A typology of ‘war’ over the public space in the contemporary city. Examples from Prague

Abstract

The French anthropologist Marc Auge sees the modern-day city as facing three risks: uniformity, extension, and implosion. All these risks are linked to the ‘war’ over space in the modern and post-modern city. The problem of uniformity arose in the last decades of the 19th century, when cities began to modernise and, amidst efforts to create a new type of residential building that could accommodate as many tenants as pos-sible (i.e. tenement buildings, the precursor to the later prefab panel building), areas of the urban space were cleared for redevelopment. Cities became an arena of conflict between people involved in business and the champions of modernisation on one side, and traditionalists and heritage preservationists on the other. Around the same time the first automobiles made their appearance; over the course of the 20th century they would profoundly transform the character of cities. These two ‘wars’ over the public space reached their peak in the 20th century. As population density in the cities increased, there was an escalating conflict of interests in connection with rising consumption and the growing volume of traffic: people needed to be able to move rapidly around the city and have access to housing and shopping opportunities, but they also needed to be close to others and to feel safe and the city needed good quality air and green areas. After 1989, communi-cation (tourism) grew sharply and this gave rise to a conflict between the interests of tourist agencies and long-term residents, who were essentially pushed out of the historic centres of cities into the growing pe-ripheries, which then required the construction of new roads. This paper seeks to put forth a typology of the ‘wars’ over space in the (post)modern city and presents the best-known examples of the conflict of interests between local politicians, developers, and citizens in Prague in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.