its home, but that it resists it better than in other types of space. The city remains a melting pot for new forms of sacredness.
The sacred as an urban function continues to profoundly mark the identities of the globalized metropolis, in ways that both continue and break with the legacies of past centuries. The restoration of Notre-Dame after the fire of April 15, 2019 was a reminder of the radical centrality of the sacred in the capital. The construction site, scrutinized by the eyes of the entire world, showed that this sacredness is very much alive, that it goes beyond the religious sphere without ever excluding it, that it says something about what the city is. To the point, perhaps, of making us forget that dozens of restoration or construction projects for sacred buildings, religious or memorial, are underway, especially on the outskirts of the metropolis, whose dynamism in this area is a form of revenge, or rebalancing, in the face of the dense heritage of the sacred in the urban center. The sacred, both religious and non-religious, has been adorning buildings, shaping neighborhoods and routes from Antiquity to the present day. It also generates collective rituals within the city, conditioning the bond between people and giving meaning to individual and collective actions.
The sacred as an urban function continues to profoundly mark the identities of the globalized metropolis, in ways that both continue and break with the legacies of past centuries. The restoration of Notre-Dame after the fire of April 15, 2019 was a reminder of the radical centrality of the sacred in the capital. The construction site, scrutinized by the eyes of the entire world, showed that this sacredness is very much alive, that it goes beyond the religious sphere without ever excluding it, that it says something about what the city is. To the point, perhaps, of making us forget that dozens of restoration or construction projects for sacred buildings, religious or memorial, are underway, especially on the outskirts of the metropolis, whose dynamism in this area is a form of revenge, or rebalancing, in the face of the dense heritage of the sacred in the urban center. The sacred, both religious and non-religious, has been adorning buildings, shaping neighborhoods and routes from Antiquity to the present day. It also generates collective rituals within the city, conditioning the bond between people and giving meaning to individual and collective actions.
