Talk
Post-socialist Urban Transformations in East Central Europe. Cases of Prague and Bratislava

This lecture will trace the socio-economic and spatial transformations of Prague and Bratislava in a process of long change from the early 1980s to the second half of the 1990s. The speakers will draw on their long-term research and the current project "In Search of the Postmodern City". Specifically, they will focus on the privatisation of housing, the transformation of historic inner cities and the treatment of socialist heritage after 1989. In doing so, they will attempt to find answers to the question of global contexts, but also local late socialist roots of post-revolutionary transformations. Basically, this will be an inquiry into continuities and discontinuities of urban life and urban policies before and after 1989. And, moreover, into results of some of these actions, which last and form urban life in the region until today. In a more general sense, this lecture will also reflect on the possibilities of researching post-socialist urban transformations and the perspectives from which this important subject of contemporary history can be approached.

Matěj Spurný is a researcher in contemporary social history, urban and environmental history of postwar Czechoslovakia. He works as an associate professor at Charles University and senior researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He published about nationalism, communism, contemporary environmental and urban history of East Central Europe in leading international journals such as Social History, Revue Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine or Journal of Urban History. He published several influential and publicly discussed monographs on postwar Czechoslovak and Central European history in Czech, German and English. The most important ones include his dissertation “Der lange Schatten der Vertreibung” (Germ. 2019) about nationality and communism in postwar Czechoslovakia and “Making the Most of Tomorrow” (Engl. 2019) about technocracy, environmental devastation and crisis of organized modernity in socialist Czechoslovakia.

Petr Roubal is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research deals with social and cultural history of state-socialism and post-socialism. His book Spartakiads: Politics of physical culture in communist Czechoslovakia (2019) dealt with symbolic meaning and social agency in a context of a political ritual. He is currently working on the urban history of socialist and post-socialist cities, with a particular interest in urban planning (or lack thereof). He has also written on the crisis of socialist urban modernism and the politics of heritage conservation focusing on development of post-war Prague. He has published in leading international journals such as Body and Society, Journal of Urban History or Journal of Modern European History.

The talk is part of the HAIT Lecture Series Lost (in) Transformation: Answers from the Recent Past to Challenges of Today in the winter semester and the Dresden-Prague Talks. Maren Hachmeister will moderate the talk.

The Lecture Series takes place in TIL 110 and hybrid via Zoom.

If you would like to attend, please register by the Monday before the event at: hait@tu-dresden.de, stating your full name. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the start of the event.

Diese Maßnahme ist mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushalts.