Everyday Life in Materialized Urban Utopia: Contemporary Changes in Standardized Blue-collars‘ Housing in the City of Zlin.
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| Year of publication | 2008 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The city of Zlin, as we know it nowadays, was mainly built during the period before the WWII by the company led by Tomas Antonin Bata. Bata is worldwide known for his successful business in the field of shoemaking industry and trade. Zlin was a place where his professional life began and where the first factory was built. Nevertheless, the project of the industrial enterprise included not only the manufacturing center, but it was also designed and realized as a comprehensive social project. The factory as one of the total institutions of the old modernity was surrounded by strictly planned quarters of brick houses and other estates intended for leisure and goods consumption of workers and their families. So the city was built on the principle of social differentiation, which corresponded to the division of labour in the organization body of the factory. There were many types of houses, but mostly common were the duplex (semi-detached) and fourplex houses inhabited by blue-collars’ families. While the city was planned with the respect to the ideas of functionalism, where each part has its own position and a specific relation to the other parts of the city, the design of houses can be perceived as an objectification of the ideal conception of the working-class family. Although the factory as a producer doesn’t work any more, the houses originally projected as temporary housing are still fulfilling their function. They are inhabited by former laborers as well as new dwellers of a wide range of socioeconomic status. The city is changing in its patterns and pace of everyday life, thus becoming a post-industrial city in principle. In our paper we would like to focus on these changes mainly from the inhabitants’ point of view. Through the in-depth interviews with dwellers we would like to contextualize the individual experience with living in the city and house built up as an industrial and social project; designed, prescribed and regulated in every particular detail. |
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