Groups on the move. The urban pathways of African Pentecostal churches in Turin, Italy

Research on the geography of religion has extensively examined the spatial politics of places of worship, yet it has largely treated them as fixed sites, paying limited attention to movement, impermanence, and intra-urban mobility. Despite early calls to study religion through both place and movement, the trajectories through which religious groups move within cities remain under-theorized. This paper addresses this gap by introducing the concept of places-of-worship pathways, adapted from Clapham's (Citation2002) housing pathways framework, as a tool for analyzing religious mobility within secular urban contexts. The concept is developed through a qualitative case study of African Pentecostal churches in Turin, Italy – a city often described as relatively accommodating toward religious diversity, yet shaped by strong legal, planning, and market constraints. The analysis is based on nine in-depth interviews with Pentecostal pastors conducted between 2022 and 2024, reconstructing churches’ spatial trajectories and the meanings attributed to relocation. The findings identify three pathways highlighting how socio-economic vulnerability, regulatory frameworks, charismatic leadership, and theological orientations shape patterns of movement. Beyond contributing to scholarship on global Pentecostalism, the paper reveals insights into the relationship between the religious and the secular, showing how urban governance and market mechanisms reproduce differentiated forms of secularity.