BALLET AMIDST FENCES: PLACELESSNESS AND PLACE-ATTACHMENT IN ONE PRAGUE SUBURB
BALLET AMIDST FENCES: PLACELESSNESS AND PLACE-ATTACHMENT IN ONE PRAGUE SUBURB

Summary/Abstract: Jenerálka, formerly a small industrial settlement on the outskirts of Prague, has been recently undergoing an extremely profound change. Since 1989 it has become a target for developers offering luxurious dwellings 'in one of the greenest parts of Prague- while within a stone's throw of the city centre. Even if it is still called Jenerálka. it has changed fundamentally, socially as well as materially. In the confines ot"Jenerálka the old and new intermingle in an assemblage that can tell us about the overall socio-economic change brought about in the last two decades. In this paper I employ the theoretical insights into place of two phenomenological geographers - David Seamon and Edward Relph - in order to analyse this change and to offer an unorthodox way of understanding it. Apart from a phenomenological and visual analysis of its spatiality, my understanding of Jenerálka is based on ethnographic methods targeting the socio-spatial practices of its inhabitants, resulting in what Seamon calls -place-ballet', and a potential absence of this resulting in a situation Relph terms 'placelessness'. The paper's aim is to demonstrate that by analysing the materiality of Jenerálka we can obtain an alternative way to conceive, theorise and speak about such topical issues as suburbanisation or gentrification.

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