This paper reports on a one-year ethnographic project investigating the role and significance of more-than-human nature in the religiously ‘super-diverse’[1] contemporary city. The project entailed one year of ethnographic fieldwork with four community gardens and bush regeneration groups in inner-urban Sydney, Australia (2024-2025) and explored expanding and changing notions of the social – particularly relating to religion, spirituality, and meaning making - in the Anthropocene. In this paper, I focus upon the findings from one community garden operated on Church land by a Christian parish, located next to one of the largest public housing developments in Sydney. In this particular case study, I sought to answer the question: How/do conventional Christian groups use nature-based projects and practices to (attempt to) intervene in urban communities and democratic life in the context of increasing religious diversity and complexity?
The research is significant in its analysis of religiously super-diverse life in a contemporary Australian city, and in synthesising urban studies approaches to the ‘more-than-human city’ with religious studies work on the significance of nature for meaning making in contemporary secularising societies.[2] Most of the existing research in this field studies Northern hemisphere urban life, and there is to-date little ethnographic research into religious super-diversity in urban Australia. The contours of religious affiliation in Australia are distinct – shaped by its indigenous peoples and their cultural practices; its geographical location below the Asia-Pacific region; its history as a British penal colony; and postcolonial governance of religion and migration throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Like many so-called ‘Western’ countries, Australia (and Sydney specifically) has a rapidly-growing nonreligious population – nearly 40% at the 2021 census[3] and fast-growing non-Christian religions, including having ‘more Buddhists than Baptists.’[4]
In the paper, and the project as a whole, I engage with sociological and philosophical work on the significance of the ‘material’ in examining more-than-human nature in urban religious and political life: foregrounding the relationship of people to both natural and artifactual material in urban gardens. I build upon both Burchardt’s notion of ‘infrastructuring religion,’ which refers to ‘the ways in which religious life is premised upon the production, maintenance, and working of mundane materials’,[5] and the work of social philosopher Jane Bennett. Bennett tells an ‘alter-story’ of materiality where ‘matter has a liveliness, resilience, unpredictability, or recalcitrance that is itself a source of wonder for us.’[6]
This paper investigates the significance of urban nature in how one Christian parish in inner Sydney responds to their rapidly changing social and political context, which includes the declining significance of Christianity and the ‘super-diversity’ of religious life in Sydney as well as the gentrification of a once-marginalised neighbourhood. Using the community garden as a social outreach, the parish draws residents of the nearby public house towers into the life of the parish along with (non-Christian) residents of the neighbourhood interested in community gardening. While referencing the interior design of the Church in the design of the garden, and conducting Sunday services in the garden regularly, the work undertaken in the garden and culture of the gardening group makes little other reference to Christianity. More evident are the efforts of the parish to promote Indigenous reconciliation through the garden, and the not-so-successful attempts to syncretise Indigenous and Christian spirituality.
The paper reflects upon the ways in which the materiality of the garden and practices undertaken within it were (or were not) productive of urban religious and political life, and the efficacy of the parish’s efforts to use the community garden to maintain their salience to their urban neighbourhood in a context of rapid religious decline. It is based on 6 months of regular participant observation in the community garden, including attendance at the regular Saturday morning gardening session and the garden coordinators meetings; and semi-structured interviews with the Parish priest, garden coordinator, and garden members. At the time of proposal, the fieldwork is still ongoing and will conclude by June 2025.
[1] Irene Becci, Marian Burchardt, and Mariachiara Giorda, ‘Religious Super-Diversity and Spatial Strategies in Two European Cities’, Current Sociology 65, no. 1 (2016): 73–91.
[2] for example Lori G Beaman and Lauren Strumos, ‘Toward Equality: Including Non-Human Animals in Studies of Lived Religion and Nonreligion’, Social Compass, 25 May 2023, 003776862311709, https://doi.org/10.1177/00377686231170993; Paul Bramadat, ‘Reverential Naturalism in Cascadia: From the Fancy to the Sublime’, in Religion at the Edge : Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Paul Bramadat, Patricia O’Connell Killen, and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme (UBC Press, 2022), 23–40; Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jasper, eds., The Botanical City (Berlin: Jovis, 2020); Catherine Oliver, ‘Transforming Paradise: Neoliberal Regeneration and More-than-Human Urbanism in Birmingham’, Urban Studies 60, no. 3 (1 February 2023): 519–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221104975.
[3] Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Religious Affiliation in Australia: Exploration of the Changes in Reported Religion in the 2021 Census’, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022, https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia.
[4] Gary Bouma, ‘The Role of Demographic and Socio-Cultural Factors in Australia’s Successful Multicultural Society: How Australia Is Not Europe’, Journal of Sociology 52, no. 4 (2016): 759–71.
[5] Marian Burchardt, ‘Infrastructuring Religion: Materiality and Meaning in Ordinary Urbanism’, Space and Culture 26, no. 2 (1 May 2023): 181, https://doi.org/10.1177/12063312221130248.
[6] Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 64.
This paper investigates the significance of an urban nature project – a community garden - in how one Christian parish in inner Sydney, Australia responds to their rapidly changing social and political context of secularisation and gentrification. The project is part of a broader ethnography with community gardens and bush regeneration groups in inner-urban Sydney that explores the expanding and changing notions of the social – particularly relating to religion, spirituality, and meaning making - in the Anthropocene. I draw upon the work of both Burchardt on ‘infrastructuring religion’ and Bennett on ‘vital materiality’ to reflect upon the ways in which the materiality of the garden and practices undertaken within it were (or were not) productive of urban religious and political life, and the efficacy of the parish’s efforts to use the community garden to maintain their salience to their urban neighbourhood in a context of rapid religious decline.