Every city needs a Klinika: The struggle for autonomy in the post-political city (original) (raw)
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Struggle for the right to the city: Alternative spaces in post-socialist Prague
2012
The dissertation focuses on spaces in post-socialist Prague which transcend the hegemony of capitalist social and spatial relations and provide alternative spaces for non-profit culture and grassroots activities used and operated by students, artistic and creative communities, alternative subcultures, and NGOs. The author presents 14 case studies focused on these spaces, whose existence in the city is threatened. Referring to Marxian urban theory and the concept of the right to the city, the author critically investigates the democratic character of the social structures which are based on the contemporary socioeconomic model, and interprets the way in which the imperative of capital-accumulation, combined with the legacies of the totalitarian past, constrain the development of open democracy and civil society, and the creation of diverse, vibrant, progressive, and socially inclusive urban environments. The empirical part of the dissertation outlines the process of creating and operating alternative spaces in Prague during a changing political-economic context, and describes in detail, alternative spaces that existed in Prague in the early 21 st century. The author discusses these spaces in relation to two different regimes, which existed in Czech society before and after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. She evaluates these spaces in light of the way they differ from Western cities in regards to their relationship to urban development, gentrification and displacement; in connection with Prague's municipal politics and its official strategies; and from the perspective of their users' attitudes towards enforcing their right to the city. Based on a critical scrutiny of the situation of alternative spaces in Prague the author is concluding that through dogmatically embracing neoliberal capitalism Czech society has replaced the former totalitarian regime with a new ideology, which ingeniously eliminates and marginalizes spaces and activities that don't generate economic profit. This fact is presented as a sign that open democracy and a tolerant pluralist society have not yet been created in Czechia. According to the author, the alternative spaces have the potential to contribute to the improvement of the urban and social environment in Prague and in Czechia as a whole.
Rethinking radical activism: Heterogeneity and dynamics of political squatting in Prague after 1989
Journal of Urban Affairs, 2020
Using empirical material relating to political squatting in Prague, the objec- tive of this article is to problematize, complement, and extend the radical- activist type within the political-activism typology for postsocialist countries developed by Ondřej Císař. The text analyzes 3 crucial political squats that emerged after 1989: Ladronka, Milada, and Klinika. It aims to document that the radical activism presented by Císař is not homogeneous but heterogeneous and dynamic. Contrary to Císař’s quantitative approach based on protest data analysis, this article is grounded in qualitative and ethnographic research strategies that intend to bring a different perspective to radical activism. From a broader perspective, the text strives to complement canonical theories of social movements (the theory of political opportunity structure) with new theories (prefiguration and politics of act), both of which lie outside the main canon. It is precisely this combination that enables us to better understand the heterogeneity and dynamics of political squatting in Prague.
Twenty Years after Socialism: The Transformation of Prague's Inner Structure
The cities of Central and East Europe have by now passed through 20 years of democracy and market economy. The new political, economic and societal climate brought a revival of urban processes which had been interrupted by forty years of socialism. The article discusses the relevancy of the post-socialist city concept. We search for specific aspects of development of cities influenced by socialism taking the example of urban processes, which have been changing the inner spatial structure of Prague. Globalization, new technology and new forms of work and mobility have similar impacts on urban development on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. However we argue that other aspects, such as the inherited physical and social structure of the socialist city as well as the institutional context of post-socialism, have resulted in a specific form of urban processes, at least during the transformation era, in the majority of European post-socialist countries. Although similar key urban processes are forming the spatial patterns of post-socialist and western cities, they often have different causes, dynamics and consequences in the two contexts.
The article discusses contemporary Polish 'right to the city' movements and their potential for creating change, described here as the potential for 'alternative modernization', a term rooted in the alterglobalist movement. The waning of the latter's energy has fostered the emergence of local movements focused on protest and reform. In Poland, both an historical anti-urbanity and monologic patterns of regime transformation (the latter producing the 'anti-city') have become points of reference for urban movements and their demand for alternative patterns of modernization, called here altermodernization. The altermodernist model focuses, among other things, on discourses and praxis of decommodification, institutional reform and visions of a 'well-organized city'. The article is primarily a product of desk research and the author's own materials based on in-depth interviews collected in six Polish cities as well as participant observation and content analysis. Keywords: Right to the city, urban social movements, alternative modernization/altermodernization, commodification and decommodification, post-socialism
Introduction: Reconsidering “Post-Socialist Cities” in East Central and South East Europe
Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics, 2023
The notion of the "post-socialist city" is a widely used interpretative framework for discussing vast number of issues-including, inter alia, housing, reconstruction, urban heritage, and sustainable urban developmentamong a divergent set of disciplines-e.g., architecture, urbanism and urban planning, urban sociology, and anthropology of the city (for an overview, see, for instance, Sýkora and Bouzarovski 2012; Kinossian 2022). Despite its popularity in the research of urban spaces in the East-Central and South East European regions, it has also been subjected to criticism as an umbrella term that arbitrarily brings together a variety of experiences, merging different histories and trajectories of transformation into a false homogeneous whole. There has also been a debate as to whether, 30 years after the events of 1989, the concept of post-socialism is still relevant, or whether it would be better to speak of a neoliberal condition with regard to the process of systemic transformation in Europe (e.g., Chelcea and Druţǎ 2016). In this special issue, we postulate post-socialism as a de-territorialized concept that focuses on a specific process or phenomenon, rather than a hegemonic framework that could be applied to define the totality of processes shaping urban space and identity (Tuvikene 2016). Building upon Grubbauer and Kusiak, we consider the coinage of a "post-socialist city" as a floskel, especially its application in the two above noted regional contexts. As neatly observed by the two authors, it paradoxically combines the two "seemingly contradictory interpretative schemes" of "post" and "socialist" to create "a substantial hiatus" in urban theory, hence allowing for an inaccurate comparison between the "Western" and "Eastern" European experiences and subsequent orientalization of the socialist legacy of the latter (2012). One can argue that * Naum Trajanovski
Images of a (post-socialist) city beyond socialist spaces
Mapping Vilnius. Transitions Of Post-Socialist Urban Spaces, 2016
This text is a part of a book "Mapping Vilnius. Transitions Of Post-Socialist Urban Spaces", which explores how USSR period infrastructural projects determine forms of collective living in 2010s Lithuania. In this text I suggest, that in order to understand the changes in post-socialist space we have to analyze not only the spaces of the past (spaces produced during state socialism and experiencing transformation today), but to look into the spaces of the future or the images of the city that are created today in and about a city that previously belonged to the space of state socialism. Therefore I provide analysis of the images of the city that are implicated in new housing projects in Vilnius as an exemplary place to look for the cultural notions of what constitutes a good city and how to live in it in post-socialist circumstances.
Despite growing scholarly interest in residential segregation in Central and Eastern Europe, thus far insufficient attention has been paid to understanding marginalization in these postsocialist transition societies through the perceptions of stakeholders. The present article reports the findings of a qualitative study of the perceptions of urban social problems in the city center of Prague, Czechia. Semistructured interviews with the key actors involved in the city's social development are used to understand what social phenomena they perceive as problematic, how they localize them within the urban space, and how their perceptions translate into policy attitudes. We find that stakeholders emphasize the issues of homelessness, drug addiction, and the appropriate delivery of social services in their narratives. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the repressive nature of policy interventions partly results from a lack of experience of overcoming such societal issues and partly results from weak coordination at the city level.