Richard Gale

Representing the City: Mosques and the Planning Process in Birmingham

There has been very little research into the effects of urban planning policy and practice upon religious groups amongst the South Asian diaspora in Britain. This paper attempts to make up some of this shortfall by examining the role of urban planning procedure in regulating the location, architectural form and use by Muslims of mosques and religious education establishments in Britain. Birmingham, in the West Midlands, provides the empirical focus. The paper has two parts. The first part is historical and traces the modes of interaction between mosque committees in the city and the local planning authority, focusing principally upon the Birmingham Central Mosque. The second part examines the contemporary situation, using quantitative data on planning decisions and the results of semi-structured interviews with members of various mosque committees in Birmingham. Interviewees were asked to evaluate the responses of the City Council to planning applications relating to their places of worship and education.

Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in the new Religious Landscape of England

This article examines the dramatic changes brought to English townscapes by Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism. These “new” religions have arrived with the large‐scale immigration and subsequent natural growth of the minority ethnic populations of Great Britain since the 1950s. The article traces the growth and distribution of these populations and religions, as well as the development of their places of worship from front‐room prayer rooms to cathedral‐scale buildings. It explores the way in which the British planning process, dedicated to preserving the traditional, has engaged with the exotic.

Contemporary grammars of political action among ethnic minority young activists

Abstract Despite public and media attention to ethnic minority young peoples political engagement in recent times, often expressed in crisis narratives about disengagement, disaffection or extremism, there has been little consideration of the range, or distinctive forms, of political action among ethnic minority young people. The purpose of this article is to address this by presenting qualitative research on political activism among ethnic minority young people in Birmingham and Bradford. We find evidence for ‘new grammars of action’ and highly ‘glocal’ (as distinct from transnational and diasporic) political orientations among the activists with whom we worked, as well as the significance of religious (as distinct from ethnic) identities in informing some activists’ political engagements. We conclude that, while there is evidence for changing political subjectivities, there is a need to take account of the interplay between old and new grammars of political action.

Religious residential segregation and internal migration: The British muslim case

Concerns over British Muslim integration have been to the fore of public debate over much of the last decade, with Muslim segregation constituting a key issue. Recent analyses have usefully shown that current concerns over segregation levels in the UK are exaggerated. However, these analyses continue to rely on census ethnicity data, which are used as proxy for religion to draw inferences about Muslim residential phenomena. Focusing on Birmingham, this paper redresses this tendency by using religion data to explore religious segregation directly. Adopting established measures of segregation and Special Migration Statistics (SMS) by religion for the year 2000/01, the paper shows that, whilst Muslim segregation in Birmingham is high, there has been a significant if spatially constrained movement away from concentrated inner urban areas.

Locating Religion in Urban Planning: Beyond ‘Race’ and Ethnicity?

This article aims to expand the scope of existing research on ‘race’, ethnicity and planning by exploring the relationship between planning and religion, drawing on field research in Birmingham into the effects of urban planning procedure on British Muslims. The article moves away from the understanding—implicit in much of the literature on planning and ‘difference’—that religion is simply an epiphenomenon of ethnicity. It achieves this, firstly, by exploring the ways in which Muslims qua Muslims have experienced particular forms of constraint in the context of interactions between religious organizations and the planning system; and secondly, by examining the ways in which Muslims have mobilized religious values and beliefs in (periodically transformative) challenges to planning practice.

Race at the margins: A Critical Race Theory perspective on race equality in UK planning:

Despite evidence of the growing ethnic diversity of British cities and its impact on urban governance, the issue of racial equality in UK planning remains marginal, at best, to mainstream planning activity. This paper uses Critical Race Theory to consider the reasons why the ‘race’ and planning agenda continues to stall. Critical Race Theory, it is argued, offers a compelling account of why changes in practice over time have been patchy at best, and have sometimes gone into reverse.

Politically (In)different? Political Engagement amongst Ethnic Minority Young People

When the political engagement of ethnic minority young people has featured in public debates in the UK, it has typically been connected with concerns about disengagement, disaffection or extremism. For instance, in the anxious debates about youth political apathy in the UK in recent years (Hay 2007), connected to the low levels of electoral participation among 18–24 year olds in elections since 2001 (Marsh et al. 2007), it is suggested that ethnic minority young people are even less likely to turn out to vote compared to young people in general or older ethnic minority groups (Purdam et al. 2002; Electoral Commission 2005), and that ethnic minority young people are less civically engaged (Janmaat 2008).

The Political Geography of Ethnicity and Religion in Young People’s Political Engagement

So far, many of the interventions this book has made into debates surrounding the political participation of ethnic minority young people have been set out according to a temporal frame of reference. This reflects the principal orientations of these debates towards concern with the apparent continuities, shifts and changes over time that can be identified in how young people politically engage. Hence in Chapter 1, we began by showing how much of the public concern expressed in relation to the political engagement of ethnic minority young people has intensified through crisis narratives on the secular decline in levels of electoral turnout. Whilst it will be apparent that we do not accede to the equivalence that is often established between falling electoral participation and ‘political apathy’, our critique rests upon an investigation of alternative forms of participation and how these relate to more conventional modes. Furthermore, an integral part of this critique rested upon the use of a ‘political biographical’ approach — set out and applied particularly in Chapter 4 — as a way of examining the diverse forms of political action in which activists engaged — including group based, institutional, networked, virtual and everyday forms activism. In Chapters 6 and 7, we developed our analysis of the significance of identities based on ethnicity, race, religion and gender in shaping activists’ engagement across these repertoires of action, relating this to the changing character of cultural theory as it relates to debates on black identity politics, from the beginning of the 1990s to the present.

Gendered Roles, Spaces and Political Activism

In this chapter, we consider the intersections between ethnicity, gender and political activism among ethnic minority young people, paying attention to the ways in which these shaped political consciousness and activism among the activists with whom we worked. We begin by considering briefly intersections between ethnicity, gender and the political, and how these have been discussed within debates on feminism and feminist politics in the work of black, Muslim and Islamic feminist and politics of recognition literatures. These literatures have focused particularly on distinctive political issues among ethnic minority women - drawing attention to distinctive, and sometimes autonomous, political struggles. We then reflect on the growing focus on gender within the study of race and ethnicity and how this has been traced through political and public discourses, particularly in discourses on raced bodies and sexualities and black, Asian and Muslim masculinities and femininities. We consider how these intersections between race, ethnicity and gender have featured in contemporary academic writings and public discourses on ethnic minority young people — including some of the distinctive ways these have played out in Birmingham and Bradford in recent times.

‘Race’, Culture and Representation: The Changing Contours of Identity Politics

In the previous chapter, we considered the ways in which the state enshrines a variety of models of youth participation, and the implications this has for ethnic minority young people’s political engagement. In particular, we examined how Birmingham and Bradford have developed divergent models of participation for young people in the form of their respective youth parliaments. Left largely implicit in our discussion of these models was the issue of how institutions of the state, at both local and central levels, inscribe and enact particular constructions of the identities of the groups they target in their policies and initiatives. In this and the following chapter, we address the political connotations of changing ethnic and cultural identity categories, exploring how specific categories of identity become lodged in the political and operational machinery of the state, and the implications this had for young people’s political identity formation and mobilisation. Given their centrality to the emerging research literature, we position the chapter in relation to recent developments in the theorisation of black identity politics, focusing in particular on the overlapping notions of ‘new ethnicities’ (Hall 1996[1989], 1999; Gilroy 1993), ‘hybridity’ (Werbner and Modood 1997), and ‘intersectionality’ (Young 1990; Collins 1998, 2000).