Fragments of citizenship: contested mosque architecture in the North of England

Abstract

This paper examines the planning process behind the construction of a mosque building in the English city of York, to demonstrate how it is entangled with contested ideas of national identity. We argue that the politics of religious architecture, particularly mosque planning and architecture, serve as a litmus test for the ways multiculturalism is experienced in contemporary Britain. We explore objections during the planning process for this mosque alongside letters to a local newspaper, where objections included the effect of the mosque on urban infrastructure, the symbolic identity of the mosque within the wider city, and how the mosque would affect claims to citizenship more widely. Objections to this mosque application indicate that architecture and the urban environment are core elements of national identity, and it is through the planning process (of religious buildings) that claims about ‘who is a citizen’ are articulated. Democratic planning processes around the construction of individual buildings can allow groups to organise resistance to much wider cultures of multiculturalism and act as platforms for Islamophobic sentiments. We argue that planning processes work as discursive registers through which architectural aesthetics, cultural identities and fears of otherness are wrapped into the wider politics of public space.