《The Battle of ŽižkovUrban Planners’ Transition from Heritage Protection to Neoliberal Discursive Planning》

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作者
Petr Roubal
来源
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.47,Issue3,P.495–510
语言
英文
关键字
作者单位
1Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia
摘要
On the example of working-class Prague quarter of Žižkov, the article studies the interrelation between heritage protection of late nineteenth-century tenement housing and neoliberal city policies after 1989. It locates the common root of both phenomena in the strong sense of crisis of socialist modernist urbanism among urban planners and architects since the early 1970s. The criticism of socialist urbanism culminated shortly before the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in a public struggle against demolition and redevelopment of the entire Žižkov quarter, led by a group of young architects. The article concludes by describing a bitter victory as the quarter’s architecture was eventually saved, while neoliberal urban policies and gentrification eroded its working-class nature. This process illustrates a major shift in urban expertise from social planning under socialism to neoliberal discursive planning in which a “story” of a city is constructed through preservation of belle-époque tenement housing.