Publication details
Brownfield regeneration in the post-socialist space: key actors and network configurations
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | The reuse of abandoned territories is one of the greatest challenges for urban planners and developers today. In the post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe, the regeneration of brownfields became a topic of public debate only recently. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc and consequent transformation was accompanied by wider spatial issues, e.g. dynamics of de-industrialization and economic restructuring, residential and commercial suburbanization, re-urbanization processes, migration flows or changes in built-up and social structures within the inner parts of cities. In particular, brownfields have constituted barriers to local development. Even if we are endowed with substantial knowledge about the source and extent of unused spaces in the post-socialist context, we still do not fully understand what drives the process of regeneration. Based on several case studies in the Czech Republic, the paper seeks to identify the key actors and configurations that stand behind the complex negotiation process of regeneration in strongly variable, unstable, and fluid interactions. By adopting a network topology perspective, we explain the spatial and temporal aspects of regeneration as the effects of specific network activities. In this sense, we interpret conflicts between regeneration projects as entry points for understanding socio-spatial relations. The latter constitute place-making processes which are strongly networked and framed by political environments and social movements. |