Research on urban life with prestigious support: UP researchers to participate

Various aspects of contemporary urban life, especially those problematic ones that raise concerns for the future or that already generate certain challenges, will be examined by scientists from the Czech Academy of Sciences and experts from Palacký University. Together, they have started research via a project entitled Urbanity: Inequality, Adaptation, and Urban Public Space in the Historical Perspective.

The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic together with Palacký University Olomouc succeeded in the call of the Johannes Amos Comenius Operational Programme (OP JAK) focusing on the social sciences and humanities. The two institutions were awarded €6 million to work on a four-year interdisciplinary project Urbanity: Inequality, Adaptation, and Urban Public Space in the Historical Perspective.

“The result of our work should be a consistent picture of what towns went through in the past, what they had to face, how they actually faced it, and what it all means for them in terms of the future. We want to prepare a classification of towns by the type of impact, by the type of threat, and by the type of vulnerability and/or resilience. We know that some towns are markedly better off, while others are worse off. We want to understand and explain why this is so and offer a certain set of recommendations for the present,” said Karel Nováček from the UP Faculty of Arts Department of History on behalf of the part of the Palacký University team, which will receive €1.5 million out of the total funding. In addition to researchers from the Department of History, the Palacký University group will also be represented by the Department of Psychology and the Department of Sociology, Andragogy, and Cultural Anthropology, as well as the Department of Geoinformatics from the UP Faculty of Science.

The experts will focus mainly on the territory of the Czech Republic, however some case studies originate from abroad, so they are going to deal with towns in the Central European context. Nováček’s team will also contribute with a case study that investigates the development of medieval towns in northern Iraq from the long-term view. Nováček, an archaeologist, has been studying this region, where specific climatic conditions resulted in striking vulnerability of towns, for a long time. The researchers will go all the way back to the Iron Age, when the first large urban settlements were established. They will investigate their spatial formation, their mutual relationships within various cooperating networks, etc. However, the main focus of the research will be on the more recent periods: the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the 20th century.

“With the exception of Iraq, we will be conducting mostly comparative research. We want to interpret the results we already have and put them into new contexts,” Nováček said. The research group expects that the new interdisciplinary project, one of the first attempts to bring together different kinds of research dealing with similar issues from different perspectives (history, archaeology, sociology, social geography, psychology, political science), could take advantage of their synergistic effect.

The project is divided into three thematic parts, which are further subdivided into a number of more specific issues. Nearly fifty researchers will be involved.

“In the first part, entitled Urban Public Space as a Space of Conflict and Creativity, we’ll explore the meaning and role of public spaces in towns. These play an important role in urban life as environments where something is created, where power is demonstrated, and where both positive and negative interactions between people occur. For instance, the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences will address a range of issues related to public life in socialist cities, where roots of the current state of affairs can be traced back. It is necessary to reflect on this in depth and then propose ways to better treat public space and the life that is associated with it,” said the scientist from the UP Faculty of Arts.

The second part, entitled Urban Inequality, will focus on how this environment generates inequality among people. “In the past as well as today, there have been few urban societies in the world that were or are built on egalitarian ideals and where common practice can maintain some degree of equality among people. It’s therefore possible to say that the city equals inequality among people, and that the larger the city, the more inequality it tends to create. The greatest megalopolises in the world represent differences that are sometimes abysmal. A large part of the project is thus focused on describing and exploring inequality. We will address questions such as: In which areas of the city is inequality created? How is it manifested? Is it hidden, or rather evident? Are there ways to mitigate inequality in urban space?” Nováček noted.

The third part of the research can be summarised in one word: Threats. In this part, researchers will focus on what threats and challenges towns faced in the past. “These could have been various natural disasters, earthquakes, fires, or various demographic events such as epidemics, famine, and so on. There are interesting studies that we want to compare and connect. We are interested in how towns in different cultural contexts and different times have been able to prevent threats, and once they occurred, how they have been able to deal with them. Many such threats are still relevant today,” said Nováček in closing.

The work on the ambitious project Urbanity: Inequality, Adaptation, and Urban Public Space in the Historical Perspective, starts in January 2025 and will be concluded in 2028. Although the project is primarily scientific and will deliver scientific results such as publications in peer-reviewed journals and monographs, it will also result in activities for the public, such as exhibitions, films, popular publications, and a geographical application that could facilitate the understanding of spatial and topographical qualities of cities. The research team also aims to make recommendations to state and local governments.