Spatial Liturgies and Urban Healing: The Church of the Common Ground as a Mobile Heterotopia in Atlanta’s Woodruff Park

This paper examines how an outdoor Eucharistic community in downtown Atlanta transforms a surveilled urban park into a space of healing for people living without stable housing. Drawing on nine months of participant-observation and interviews at the Church of the Common Ground, an Episcopal “church without walls” that gathers weekly in Woodruff Park, I argue that healing is produced through spatial liturgy: rituals that reconfigure public space, time, and social relations into a mobile heterotopia. Building on Lefebvre’s produced space via Knott’s spatial method and Foucault’s heterotopia, I show how embodied practices, such as call-and-response, circle prayer, testimony, Eucharist, and shared meals, suspend urban hierarchies and cultivate Turnerian communitas. These practices generate belonging, safety, and hope, while contesting redevelopment logics that frame downtown parks as spaces to be cleared. The paper offers an ethnographic account of urban healing and a transferable conceptual lens for studying how liturgy makes place.