Author: Marie Horňáková

At the turn of August and September 2021, another international conference organised by the European Network for Housing Research took place, this time with the subtitle Unsettled Settlements: Housing in Unstable Contexts. Members of our team presented their papers at the conference! Two papers were presented within the working group “Disadvantaged Urban Neighborhoods and Communities”. Kadi Kalm presented the paper “Various housing estates’ trajectories in post-socialist cities: does the socialist legacy still matter?”, which she is currently working on together with her colleagues Petra Špačková, Jan Sýkora and Ondřej Špaček.  Jan Sýkora and Marie Horňáková presented the paper “‘It is natural’: life course as a key element of long-term residents’ place attachment in a gentrifying Prague neighbourhood”, on which they worked together with Kirsten Visser and Gideon Bolt from the University Utrecht. 

A new article in the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment entitled: “Towards ordinary quarters: the development of housing estates in Prague after transformation” was published in the last few days. Its authors are Martin Ouředníček and Zuzana Kopecká. The main objective of the paper is to explain and understand contemporary spatial changes within housing estates in Prague with special attention to the role of public and private institutions. The authors that housing estates are undergoing considerable functional heterogenization and becoming integral parts of the city as a consequence of mix of commercial development, specific public policies and activities of local actors. We focus on two crucial aspects of the contemporary development of housing estates within the capital city of Prague: (i) the new functional differentiation of housing estates as a consequence of private activities and commercialization; (ii) the role of master planning and public policies on the level of both the city and self-governed city districts. A case study of the largest housing estate and a symbol of socialist housing in Czechia—Jižní Město—illustrates the impact of state and municipal policies and commercialization on the local level. Read the full article here.