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.

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 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!  

     

Cherry-picking was a great start to the day thanks to the Geomigrace team who organised this one-day excursion to Slaný on Tuesday 16/06/2020, attended by some of our URRlab members and a group of bachelors and doctoral students of geography at our faculty.   After meeting the boss of the orchards, Mr Kníže, who gave us clear guidelines on how to pick cherries, which size and shades of red we have to search for, we were off to fill up our buckets. We were told that the skilled cherry pickers need approximately 15 minutes to fill up one bucket. Although we were motivated to show off our cherry-picking skills, our productivity was limited by our cherry addiction after the first bite.   Once the buckets were full, we set down for a discussion under the cherry trees. We could perceive that Mr Kníže takes a lot of pride in Ekofrukt being the 10th biggest fruit producer in Czechia; however, he was honest about the company’s struggles. Namely, due to the pandemic Czechia and other countries have considerably constrained mobility, which resulted in a lack of workforce that was mainly composed of foreign workers. During our visit, Mr Kníže showed us around the plantation and the factory where they further select and use the fruits for making different products (syrups, muesli bars, etc.). We tackled a broad range of interesting topics during our visit; such as effects of different circumstances on the company and local economy, customers’ preferences, and a wide variety of conditions necessary to satisfy for each type of fruit.   To sum up the foregoing, Ekofrukt demonstrated their dedication to their work with, for example, acquiring expensive technology for a quality selection of cherries according to their size and efforts put into the cultivation of watermelons!