A paper in Cities on housing estates in Czechia and Estonia

A paper focusing on housing estates’ trajectories was published. The authors of the paper are Kadi Kalm, Petra Špačková, Jan Sýkora and Ondřej Špaček.

The paper explores the trajectories of housing estates from 1989 to 2011 by examining neighbourhood transitions in Estonian and Czech cities based on socio-economic, demographic, and ethnic characteristics of their residents.

The authors use data from population censuses and clustering techniques to create typologies of housing estate neighbourhoods.

The results suggest that the main development trajectory of Estonian and Czech housing estates has been stability with neighbourhoods remaining in the same housing estate type and developing similarly as other urban neighbourhoods. This is mainly related to housing market specifics of post-socialist countries, and ageing being the main mechanisms of residential change of housing estates.

Other types of trajectories are differentiated along two lines: the position of the city within the settlement system and the location of heavy industry in the city during the socialist period, indicating persistent impact of socialist urban development for housing estates.