Hidden Order and the Essence of Uniqueness of Historical Cities in the Czech Republic

The exhibition presenting the concept, results, and future use of a five-year urban and heritage research project involving dozens of researchers will be launched on October 1, 2020, at 6:00 PM in front of the Jaroslav Fragner Gallery and will last until mid-November. For interested parties, there will also be an online curatorial tour with Prof. Jan Jehlík, the leader of this exceptional multi-million euro grant and head of the Institute of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture at Czech Technical University in Prague. The methodology that allows historical development of cities to be processed into sets of maps enabling a wide range of analyses is expected to significantly assist both heritage conservationists and local governments in evaluating the current situation and planning construction or transport changes in the city.

Exhibition Concept /
Petr Buryška, Kateřina Dolejšová, Tomáš Drdácký, Jan Jehlík, Edita Lisecová

“We started from these premises: the city is a cultural value as a whole – not just as a sum of valuable objects; heritage-worthy areas (reservations, zones) are an integral part of their landscape and overall urban context; and thirdly – digital mapping models allow for professional comparisons of diverse formal and historical sources,” explains architect and urban planner Jan Jehlík. “The goal was to create tools that identify complementary phenomena and attributes that are important for the sustainability of cultural values of historical cities and for preserving their authenticity or designing innovations for their protection in urban planning and heritage care.”
The ambition of the research was to supplement existing methods and approaches in heritage care based on contemporary urban knowledge, thereby enriching and strengthening heritage care and its execution without discrediting its existing priorities. Care for the values of the city is equally important for the whole, parts, and individual components. For this purpose, the city can be understood as a whole within its administrative boundaries, as part of its medieval core, and as individual objects or smaller sets. The methodology involves the depiction, description, and interpretation of phenomena in different historical periods. The essence of mapping is the projection of essential phenomena, attributes, and relationships, along with information about their transformations. The arrangement and formation of phenomena and attributes are fixed within a geographic information system (GIS). The output of mapping consists of sets of maps with expert content and examples of their analytical use. The projection is based on the scale of the whole city, the scale of the landscape context, and the scale of its composite parts.
The development of urban settlement structure in the Czech Republic was fundamentally completed at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries and was primarily the result of medieval establishment and development of cities in European Christian civilization. The structure of urban settlement developed gradually in several waves, the most significant being the founding and colonization efforts of the late Přemyslids. Even though in the following centuries cities and the overall structure of urban settlements in our territory underwent various developmental vicissitudes, the most significant feature of cities remains their medieval character, which most cities have retained not only during the onset of the Industrial Revolution but also in the subsequent period up to the present day. The cornerstone of a medieval city is the coexistence of secular and sacred power. This is expressed through secular buildings, which include bourgeois housing, town halls, marketplaces, fortifications, as well as noble residences, and sacred buildings, such as temples, churches, chapels, and their complexes. From an urban point of view, the most significant manifestation of this coexistence is public spaces – squares (markets), street and road networks - and their mutual hierarchical connections. Buildings and their complexes and public spaces in the landscape context and their compositional arrangement constitute a shared image of the city by society, an expression of historical layering and diversity as a result of coexistence of various ethnicities and cultural influences.
Historical centers of many cities have preserved a very rich and diverse urban architectural structure thanks to their long-term continuous development. Although some of the most significant buildings and spaces have lost their original functions and we can generally say that the ways urban structures are used have undergone substantial changes, the layered arrangement of urban structures has often absorbed these changes in function and use. An essential and visible component of the city's image is also the presence of permanent processes, manifested by the acquired ability to inhabit urban environments. The expression of the quality of this acquisition is the relationship to the place – identification with it. The intensity of this identification deepens through the development of the value of the place and its noteworthy characteristics – the values of the heritage. The cultural process consists of acquiring the keys to understanding the language of a complex image of the situation. It is essential to always remember that in the complex image of the situation, one cannot exclude the cultural influence of humans here and now; heritage is to be a living testimony of such influence. Another essential characteristic here is authenticity – genuineness, which lies in the depth and sustainability of a permanent cyclic dialogue of generations and the authenticity of the content of the message. This characteristic has both a material and an immaterial nature.
One of the attributes of the present is the ability to store and preserve large amounts of data. The value of the present is the ability to evaluate this data and utilize it as information for further development and its prediction. This presupposes the ability to visualize information, create a complex model, and its display in individual time intervals. If we have a relevant image of material and immaterial processes in cities and also understand their historical tendencies, it will be possible to predict and evaluate future directions and strive for the optimization of the target image. It is essential to experimentally verify the sustainability of heritage on a digital model without taking a erroneous and fundamentally irreversible step. In this context, it is necessary to fill a purposeful database with information about the situation of the heritage and the heritage itself, to digitize relevant data and information, and to improve the virtual image of the city, including the gradual digitization of archival documentation. This way, essential information about the physical state of the city can be captured, which allows for a return to historical situations, the possibility of their retrospective analysis, remodeling or anastylosis (i.e., restoring a building heritage by assembling preserved parts into their original form). The presented work contributes to effective measures in this area, and its methods follow the trend of contemporary global experimental heritage care.
Heritage care can be effectively implemented on an urban scale only when it can take into account lived reality, predict ongoing changes, and effectively coordinate them within its own planning, rather than merely passively reacting to them. This requires a systematic approach at several levels. The aforementioned collection, sorting, and evaluation of data about the territory will allow monitoring changes, timely recognizing ongoing trends and their potential impact, and will facilitate their effective communication with individual stakeholders. Effective management and adaptation of systems where they are under the direct control of public administration primarily concerns public spaces and civic, landscape, and technical infrastructure. This is also related to meaningful updates of relevant rules and regulations, including the conditions for providing methodological support. In general, it is necessary to shift some attention from object-oriented care to an interest in heritage values and phenomena manifested at an urban scale. Only in this way will it be possible to ensure the natural development of the heritage environment and consciously set the optimal level of preservation of its physical form as well as its generally perceived identity and authenticity. Ongoing events and urbanization processes in cities are an inseparable part of the heritage environment, fundamentally influencing its perception and indicating trends that will sooner or later manifest in the physical environment, and thus it is necessary to understand them well.

