This paper explores the influence of transnational professionals and financial capital on the residential spaces and real estate markets of Prague, Czech Republic. This is achieved by situating two in-depth case studies of real estate institutions within wider processes of post-socialist transformation. The paper concentrates upon the exclusionary markets and material spatialities that such institutions and related actors are producing in a specific city district, Prague 8. Through a critical discussion of these exclusionary spaces and the processes contributing to their formation, the paper contributes to contemporary debates concerning the creative destruction of urban space in post-socialist cities, as well as to broader issues relating to the nature of space, scale and power in late capitalism, arguing for a more relational and topological understanding of urban regeneration projects.

First, the institutional history of a real estate developer and the complex associations it has with international financiers, the geopolitics of commodity trading, real estate developers and agencies, as well as with municipal governance structures in Prague, indicates the sheer complexity and topological nature of property development under late capitalism. Policies of neoliberalisation and privatisation, pursued during the 1990s and 2000s in the Czech Republic, have had the effect of encouraging unregulated international investment in Prague, leading in turn to a tranche of new commercial and housing developments that are transnational in terms of both aesthetics as well as the actors and institutions involved.

Second, such developments are inherently exclusionary, both in their specific spatial form as well as the ways in which the property market has become polarised, both in terms of pricing, but also by nationality. The dominance in the luxury real estate sector of foreign owned firms (developers, agencies, marketing companies and investors) and their networks of association, as well as the fact that such institutions and actors generally only target foreign clients for their products, produces an exclusionary market, essentially removed from any regulatory frameworks, and ultimately from any meaningful responsibility. These processes of physical and financial exclusion are highly problematic, especially in light of the housing shortage expected to hit Prague in the next decade.

Finally, the case studies discussed serve to demonstrate the weaknesses of thinking through space and place in closed and binary ways, serving instead to argue for a conceptualisation of space and place that as open, heterogeneous and relational. By focusing upon a major ‘local’ urban development, it becomes clear that that the flows of capital, actors and institutions involved in producing this space are tied together in complex ways that manifest themselves materially behind the luxurious façades of Prague 8.

University of Newcastle - Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies
NE1 7RU Newcastle upon Tyne
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/curds/
Andrew C.G. Cook (Post-Doctoral Fellow)

17/03/2008

Andrew C.G. Cook

research

Urban Policy

Housing