I am afraid that some of the people who grew up in Prague and shaped the life of the city will have to move, says Michal Lehečka – A2larm
Photo courtesy of Michal Lehečka
Michal Lehečka is a social anthropologist working at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University and in the Antropopictures and AutoMat associations, where he founded the Laboratory of Sustainable Urbanism. Lehečka professionally focused on the forms of development of contemporary cities, especially with regard to the so-called post-socialist cities and with an emphasis on the public space of prefabricated housing estates. He is also one of the authors of a new brochure of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences entitled Prague panel housing estates as places of contradictions. He is the author of a number of professional and popular texts.
In the first part of the boulevard podcast, we talked about the transformation of housing estates over the past decades. It is precisely the outskirts of cities where housing prices have risen the fastest in recent years. How did the function of the housing estate help, why, according to Lehečka, is it necessary to stop sticking only to an aesthetic or urban scale and to focus on how much the housing estate met or is meeting the needs of the inhabitants? Is it possible to talk about gentrification and financialization in connection with prefabricated housing estates? What experience did Michal Lehečka gain during his five-year research at the Černý most housing estate in Prague?
The next part of the interview is devoted to territorial development and participation with a focus on the new districts of Prague. Preparations for the unblocking of several important Prague brownfields are currently being completed. A new district of Bubny – Zátory is to be built, the area around the Freight Station in Žižkov will be transformed into Žižkov City, and a new functional-residential district in Smíchov is also growing. What will they look like and who will live in them? And what does the blackest possible scenario look like in terms of the future development of housing prices in Prague? The last part of the interview then deals with the topics of participation and transport.