At the end of April, the Annual AAG Meeting took place in Honolulu (Hawaii). The themes of this year’s AAG connected meeting and academic offerings to the ecologies, history, and cultures of the host location in Hawai‘i, affirming the interconnectedness of place and beings here and around the world. These themes shaped keynotes and special events during the meeting. The three main themes were:

• Reciprocal Scholarship
• Colonialism and Resources
• Recovery and Restoration

Two members of our research lab attended this year’s AAG, Jiří Nemeškal and Martin Ouředníček. Jiří Nemeškal was part of the session “GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI and Social Sensing for Human-Pandemic Dynamics” and presented a paper called “Disruption of long-term commuting development – the impact of Covid-19 on the daily mobility in the Czech Republic.”

Our team member, Adela Petrovic, since February 2024, has embarked on a six-month doctoral fellowship at Social Geography and Urban Studies (SURB), University of Zurich.She is delving into the complexities of gentrification dynamics and urban transformation processes under the supervision of Professor Hanna Hilbrandt.

---

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. 

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

• PORKERTOVÁ, H., OSMAN, R., POSPÍŠILOVÁ, L., DOBOŠ, P., KOPECKÁ, Z. (2024): “Wait, really, stop, stop!”: Go-along interviews with visually disabled people and the pitfalls of ableist methodologies. Qualitative Research. [online first]
• This paper explores the challenges involved in conducting interviews with people with visual impairments in geographical research of blind people’s experiences of urban space.

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

• HORŇÁKOVÁ, M., ŠPAČKOVÁ, P. (2024): Having a garden or being in the city? The trade-offs and strategies of young middle-class families in Prague. Journal of Urban Affairs. [online first]
• Using the concept of life pathways, the study explores the process of decision-making about moving to a post-socialist city and how housing needs and preferences intersect with what is affordable for young middle-class families.

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.

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.