News – Page 7

New BA and MA urban course supported by 4EU+ to start in October 2021

Written by dominik on 14. 5. 2021. Posted in News.

We are proud to reveal that the application for a joint educational project of the Warsaw University, University of Milan and Charles University, where Urrlab team members will also participate, was supported by the 4EU+ funding. The course entitled Urban Regulations and Political Memory: Towards understanding Spatio-Temporal aspects of Urban Development brings together three dimensions: the past (history), the present (law) and the future (geography) of the conditions of the urban development of smart cities in three 4EU+ counties. The course will run from October 2021 until April 2022 and will consist of blended form (virtual and in-person activities including a field trip, workshops, and a conference in Warsaw). Active participation of students by using research-based education work in an international team is foreseen. The course aims at improving data literacy and encouraging students’ critical thinking. Keep an eye on our News feed to find out more soon!

Invitation to two online seminars with Kadi Kalm!

Written by dominik on 21. 4. 2021. Posted in News.

We are excited to invite you to two online seminars that we are organizing in the coming days. In both cases, the seminar will be led by Kadi Kalm, who is currently collaborating on the project History and Future of Housing Estates: quality of living environment and residential satisfaction as part of her post-doc position. Her research focuses mainly on ethnic segregation and internal migration. Before joining the URRlab team, she worked as a researcher in the Department of Geography at University of Tartu. She has also previously worked as a visiting researcher at Delft University of Technology. The first seminar is entitled “Various housing estates’ trajectories in post socialist cities: does the socialist legacy still matter?” and will focus on the developmental trajectories of different housing estates in Czechia and Estonia from 1989 to 2011.

When: 4 May 2021, 14:00
Where: online – meet.google.com/hmm qfbh pjr

The second seminar is entitled „My journey in academia“ and destined mainly for (PhD) students. During the seminar, Kadi will present her journey through academia with time spent in three universities, cities, and countries. She will talk about her main research interests as well as the life of PhD student and post-doc. After her talk, an informal discussion will follow.

When: 29 April 2021, 12:30
Where: online – meet.google.com/kqw ebwt jti

Scroll down for detailed information on both seminars.

Database of historical data for Prague now released

Written by dominik on 20. 4. 2021. Posted in News.

Our project Prague suburbs: the dynamics of social environment within the growing metropolis aims to describe and explain the transformations of social environment of peripheral parts of the dynamically growing Czech metropolis from industrialisation until present. Key outcomes of the project include a geodatabase of historical spatial and statistical data for cadastral units of Prague, which were recently published on the project website. The data and layers relate to historical population censuses from 1869 until 1910 and can be downloaded – after registration – here.

Two new projects awarded to Urrlab PhD students

Written by dominik on 15. 3. 2021. Posted in News.

We are excited to announce that our members were successful in obtaining new funding for their research from GAUK and START schemes. Congratulations! Adela Petrovic’s GAUK project entitled “In the face of gentrification: the changing identities of working-class neighbourhoods in the inner-city of Prague” analyses two selected gentrifying inner-city neighbourhoods, Karlín and Smíchov, identifies the changes in the urban physical and socio-cultural landscape, reflects upon their implications, and investigates the identity construction of these changing neighbourhoods. Another project, supported by the START programme, is “What about your locality? Life-course differences in experiencing and perceiving residential neighbourhoods” with Pavel Frydrych as the principal investigator and Marie Horňáková, Jan Sýkora and Niloofar Ghafouriazar as co-investigators. The project focuses on life-course differences in how residents experience, perceive and are satisfied with their residential neighbourhoods. It aims to approach the topic from perspectives of three population groups in various life-course stages and living in distinct neighbourhood types (children from suburbs, young families from housing estates, older adults from the inner city).

Urban geography courses in summer term 2020/21 – registration is now open!

Written by dominik on 3. 2. 2021. Posted in News.

This upcoming summer semester URRlab welcomes all Erasmus and Czech students and offers two courses taught in English. The registration is open. Urban Social Geography: Contemporary Issues is for students interested in finding out the contemporary trends and issues in urban social geography. The students will have the opportunity to study urban occurrences and processes and to compare those with cases in Prague and other European cities. The course offers its participants lectures, discussions, group work, film seminar, field trips and the opportunity to carry out their own research. The lessons will be held at the Faculty of Science on Thursdays from 9 am. Discussion Seminar on Contemporary Urban Studies, new course starting this year, focuses on exploring the phenomena and processes in contemporary cities and analyzing and explaining them in their local context and relationship with different urban actors. The main objective is to promote students’ critical thinking and introduce them to a broader spectre of urban issues through alternative teaching methods. The lectures will be held at the Faculty of Science on Wednesdays from 10:40 am.

