Summary
In the frame of the “Spatial Turn” that has characterized Religious Studies in the last 15 years (Knott, 2005; Obadia, 2015), researchers of different scientific fields have reflected on the sharing of religious places from a variegated perspective, using different concepts, terminologies, and approaches (Albera & Couroucli, 2012; Brand et al., 2012; Crompton, 2013; Bowman, 2013b; Barkan & Barkey, 2014; Diez de Velasco, 2014; Crompton & Hewson, 2016; Hayden et al., 2016; Bobrowicz, 2018). Such places are usually referred to as places of religious coexistence and sharing; they are rooms, buildings, and even large urban areas or zones (e.g., streets, neighborhoods, or city suburbs), as well as natural places (e.g., parks, hills, and caves). 

The paper aims to offer a concise framework on the issue related the sharing religious places and discuss the possibility of a common terminology through the case studies identified so far.

In an attempt to organize this complexity – and the wide variety of terminology that derives from it – scholars distinguish between two main places. On the one hand, the “sites which are claimed, practiced and inhabited by two or more religious denominations, or which have been converted from one religion to another” (Longhi & Giorda, 2019, p. 110) through bottom-up dynamics such as churches, mosques, shrines, monasteries, and tombs. On the other, those settings which following the opposite meanings of the multireligious paradigm (Dinham, 2012) recreate multi-faith spaces top-down in so-called non-places such as shopping centres, airports, hospitals, or middle-middle architectural projects.

The simultaneous presence of different religions in the same place has been analyzed from an anthropological and sociological perspective in the last years. These studies have focused on how religions have settled in urban space: as guests, through renting a place (secular or religious), by a commodate contract, by purchasing a place (secular or religious), through allocation, or even through illegal occupation (Longhi & Giorda, 2019; Cozma & Giorda, 2020).

From the historical point of view, there are ways of diachronic and synchronic coexistence. Diachronic sharing is the case of the places which were converted over time, accompanied by the changing their religious identity, while synchronic sharing is the case of those places that are used (or temporary/occasionally attended) simultaneously by two or more religions.

Some ethnographic studies have concentrated on religious practices, rites, objects, vestments, customs, and gender. 

Studies on architecture and management have promoted spatial modes management and design of those places. They have identified different dynamics of sharing: by ‘partitioning’ of the rooms or buildings, by ‘overlapping’, that is, the alternative use of the same environment at different times of the day, or by ‘syncretic combination’ characterized by spaces in which different religious identities are stratified.

Ioan Cozma earned a doctorate in Eastern Canon Law in Rome with a dissertation about the conflicts over places of worship ownership between Orthodox and Greek-Catholics in post-communist Romania. His expertise is comparative religious law, Byzantine canon law, interreligious dialogue, and religious places. He taught Orthodox canon law at the universities of Alba Iulia and Cluj-Napoca in Romania and comparative canon law at the Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Venice. Since 2014 he has been teaching Byzantine canon law at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome and serves as Canon Law expert of the Orthodox Church in America.
 
Maria Chiara Giorda is an Associate Professor of History of Religions at Roma Tre University in Rome. She is also a member of the Faculty of the “Master in the European Islam Studies” at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Professor of “Comparative profiles between systems: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” at the University of Padova and she teaches “The planning of buildings for worship” at the Sapienza University of Rome. She earned a PH.D. in Religious Studies at École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (2007) with a dissertation about monasticism and ecclesiastical institutions in Late Antique Egypt. Her research interests are Geography of Religions, Shared Religious Places, History of Monasticism, Religions and Urban Spaces.

Silvia Omenetto is an Italian Geographer of Religions and Research Fellow in the Department of History Anthropology Religions Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Rome “Sapienza”. She deals with examining the territorialization processes activated by religious organizations – now and in the history – and the location in addition to the architecture of religious places (places of worship and cemeteries) in the urban space intertwining multiscalar spatial analysis with qualitative field research.