Sacred Shift: Contested Heritage, Public Memory, and Sustainable Futures in Places of Ritual Reuse

What is a sustainable urban future, and what place do communities hold in that future?

Religious and community identity have been foundational to the built fabric of many urban centers, and yet long-term sustainability for historic religious buildings remains elusive. The challenges facing their preservation is in many ways the cornerstone of heritage preservation as we understand it today. Anxieties around secularization in the face of declining attendance in white-majority Christian denominations have shaped an underlying assumption of what is our collective past and a salvage mentality to preserve its material remnants.¹

In my research, including through the Sacred Shift Project, I am specifically, and perhaps some would say obsessively, focused on adaptive reuse. “Sacred Shift” is a framework I developed for describing religious buildings ritually reused by different faith traditions in contemporary urban settings as an underrepresented form of building conservation.² By focusing on action, the ordinary, and the vernacular, I argue these spaces are a distinct yet commonly found form of intercultural heritage that demonstrate how communities have sustainably reused buildings in urban centers for centuries. I ask what we can learn from these examples of the past to facilitate better building reuse in the future, marrying intangible heritage and circular economic principles.³

When I formally began this research in 2018, I was looking to bridge my own experiences and frustrations from working and volunteering in aging religious buildings for the previous seven years. I wanted more than just a theoretical framework for why religious change has been and is happening. I wanted this to be applied research with a goal of providing solutions, a tangible playbook of sorts.

At that time, I was in London, and I began surveying dozens of examples of reuse across the UK—from light touch coffeeshop and restroom insertions to full crypt café remodels to elaborate circus schools to theaters to housing to museums to recording studios—all with an eye for how the concept of “heritage” and the sacred was being framed and preserved as communities, architects, and developers looked to create renewed social and economic vitality. Design and reuse literature focused on the blending or conversion of secular and sacred uses, but one typology I saw turned up time and time again with little-to-no commentary, seemingly so obvious it didn’t arrest attention: ritual reuse. Countless examples lay not in purpose-built fabric, professional design interventions, or heritage listings but in shifting communities’ physical embodiment keeping the building in use. While most professionals left these examples to the side, I moved them to the center.

After my return to the Midwest, I’ve continued to find and document sites, now with an ever-growing atlas of hundreds of examples across Europe and North America. As anyone with good intentions and a prolonged research focus knows, the more you research, the more you realize that while you can perhaps find ways to systematize and categorize the realities you see, the application or playbook for how to move the needle forward to proposed solutions can be as fraught as it is illuminating. Every instance of adaptive reuse comes with its own complex set of realities, and a decade and a half later, I find myself still seeing innumerable communities facing the same set of challenges: buildings get older, communities need resources.

Methodologically, Sacred Shift crosses boundaries between public history, critical heritage studies, architectural history, cultural geography, material religion, and sustainability studies. I examine religious buildings for their acknowledgement, or more often lack of acknowledgement, of ritual reuse by faith traditions different from those of their original construction in archival, heritage, and planning systems. In this, I argue that sustainable urban futures rely on better facilitation of building reuse. Yet, often the cultural, social, and economic challenges diasporic and minority religious communities face and the kinds of adaptations they make are framed as antithetical to preservation. I ask how these contemporary places of reuse can help us reorient our value systems beyond not just what elements are preserved but who is recognized as contributing to those efforts.

Fundamentally, I believe adaptive reuse is its own form of heritage. It needs a different category of consideration than historic preservation and cultural heritage fields currently allow, fitting clumsily in traditional categories. It shifts the value system from the material to the ephemeral, reorienting our formal understanding of heritage to balance the physical with the relational.

As urban centers become more globalized and architecturally homogenized, heritage advocates often focus on architectural icons of exceptional significance. Critical heritage studies push beyond these centralized and elitist views, shifting recognition and power to underrepresented communities and everyday people and practices.⁴ Many diasporic and marginalized communities have first focused on their ritual use of a place before pursuing distinct architectural expression. Failure to give value and recognition to this may mean loss of this heritage and history, a loss that may not be replaced by later purpose-built structures and broader public memory.