The exhibition was created as part of the project "Origin and Attributes of Heritage Values of Historical Cities of the Czech Republic," funded by the Applied Research and Development of National Identity Program of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic – NAKI II

AUTHORS
Prof. Ing. arch. Jan Jehlík (concept, project coordination, evaluation)
Ing. arch. Tomáš Drdácký (concept, historical development, analysis of the ground plan)
JUDr. PhDr. Jiří Plos (concept, evaluation)
Ir. André Loits (analysis of the ground plan)
Ing. arch. Jana Zdráhalová, Ph.D. (historical development, space syntax, survey research)
Ing. arch. Vít Rýpar (topographic plan, basic map set, algorithmic analyses)
Ing. arch. Petr Buryška (partial map sets)
Ing. arch. Jan Sedlák (analysis of the city's image)
Doc. Ing. arch. Miroslav Cikán (analysis of the city's image)
Prof. Ing. arch. Michal Kohout (analysis of the use of the urban core)

CO-AUTHORS
Jaroslav Buzek (analysis of the ground plan)
Ing. Tomáš Zadražil (analysis of the ground plan)
Ing. Jan Bryscejn (analysis of the ground plan)
Ing. arch. Vojtěch Ertl (analysis of the city's image)
Ing. arch. Jiří Mika (analysis of the city's image)
Ing. arch. Šárka Jahodová (analysis of the use of the urban core)
Ing. arch. Veronika Peňázová (analysis of the use of the urban core)
Ing. arch et Mgr. Klára Nedvědová, Ph.D. (survey research)
Mgr. Jiří Čtyroký, Ph.D. (GIS)
MgA. Ester Havlová (photographing the urban environment)
Ing. arch. Kateřina Koňata Dolejšová (graphic works)
Ing. arch. Edita Lisecová (production work)

All information about the project and links to individual results can be found on the website FA ČVUT.

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