Občianska spoločnosť v kontexte vývoja sídelných štruktúr
The Civic Society in the Context of the Settlement Structures Development

Summary/Abstract: The Civic Society in the Context of the Settlement Structures Development. The author chose the fourth chapter of the autobiography Slovensko na konci tisícročia (Slovakia at the End of the Millennium) by Róbert Roško as a mainspring to this article that deals with problems of restoration of the civic society. The chapter contains inspiring stimuli related to problems of the evolution of human settlements and their communities. The author summarised those stimuli into four comments. The first comment analyses the historical context of the settlement development and the civic society within the European area emphasising the Antique Greece and its polis that Romans adopted as a theoretical model and later improved in practice. Herein is mentioned social implication of the understanding of democracy that conduced to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and to the decline of antique municipalities. The second comment is concerned with problems of the settlement communities and their municipality on the territory of medieval Slovakia. In that period the skeleton of current settlement scheme of Slovak territory was established and further developed in the course of the 17th and 18th century. Within this scheme, the dominance of approximately 200 settlements appeared to be noteworthy. Their communities also included some segments of citizenship. The third comment describes the development of the civic society on the territory of Slovakia in the first half of the 20th century – conditioned by agrarian and rural character of the region, but being a part of the developed democratic system of the Czechoslovak Republic. The fourth comment is of the widest comprehension. It addresses problem of imposition of civic society during the period of the communist experiment and its revitalisation after the year 1989. It analyses conditions of the settlement structure and its territorial communities and residuals of a utopian social engineering from the period of the communist experiment. It particularly concerns an idealised mathematical model by Walter Christaller (a spatial layout of settlements based on the departmental principle) that was modified and implemented in Czechoslovakia. The administrative merge of minor settlements into departmental settlements consolidated the centralism of communist regime and put remains of the civic society into liquidation. Many minor villages were indicated as villages without development and were adjudged to a decline. After the year 1989 the associated settlements became independent en masse with their self-government being restored and the village citizenship being revitalised. The present reform and modernisation of public administration is trying to solve the problem of the big proportion of minor rural settlements (up to 1000 habitants). In this comment the author also pays a considerable attention to the questions of citification and ruralisation from the aspect of the civic society development. The article

• Details
• Contents