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:

• 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

 

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.

See more information about the course.

See the detailed timetable.

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?

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 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

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.

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?

You can read the whole report here.

The final conference of the 4EU+ course “Urban Regulations and Political Memory” was held in Prague at the Faculty of Science on the 23^rd and 24^th of March 2023. Course „Urban Regulations and Political Memory: Towards understanding Spatio-Temporal aspects of Urban Development” (UNREAD) is one of the educational projects developed under Flagship 1 of the 4EU+ alliance. A team of historians, lawyers and geographers from University of Warsaw, University of Milan, and Charles University conducts this interdisciplinary course. The first edition started in October 2021 and was finalised in March 2022, while the second began in October 2022 and was completed in March 2023. The topics of this course are driving forces of urban changes, the development of smart cities and interdisciplinary methodologies of urban studies applied to cases in Czechia, Poland and Italy. The final conference was organized by the Faculty of Science, Department of Social Geography and Regional Development. Two members of our research team (Martin Ouředníček and Adel Petrović) together with master students of geography (Jakub Kraft and Daniel Bečvář) and the head of the Map Collection (Eva Novotná) prepared the whole two-days program. Students of the course presented their research project outcomes: suburbanisation, smart villages, social housing, spatial planning, urban green areas…These are some of the topics presented by students during two panels on the first day of the conference. On the second day, the main coordinator of the project dr. Karolina Wojciechowska led a panel discussion and asked the participants for feedback. The positive aspects pointed out that the course is interdisciplinary, interactive and international, providing hands-on knowledge and preparing students for not only academic but also professional careers. The students mentioned that meeting in person, not only at the end but also at the beginning of the course, would make the research and their engagement easier and smoother. Throughout the two days, the participants could enjoy a guided tour around the inner-city of Prague, visit the map collection of the Geographical Institute, and participate in workshops aimed at integration with colleagues from other universities and developing international contacts.