Within spatial studies, scholars such as Lefebvre and Harvey have provided a crucial contribution to understanding the geographical and situated dynamics of inequality. Drawing on such legacy as applied to religious studies, the paper engages with the theme of spatial justice and with the right to the city approach to analyse and discuss the case of the growing emplacement of religious diversity in the urban space of Rome.
Drawing on secondary data (statistics and maps), the paper examines the relationship between the spatial distribution of places of worship of minority religious communities and the geographical distribution of economic and social inequality in the city.
The intersection of religious diversity and inequalities is discussed by addressing urban space not only as the product of "geographies of power", such as regulatory regimes and mechanisms controlling visibility, but also as a field traversed by "geographies of habit", understood as the set of representations and expectations associated with spaces and spatialised differences which shape patterns of urban coexistence. Research on religious places, thus, explores not only how these places are inscribed in urban power relations, but also how they are embedded in the situated production of cultural and social representations. It means questioning both stigmatisation and the possible resources religious places present to challenge it; for example by substantiating flexible visions of otherness and new forms of identities that combine rootedness and openness. This perspective is essential if, following Harvey, one acknowledges the need to grasp through a situated gaze the fractures and possible re-compositions between existing geographies, along with their "banal evils", and the normative frameworks, such as those inspired by ideas of pluralism and cosmopolitanism, that can guide processes of urban equality and transformation.