Settlements of the Present and Past: Changes in the Prague Settlement of Stodůlky Through the Eyes of Its Inhabitants
Abstract
High-rise housing settlements are an integral part of every city in the postsocialist area of Eastern Europe. These prefabricated urbanistic wholes, of varying extent, have been taking on a very interesting and distinctive character in the context of the political, economic and social changes of recent years.
My principal interest, however, is not in the actual changes in the character of the settlements and how to describe them, but rather in how these changes are reflected in the utterances of those directly involved. In this study, based on narrative biographical interviews with inhabitants of the Stodůlky settlement in Prague, I attempt to interpret how these dynamic changes are reflected on the narrators’ side.
The primary focus of interest is therefore the conceptualisation of changes in the relationship to the settlement as home (Svašek, 2002), in the context of roughly the past thirty years. Theoretically I take my premises from the anthropological concepts differentiating place and space (Hirsch, 1995; De Certeau, 1984), where these two ideas are conceived as two distinct dimensions of the perception of spatiality.
Place functions as a category related to everyday perception. Space is more an impersonal structure leading beyond the plane of the everyday.
Based on this differentiation, I will consider how the settlement appears in narration, and how place and space relate to the time dimension in the settlement’s evolution. The narrators show a tendency to categorise the settlement’s “history”.
This schematisation again reveals a further interesting level, stemming from narrative reactualisation of the personal past in the locality being examined.