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    Published: 2015-01-01
    Vol. 13 (2015)

    Praga – robotnicze miasto pod przymusem : nowy pejzaż miasta w okresie powojennym

    Blanka Soukupová

    Abstract

    In the course of the 19th century, Prague, the political, economic and cultural centre of the Czech lands, witnessed the formation of a new social class – the working class. Driven by industrialization, the core of this class consisted of factory workers. Industrial cities were newly divided into commercial and residential districts; in Prague, workers sought accommodation near the city centre. Working-class Prague became a major part of Czech Prague. In the last three decades of the 19th century, the working class expanded out to the Prague suburbs, but the suburbs did not become working–class areas. The districts of Holešovice, Libeň, Smíchov, Košíře and the eastern part of Karlín were heavily working class, because tenement houses there offered plenty of cheap apartments. The construction of apartment complexes for factory workers began in the 1860s and reached a peak from the 1890s to the first decade of the 20th century. In 1921, 37.4% of the capital’s population was working class. As a consequence of the outcome of the Second World War, however, a new political force, i.e. the communist party, backed by manual labourers, began to demand the entire municipal space for itself. The memory of the city and even its social structure was to become “working class”. The author analyses the mechanisms by which this ideological plan was to be achieved: settling the city centre with labourers, removing the political undesirables from Prague, cleansing the Dejvice district of its “bourgeois” class, rewriting the history of Prague, reconstructing “ideologically appropriate” landmarks, establishing museums of the workers’ movement, creating a new “ideological” urban center, and increasing investment into the suburbs of the city

    Keywords:

    Prague, working class city, post-war period

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    Citation rules

    Soukupová, B. (2015). Praga – robotnicze miasto pod przymusem : nowy pejzaż miasta w okresie powojennym. Journal of Urban Ethnology, 13, 21–37. Retrieved from https://journals.iaepan.pl/jue/article/view/671

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