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Author: Marie Horňáková

4EU+ Seminar: Urban planning and development – looking for the bridge between science and practice

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Don’t miss the February seminar “Urban Planning and Development – Finding the Bridge between Science and Practice”. The event is prepared in the framework of the 4EU+ Alliance by the project team Urban Regulations and Political Memory: Towards an Understanding of the Spatio-Temporal Aspects of Urban Development PLUS. The focus will be on spatial planning from different perspectives – geographical and legal – in three countries: Czechia, Italy and Poland. Karolina Wojciechowska, Martin Ouředníček and Zdeňka Havlová will be among the presenters.
  • Date: 21 February 2024, 13:15-14:45
  • Form: online
The whole programme will be in English! More about the programme and the link to log in here. 

Newly published articles

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Late last year and during January 2024, several new papers were published by members of our research team.

“Wait, really, stop, stop!”: Go-along interviews with visually disabled people and the pitfalls of ableist methodologies

Having a garden or being in the city? The trade-offs and strategies of young middle-class families in Prague

In praise of (spatial) bundles

  • ARRIBAS-BEL, D., FLEISCHMANN, M. (2023): In praise of (spatial) bundles. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 51, 1, 3-6.
  • This is an editorial that focuses attention on an approach to the classification of (urban) landscapes called spatial bundles.

Clustergram: Visualization and diagnostics for cluster analysis

  • FLEISCHMANN, M., (2023): Clustergram: Visualization and diagnostics for cluster analysis. Journal of Open Source Software, 8, 89, 5240.
  • This paper presents a Python package called clustergram that provides tools for analyzing clustering solutions and visualizing observation behavior in relation to a tested range of class count possibilities, enabling a deeper understanding of the behavior of observations divided into classes and more informed decision making about the optimal number of classes.

Inequalities in experiencing urban functions. An exploration of human digital (geo-)footprints

  • CALAFIORE, A., SAMARDZHIEV, K., ROWE, F., FLEISCHMANN, M., ARRIBAS-BEL, D. (2023): Inequalities in experiencing urban functions. An exploration of human digital (geo-)footprints. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. [online first]
  • This study uses high spatial-temporal resolution data provided by Spectus.ai to investigate how the level of deprivation in the area where people live affects the types of urban environments they are more likely to use for their daily activities.

Become a STAR at URRlab

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Application for STARS scholarships for PhD studies is now open and our team offers two positions!

The STARS scholarship provides fully funded PhD positions, guaranteeing high-quality education and ample financial support for students enrolled in the Faculty of Science’s doctoral programs. The primary aim of the STARS program is to attract exceptional students, both from international locations and within the Czech Republic. Students enrolled in the STARS program can expect a monthly stipend of at least 20,500 CZK (around 800 EUR). Importantly, the actual income may exceed this minimum amount, depending on the specific funding allocated to each individual project.
  • The deadline for the application is the 13th of March.
  • For the upcoming academic year, URRlab within the Geographical Institute offers two PhD positions, linked to a research project focusing on the structure of cities in Central Europe

Bridging urban morphology and community ecology to study the structure, organisation and evolution of cities

A project in collaboration with the dept. of ecology, focusing on understanding the ability of community ecology to describe the physical environment of cities and uncover underlying patterns forming the places we live in. The project’s scope will be primarily methodological research leading to developing new techniques, potentially affecting both urban morphology and community ecology, and creating tools to use them. See more details at https://stars-natur.cz/phd-positions/geography/bridging-urban-morphology-and-community-ecology-to-study-structure-organisation-and-evolution-of-cities

Inequality of neighbourhood choice in regions of Central Europe

A project built on a combination of a computational social science based on the recent national censuses combined with additional open data sources, and morphological analysis of the built environment using methods known as urban morphometrics. The former provides a quantitative insight into society’s structure, while the latter quantifies the environment and describes neighbourhood-level housing types from a data-driven built-form typology. This combination allows for quantitative analysis of the relationship between people and places, leading to the assessment of (in)equality of access to the desired place to live and the capability of different groups to make such a choice. See more at https://stars-natur.cz/phd-positions/geography/inequality-of-neighbourhood-choice-in-regions-of-central-europe

Prof. Vlček Scholarship for Adela Petrovic

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Adela Petrovic, a PhD student and a member of our research team, was awarded the Prof. Vlček Scholarship. We congratulate her on the award and appreciate all her work! The Professor Miroslav Vlček scholarship is awarded to a foreign student who, in addition to fulfilling his/her study duties, has contributed to the dissemination of the reputation of the Charles University in Czechia and abroad, and who has supported greater internationalization of the university environment of the public universities in Prague.