Urrlab Christmas walk

Written by dominik on 18. 12. 2020. Posted in News.

Urrlab team remains active despite the covid-19 restrictions. On Tuesday 15 December, many of us participated in the urban walk organised by Marie, Greta and Adela. Although the weather was cold, we enjoyed this opportunity to meet some of our colleagues and learn more about Invalidovna. We thank the organisers and wish everyone Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

New papers on crime in a Czech city

Written by dominik on 14. 12. 2020. Posted in News.

Two new articles by Jana Jíchová and Martin Šimon have been published. Both papers focus on the concentration of crime in places and use geolocated data for crime from a regional Czech city. The first article was published in the Czech Sociological Review and focuses on the concentration of crime in street segments. At the same time, it presents a general model of the distribution of crime in the city, based on different levels and concentrations of crime in different types of residential environments. The second article was published online in the European Journal of Criminology. This article combines crime harm indexes and the law of crime concentration in place. The research shows the differences between the concentration of crime and its severity between western cities and in the Czech city, where they are less spatially clustered. These findings are essential for planning locally oriented policies. Both papers are available on the links above.

New paper out on residential change and gentrification

Written by dominik on 5. 12. 2020. Posted in News.

In autumn an article by Jan Sýkora and Petra Špačková was published in Housing Studies journal. The article aims to analyze variations in residential change in individual localities within Holešovice, Prague’s inner-city district. It concludes that gentrification influences Holešovice simultaneously with other types of residential change. The most common type of change is incumbent upgrading related to the privatization of the housing stock. At the same time, several stagnating areas were identified. The neighbourhood development indicates the concurrent presence of diversified neighbourhood trajectories with drivers at various spatial and temporal scales. Read here.

Urrlab at the 2020 Annual Conference of the Czech Geographical Society

Written by dominik on 21. 9. 2020. Posted in News.

Last week, one of the few conferences of this year took place, the Annual Conference of the Czech Geographical Society on the topic of Geography for Sustainable Development of Cities and Regions. The plenary lecture included a paper by Martin Ouředníček, Jiří Nemeškal and Lucie Pospíšilová: Delimitation of metropolitan areas and agglomerations of statutory cities in the Czechia, which was followed by a panel discussion with representatives of the Ministry of Regional Development. The conference in Pilsen was attended also by other team members with interesting papers, and others had an author’s contribution to the papers:

Adam Klsák: Transformations of “Russian” Karlovy Vary: Five years since the annexation of Crimea

Adela Petrović: Gated Communities in Prague Urban Region: Location and Positionality on different Scale

Martin Šimon, Ivana Křížková, Adam Klsák, Yana Leontiyeva, Renáta Mikešová: Migrants in selected cities in Czechia 2008–2015: Analysis of changes in spatial distribution using a population grid

Robert Osman, Zuzana Kopecká, Veronika Kotýnková: Time disadvantage: when the body does not meet the standards of time

New papers with a focus on residential segregation

Written by dominik on 31. 7. 2020. Posted in News.

Two new papers by Martin Šimon, Ivana Křížková and Adam Klsák with a focus on residential segregation were published recently. The papers use newly available register-based data on foreign citizens’ residence in Czechia that were aggregated to spatial grid and used dissimilarity index as a widely used measure of segregation. Although the both papers are in Czech, they also contain an English summary and abstract. The Geografie paper looks at the development of spatial residential distribution of six major immigrant groups, based on citizenship, in selected Czech large cities. The article published in Urbanismus a územní rozvoj deals with these immigrant groups in Czechia as a whole and introduces the innovative method of measuring segregation using multilevel individualised neighbourhoods. Basic results show a dominant trend of decreasing segregation between the majority and immigrant groups. The slow and constant increase in immigrant population in Czechia thus does not lead to clear segregation patterns, except in some specific areas. The papers were supported by funding from the Czech Science Foundation for the project Residential segregation and mobility of foreign citizens: analysis of neighbourhoods, housing trajectories, and neighbourhood context and the latter paper was also co-authored by Renáta Mikešová and Yana Leontiyeva.