The third space between church and city: Coproduction in a Danish municipality

The city is essentially a public arena where diverse people and multiple systems, networks and cultures encounter each other. It is where church interacts with all the other agents of the city. Understanding the implication of these encounters for church as well as city is notoriously difficult and ambiguous. As a result of an empirical study in the Danish city of Aarhus, eight 'functions' have been distinguished. This article asks what happens, if instead, they are seen as part of a third, common space of interaction for church and city. For purposes of further interpretation a garden-city narrative and trinitarian motifs are deployed.