The project focuses on Prague allotments as an empirical example of the changing approach to urban nature and urban planning after the fall of socialism. Allotments represent spaces of affection and care. As urban nature, they are spaces of intense political negotiations. The project aims to analyse how allotments reflect changes in urban developments and nature, politics of urban space as well as the experience of the city and home. Combining the micro and macro perspective in a multi-method research (Burawoy’s (1998) extended case method), the project will (1) produce detailed understanding of practices/experiences of urban gardening and their changes in the transformation from socialism to post-socialism; (2) explore how changes in imaginaries and experiences of home, nature and the city manifest; and (3) analyse negotiations over the spaces of allotment gardening. The objective is to show how the transformation from socialism has affected the complexities of the politics of urban nature, and what its impact is on everyday experience of home and nature in the post-socialist city.
Goals:
To establish practices of urban gardening and their changes from socialism to post-socialism; to analyse how the changing practices reflect changing experience of home, nature and city; to provide an empirically based analysis of developments in the politics of urban nature over the given period.
Publikace vydané v rámci projektu (celkem 6, zobrazeno 1 - 6)
In this article, we propose to expand the field of urban political ecology (UPE) by analyzing the role of discourse in the production of urban nature. We exemplify our case by analyzing media discourses and exploring discursive modes of justification and hierarchies of worth mobilized in socialist and postsocialist struggles over allotments in what is now the Czech Republic.
This article details our attempts at making sense of an ostalgic heterotopic space. We relay here our analysis of staying in and exploring a disused air raid shelter built during WWII, converted into a fallout shelter at the beginning of the Cold War and recently repurposed in an anti-communist museum/tourist hotel/ostalgic canteen called 10Z Bunker.
Humanistic and phenomenological scholarship has long tended to regard home as a fundamental place of existential and experiential stability. In recent times, the notion of home has been critically re‐examined, however, and home is now regarded as a more complex and multi‐faceted phenomenon.
In this article we explore how nature becomes part of the city through the example of allotment gardening in the city of Prague, in the Czech Republic. Prague allotments were established based on an ongoing political‐ecological process of urbanization of nature that was locally driven by socialist (from 1948 to 1989) and later neoliberal governance.
The chapter draws on an example of the negotiation of the fate of urban gardening in allotments in post-socialist Prague in order to question the public-private dichotomy and argues that urban spaces need to be understood and managed as a hybrid space.
Exploring a history of one Prague allotments, the chapter explores everyday experience of allotment gardening, its everyday properties and the ways in which it is rhythmed.
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