"Towns of 100 chimneys" : Efforts to ideologise the urban space of the town of Kladno in the1950s and 1960s
Abstract
The paper's authors have attempted to outline the research possibilities present in work on the subject of the ideologisation of the public space of the town of Kladno and to contribute to a discussion on the approaches and methods of nascent urban anthropology and its penetration into related fields. On the basis of a study of Kladno's urban space and the highlighting of its most striking changes, it can be stated that Kladno became a shop window of the communist regime.
The local transformation of Kladno was closely dependent on national ideological plans presented at congresses of the Communist Party and ancillary organisations. They employed two basic approaches intended to rewrite the competing original "memory map" of the entire town.
In the authors' view, actual "places of memory" were targeted in three phases. The first involved the deliberate shifting of original meanings connected to the town and its urban elements.
There was also a linking of old and new urban elements.