At the same time, climate concerns drive the impending need to address demolition and new construction through considerations of carbon costs and wider applications of adaptive reuse.⁵ This is occurring against a backdrop of globalization and forced migrations as our world becomes increasingly more urban, putting pressure on existing spaces to accommodate not just increased numbers but increasingly diverse identities.⁶

For diasporic communities looking for new gathering spaces, pre-existing religious buildings can be a logical entry point to property use or ownership in urban cores. Not only that, but they can also be a more ecologically sustainable choice, subscribing to the idea that “the greenest building already exists.”⁷ However, new owners are faced with the same challenges of caring for aging buildings as their original users while often facing increased skepticism, concern, and even outright hostility. Countless adaptive projects by religious minorities face coded racialized or xenophobic language through public complaints over traffic, parking, noise, and real estate values, which has not only financial and temporal repercussions for communities but belies their sense of belonging.⁸

In building conservation terms, these ritual reuses can place two important aspects of cultural heritage in competition: physical or material heritage (as in buildings, monuments, objects, etc.) and intangible heritage, meaning living traditions that are inherited and passed down.⁹ Intangible heritage was codified by UNESCO in 2003, and in recent years is growing in momentum in its exploration and recognition.¹⁰ Social practices and rituals, things intrinsically linked with religious expression, are increasingly being acknowledged and inscribed as global heritage (though not yet enacted in the United States). In faith-based contexts, this is known as “living religious heritage,” where it is seen as impossible or impractical to isolate the tangible and intangible from each other, which can result in a confrontation of heritage values.¹¹ Contemporary secular heritage management can contradict the embodied facilitation and stewardship of community practice. Their coexistence and balance can be what brings conservation and community use together.

Secularization theories often contradict the contemporary reality of religious expression in many cities, where global ethnic majority, diasporic, and non-Christian practice is growing.¹² This includes those who identify as non-religious but spiritual or those who find value in some form of sacred practice outside mainline traditions. In addition to this contemporary reality, the projected future of global religious practice is not one of decline but one of change.¹³ Here in the US, Pew Research Center projects that by 2070 we will be steadily less Christian and increasingly more religiously unaffiliated—though still largely spiritual—as a nation.¹⁴ Of equal consideration, Pew projected practice of non-Christian traditions is expected to double, either through religious switching or through increasing diasporic migration. All of this speaks to an evolving, shifting future and a continual reimagining of the places for and of religious and sacred communities.

The dichotomy between tangible and intangible is certainly present in places of non-religious use and history. The anxieties of their loss can be paralleled in our collective yearning for and mourning of third places and spaces of all kinds and the camaraderie and community they provide.¹⁵ Focusing specifically on religious buildings, transitions in use between communities of the same or similar traditions can certainly experience these tensions too. There are countless examples of churches in areas of ethnic succession in which their founding congregations, usually of European heritage, decline in attendance, and diasporic communities of color become the majority stewards.¹⁶

A recent example of this close to home received national and international attention. St. Adalbert’s Catholic Church in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, a historically Polish and later Latine majority parish, closed in 2019 and its congregation merged as part of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Renew My Church program.¹⁷ It has since been landmarked and is in the process of reuse as a non-denominational Christian church, which has not been without its own contention.¹⁸

In places of shifted use between different traditions, it becomes more complex as multiple traditions and communities contribute to a place’s lineage, making many different voices stewards of the living tradition and many different value claims for its material remnants. This connects to other important conversations such as what constitutes“authentic” heritage and who takes ownership of that claim.¹⁹ Is it the original building and its users, or can it be shared with successive ritual uses and users? This closely relates to questions of contested heritage, where power dynamics between majority and minority voices are experienced.²⁰ Places that have multivocal claims can also be sites of multiculturalism, where cultural differences and distinctions coexist without interaction, or interculturalism, where there is value placed on the interactions between communities and their dynamic, relational exchange. I argue it is the latter, when we place value on active relationships, where the true power of adaptive reuse narratives lay.

A comment I received some years ago from a peer reviewer said that the value of my research would be better served if I said its purpose was to “present a problem rather than a solution.” While I acknowledge their point—that the innumerable complexities surrounding global shifts in religion can be overwhelming to many minds, including mine—I continue this research as an ongoing pursuit against this kind of nihilistic thinking. Over time, as I have surveyed buildings and spoken to communities about the process of anchoring themselves in a place, I see time and time again how the simplest solutions can provide the most inspiring results. In many cases, the best conservation stories are facilitated outside heritage interventions and come through direct community-to-community exchange. The playbook is in many ways the simplest and yet often hardest action: building better and more equitable relationships.

Systems built on authenticity and architectural significance will struggle to value the happenstance, the makeshift, and the seemingly architecturally incongruous additions that communities have made to create their spaces in their own image and carve relevance into pre-existing forms. And yet, it is our basic human needs of enjoying a good meal and a cup of coffee or tea, finding a warm seat on a cold day and letting ourselves be immersed in the resonance of song and rhythm, seeking reprieve from the daily grind by finding grounding moments of reconnection–these are our points of shared heritage. To make a more sustainable world, we need to question what’s worth bringing with us from the past for the future. In global moments of intense contestation, I hope we can look back to this archive of ordinary yet extraordinary everyday moments as a reminder of what’s possible in finding new ways forward.