News
In autumn an article by Jan Sýkora and Petra Špačková was published in Housing Studies journal. The article aims to analyze variations in residential change in individual localities within Holešovice, Prague’s inner-city district. It concludes that gentrification influences Holešovice simultaneously with other types of residential change. The most common type of change is incumbent upgrading related to the privatization of the housing stock. At the same time, several stagnating areas were identified. The neighbourhood development indicates the concurrent presence of diversified neighbourhood trajectories with drivers at various spatial and temporal scales. Read here.
In the academic year 2020/2021, the Urrlab team has grown again. We are proud to host four new postgraduate students: Adela Petrovic, Dilnoza Tasheva, Jiří-Jakub Zévl and Niloofar Ghafouriazar. They come from diverse educational and national backgrounds, all focusing on urban issues that have been unfolding in the post-socialist region in their PhD projects. We wish them all a successful study and are positive that their experience and personalities will also be beneficial for the team. An introduction of our new colleagues’ background, research plans and more can be found here.
- Adam Klsák: Transformations of "Russian" Karlovy Vary: Five years since the annexation of Crimea
- Adela Petrović: Gated Communities in Prague Urban Region: Location and Positionality on different Scale
- Martin Šimon, Ivana Křížková, Adam Klsák, Yana Leontiyeva, Renáta Mikešová: Migrants in selected cities in Czechia 2008–2015: Analysis of changes in spatial distribution using a population grid
- Robert Osman, Zuzana Kopecká, Veronika Kotýnková: Time disadvantage: when the body does not meet the standards of time
Two new papers by Martin Šimon, Ivana Křížková and Adam Klsák with a focus on residential segregation were published recently, using newly available register-based data on foreign citizens’ residence in Czechia. Although they are in Czech, the papers also contain an English summary and abstract. The Geografie paper looks at the development of spatial residential distribution of six major immigrant groups, based on citizenship, in selected Czech large cities. The article published in Urbanismus a územní rozvoj deals with Czechia as a whole and introduces the innovative method of measuring segregation using multilevel individualised neighbourhoods. Basic results show a dominant trend of decreasing segregation between the majority and immigrant groups. The slow and constant increase in immigrant population in Czechia thus does not lead to clear segregation patterns, except in some specific areas. The papers were supported by the Czech Science Foundation funded project Residential segregation and mobility of foreign citizens: analysis of neighbourhoods, housing trajectories, and neighbourhood context.
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.
We are very pleased that from October 2020 to April 2021, Kadi Kalm, who was accepted for a post-doc position at the Department of Social Geography and Regional Development (CUNI), will join our team. Kadi currently works at the University of Tartu (Estonia) and focuses mainly on ethnic segregation and internal migration. In 2018 she defended her dissertation, which looked at ethnic residential segregation and integration of the Russian-speaking population in Estonia.
New paper Immigrant internal migration in a new destination country: Do immigrants suburbanise in Czechia and why? by Ivana Křížková and Martin Ouředníček was published in Population, Space and Place. The paper contributes to the debate on immigrant internal migration that has been limited to established immigration countries. It investigates trends in participation of different groups of foreign residents in urbanisation processes in Czechia, which has recently become a new immigration destination. The paper also evaluates the strength of sociodemographic and place‐based factors contributing to suburbanisation. Similarities are found between the internal migration of different immigrant groups and that of the Czech majority, indicating the predominance of suburbanisation of affluence, notably in culturally and economically well‐off groups.
A new paper, co-authored by Martin Ouředníček, Adam Klsák and Petra Špačková, focusing on the development of spatial patterns of suburbanisation in Czechia between 1997 and 2016 was published last December in Demografie. The main objective of the article is to furnish a coherent methodology for the delimitation of suburban municipalities in Czechia, to describe and explain the scope and spatial distribution and to compare the development of residential suburbanisation during two distinct periods: 1997–2008 and 2009–2016. The article uses the delimitation of zones of residential suburbanisation (Ouředníček, Špačková, Novák 2013; Ouředníček, Špačková, Klsák 2018), as an analytical tool for the evaluation of positional aspects of municipalities within the Czech settlement system.
Registration for Urban Social Geography: Contemporary Issues summer-term course is now open. The URRlab team is welcoming all Erasmus and Czech students who are interested in finding out what the contemporary trends and issues are in the field of 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 lectures, discussions, group work, film seminars and field trips. The language of instruction is English. The lectures will be held at the Faculty of Science on Thursdays from 9 am.
The first issue of Journal of Maps this year brings a new paper entitled „Temporality of urban space: daily rhythms of a typical week day in the Prague metropolitan area“ by Jiří Nemeškal, Martin Ouředníček and Lucie Pospíšilová. The paper focuses on identification, analysis and explanation of daily rhythms in cadastral units of the Prague Metropolitan Area which are influenced by commuting of inhabitants to work, services and free-time activities. Mobile phone location data on time-space population mobility are used to define and cartographically produce a typology of cadasters according to the predominant use during a working day.