This article seems likely to provoke discussion. In a nutshell: it sure looks like everything is going to hell, but it's really going to be coming up roses here in a little while. (Maybe.) What the world has now is new cities with young populations and old cities with old populations. How the dialogue between them plays out will determine much of the nature of the next half century. The convergence of the two major trends, globalization and rampant urbanization, means that all cities are effectively one city now.
It's one city, and it's a Temporary Autonomous Zone. The TAZ by its very nature seizes every available means to realize itself--it will come to life whether in a cave or an L-5 Space City--but above all it will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology.
Having said that, while we're on the religion tip: "Pentecostalism is ... the first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum” and “since 1970, and largely because of its appeal to slum women and its reputation for being colour-blind, [Pentecostalism] has been growing into what is arguably the largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet."
In Gibson's version of the Sprawl, most people are poor, but I don't remember anything about everyone being deeply religious. City Planet, by Stewart Brand | 