CATference 2023 in Riga

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Our team participated in the (tenth anniversary) Cities After Transition conference, known mainly as CATference. Dozens of researchers working on cities in Central and Eastern Europe met this time in Riga. We were understandably not absent and presented several papers:
  • Petra Špačková: 
    • The Distribution of Ukrainian Refugees in Czechia: Regional Disparities and Absorptive Capacity Analysis (together with Pavlína Netrdová and Daniel Hůle)
    • Tracking the Evolution of Czech Housing Estates (together with Kadi Kalm, Jan Sýkora and Ondřej Špaček).
  • Adam Klsák: Karlovy Vary – turning a “Russian city” into a Ukrainian shelter?
  • Jiří Nemeškal: They’re building, but for whom? The social structure of the inhabitants of new residential areas in Prague.
  • Jiří-Jakub Zévl and Martin Ouředníček: Time-space mobility within Prague’s suburbs: local centers, commuting areas and autonomy of hinterland
 

IGU Conference in Mecico City

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Jiří-Jakub Zévl, a member of our research team, attended the thematic conference Urban Transformations: Towards Resilient Cities that was organised by the International Geographical Union (IGU). Within his contribution, Jiří-Jakub presented the outputs of a recently published article. You can read it in Applied Geography.

For students: 4EU+ Course Urban Regulations and Political Memory

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„Urban Regulations and Political Memory: Towards Understanding Spatio-Temporal Aspects of Urban Development PLUS” is an international, interdisciplinary course organised by four 4EU+ member universities: University of Warsaw, University of Milan, Charles University, Sorbonne University, as part of the 4EU+ joint educational offer during the academic year 2023/2024. Key topics of the course are the driving forces of urban changes, development of smart cities and interdisciplinary methodologies of urban studies. The course is developed as part of an educational project which addresses changes in the conditions of the urban development of smart cities in Poland, Italy and Czechia, according to three dimensions: past (history), present (law) and future (geography). Emphasis is put on integrated and interdisciplinary approach in order to help students understand the complexity of new urban centres in which real estate development must coexist with the protection of the environment and with the history and heritage of the local community. The course will be conducted by an interdisciplinary team of historians, lawyers, geographers and educational sciences specialists.

How to apply?

  • The students will be selected based on their CV and motivation letter.
  • The deadline for sending the documents is 22th September, 2023.
  • The CV and the motivation letter should be sent as a single PDF document to unread@wpia.uw.edu.pl.
  • The file’s name should contain the applicant’s name (surname_name.pdf), and the subject of the email should be “UNREAD+ recruitment”.
  • The motivation letter should indicate the students’ objectives and motivations for taking the course.
  • The motivation letter should not exceed 1,000 characters.

See more information about the course.

See the detailed timetable.

The UNREAD+ project recieved SEED4EU+ funding

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We are pleased to announce that the project ‘Urban regulations and political memory: towards understanding spatio-temporal aspects of urban development PLUS (UNREAD+)‘, in which two of our team members, Martin Ouředníček and Adela Petrović, are participating with other three 4EU+ partner universities, was selected to receive SEED4EU+ funding! The ‘original’ UNREAD project has been expanded, and now UNREAD+ welcomes a new member, Sorbonne University, and is expanded with new teaching and scientific activities. More information about the #Growing Together call outcomes: https://4euplus.eu/4EU-693.html?

INURA and SHCONF Conferences

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Our team member, Adela Petrovic, attended two conferences in Zurich this summer, where she presented and discussed her dissertation research progress and preliminary findings. 29.5-4.6.2023, in Zurich (CH), INURA 31st Conference ‘Right to the Planet. Reconsidering the Urban Question.’, Research project: Urban transformation: manifold and multifaceted processes in formerly working-class neighbourhoods of Prague. 7-9.7.2023, in Zurich (CH), SHCONF 6th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities, Research project: Urban transformation: manifold and multifaceted processes in formerly working-class neighbourhoods of Prague.    

International conferences in June

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In June our team members attended two international conferences.

Eura 2023 in Reykjavik. The European City: A practice of resilience in the face of an uncertain future

  • Martin Ouředníček presented a paper “Contemporary tendencies in migration to small municipalities in Czechia” 
  • Martin Šimon presented a paper “Non-EU migrants in Prague metropolitan region: segregation patterns and its role for coping with migration from Ukraine”, which was prepared in cooperation with Ivana Křížková and Adam Klsák

ENHR 2023 in Lodz. Urban regeneration: shines and shadows

  • Marie Horňáková presented a paper focusing on the long and short-term transformations of HEs from residents’ perspectives. The paper was prepared in cooperation with Slávka Ferenčuhová, Jana Kočková and Petra Špačková
  • Petra Špačková and Jan Sýkora presented a paper “Tracking the evolution of Czech HEs: Unveiling the long-term population shifts from 1970 to 2021” prepared in cooperation with Ondřej Špaček and Kadi Kalm
  • Niloufar Ghafouriazar presented part of her ongoing PhD research exploring housing choices of young families with small children living in a HE in Prague

URRlab

Urban and Regional Laboratory

Department of Social Geography
& Regional Development

Charles University in Prague
Faculty of Science

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128 43 Praha 2 - Nové Město

Contact person
Jiří Nemeškal
jiri.nemeskal@natur.cuni.cz
211 951 972

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