Abstract
As a result of major social changes associated with transformation of the geographical organization of society in the 19th century, a broad debate was initiated about the importance and nature of social bonds in society and their embeddedness in urban and rural areas. The processes of modernization, industrialization and urbanization have fundamentally impacted the spatial organization and the actual contents of social ties.
The Ph.D. thesis deals with the consequences of the changes indicated above for the social environments in urban, suburban, and rural localities and it is built on the geographic perspective of social network research. The Ph.D. thesis consists of two parts.
The first part introduces theoretical and methodological aspects of the social environment research and assesses changing position of local community in society. The second part comprises of six published research papers, illustrating the change of social environment in urban, suburban, and rural parts of the Czech Republic after 1989.
The aim is to show different types of social environments, spatially differentiated importance of local communities in various parts of the Czech settlement system, and factors conditioning the character of local community in diverse types of residential environments. In the empirical research, main attention is paid to suburban areas.