Urban Aspirations in Seoul: Guest Editors’ Introduction

This special issue invites readers to examine dynamic religious aspirations in the urban contexts of South Korea. Focusing on religious practices, adaptations, and material constructions in the making of Seoul, these articles contribute to the growing scholarly discussion on the relationship between the urban and the religious/sacred in the context of Asian cities and beyond (e.g., van der Veer 2015, Goh and van der Veer 2016). This special issue is the culmination of an interdisciplinary research team—the Seoul Lab—which contributed to the larger comparative urban research project of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity undertaken in Mumbai, Shanghai, and Singapore. In these introductory remarks we share some key concerns of the project in order to invite further scholarly discussion.