Mellon Forum // Infrastucture and Difference

“How Mid-Century Planning Infrastructures Governed Urban Religious Mobility”

This talk examines how mid-century U.S. planning officials built a classificatory infrastructure to spatially rank the legitimacy of religious communities in rapidly growing cities and suburbs. Drawing on the American Society of Planning Officials’ 1958 report Churches and Planning Controls, it traces how zoning codes, land-use classifications, and belief-centered definitions of religion formed “soft” infrastructures that governed which communities could move through, expand within, or remain in urban space.