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
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
Dr Martin Fleischmann will supervise both projects. In case of an interest, please reach out to Martin at martin.fleischmann@natur.cuni.cz.
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.
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:
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
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.
„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.
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.
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 withOndřej 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
PhD student Pavel Frydrych had an article published in the impacted journal Children’s Geographies: Changes in children’s rhythms of everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic in a small town in the Prague metropolitan area.
The restrictions imposed in response to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected people’s everyday life, including those of children. For an extended period, children had to deal with the closure of schools and subsequent online teaching, which disrupted their daily rhythms.
This study aimed to determine how children coped with the changes in the rhythms of their everyday life.
It provides insight into the diverse coping mechanisms employed by children during challenging times and highlights the importance of rhythm in establishing a sense of normalcy and stability in everyday life.
The study is based on semi-structured interviews with children aged 12–17 years living in a small town in the Prague metropolitan area.
The results show that the coping strategies adopted in response to the change in baseline rhythm varied greatly among children. Introducing new rhythms into everyday life was a long process, and some children tried to maintain the rhythms created even after returning to classroom teaching.
We have successfully completed one of the outcomes of the project START (START Programme) – the Final Report, which links and summarises all the results of this project. The project and the report share the same title: ‘What about your locality? Life-course differences in experiencing and perceiving residential neighbourhoods.
The project officially ended at the end of March 2023, and all four researchers Pavel Frydrych, Niloufar Ghafouriazar, Marie Horňáková and Jan Sýkora worked on the project and this Final Report.
The project aimed to examine how various residential groups experience, perceive and are satisfied with their neighbourhoods. Specifically, we analysed individuals’ functional and emotional links to residential surroundings in different life-course stages living in different neighbourhoods. The groups included older children from the suburbs, young families from housing estates, and older adults from the gentrifying inner city. This allowed us to examine the topic from various perspectives leading to a comprehensive knowledge of the complex person-place relation.
In Final Report, we posed the following research questions:
How do distinct life-course groups living in different neighbourhood types experience and perceive their neighbourhoods?
How are residents functionally and emotionally attached to their neighbourhoods?
Which are the factors that influence the residents’ attachment to their neighbourhoods?
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ence. 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:
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.
The project officially ended at the end of March 2023, and all four researchers 
