Ivan Plicka within the series Housing Estate, what next?

Housing Estates represent specific areas of cities that require conceptual and thoughtful decision-making by public administration. Their spatial structure brings complications in both economic and social sustainability. Up to now, as a society, we have dealt almost exclusively with houses and their construction technology standards and have not focused much on finding a long-term strategy for the development of these locations. Searching for answers to the questions of the future development of these specific territories thus represents one of the most important topics in spatial planning and urban management.

We invite you to the final lecture of the series “Housing Estates, What Next?”, in which this time architect and urban planner Ivan Plicka will speak.

Southern City or the Journey There and Back.

“Forty years ago, the construction of our largest housing estate, the Prague Southern City, began; subsequently, the first residents began to move in. Today, their third generation already lives there. After 1989, housing estates were labeled as rabbit hutches, and they have not shed the stigma of strange living conditions until today. In the last twenty-five years, only rare attempts at systematic transformation of the housing environment can be observed.
Prague's Southern City was, at the beginning, a product of the heightened sixties, which brought much promise even in architecture and urbanism. However, everything changed after 1968. The year 1989 perhaps brought hope, but the housing estate hardly saw any real steps. For several years, architects Jan Sedlák, Ivan Plicka, and Martin Sedlák (SPS architects) worked for the Southern City municipal office; during the nineties, countless studies and projects emerged, aiming at a fundamental transformation of the housing estate into a city, into a good address. Most of the intentions remained just on paper, as local politics followed its own paths.
The transformation of Southern City “from the top down” did not occur after 1989. Today, in times of crisis and limited investment opportunities, large solutions can no longer be expected. The focus is on transformation “from the bottom up”.
The lecture will address the transformation of approaches to designing and regenerating housing estates over the past four decades using the example of Prague's Southern City.”

The lecture will take place in the building of the Faculty of Architecture CTU in Dejvice on Thursday, May 22, at 6:30 PM in room 107.

The research project “Housing Estates, What Next?” is organized by the Faculty of Architecture CTU in cooperation with the Housing Quality Center, Heinrich Böll Stiftung Prague, and the National Network of Healthy Cities. The project is supported by the Visegrad Fund.

The project “Housing Estates, What Next?” explores the possibilities of transforming existing housing units into functioning and attractive parts of urban structure. Part of the project includes a studio assignment in the Kohout-Tichý studio, a student workshop, and a series of six thematic lectures. In the first part of the lecture series, experts from the Visegrad countries will present the issue of housing estates in the Central European context, followed by Czech experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, and theory who deal with the topic of housing estates in their activities. An international conference is planned for the fall of this year, which will present the results of case studies and analyses conducted in the studio and will feature guests from Germany, France, and the Netherlands, who will present implemented or ongoing regenerations of housing estates, both in terms of content (principles) and process (the role of public administration). The project concludes with a traveling exhibition, which will be inaugurated at the Faculty of Architecture CTU and subsequently presented in cities and urban areas that participated in the project. The theoretical knowledge gained during the individual phases of the project “Housing Estates, What Next?” will also be summarized in a publication that will suggest basic recommendations for the transformation of Czech housing estates.

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