The Expatriate Real Estate Complex: Creative Destruction and the Production of Luxury in Post‐Socialist Prague

Abstract

This article explores the influence of international financial capital on the production of exclusionary housing markets and spatialities in the city of Prague, Czech Republic. It focuses on the regeneration of Karlín, a district of Prague increasingly defined by the presence of luxury housing and high-specification office developments. Through a critical discussion of two private companies heavily implicated in the renewal of the district, it is possible to examine the ways in which these actors are contributing to this regeneration. I argue that the regeneration of the district is intimately bound up with processes of capitalist uneven development that couple networks of foreign investors with local municipal authorities through an asymmetric set of power relations. These relations are heavily skewed in favour of the private sector, and the complexity of the linkages between these actors makes meaningful regulation of foreign investment extremely challenging. I also suggest that such practices should not be seen as a transitory position between state socialist planning mechanisms and mature 'Western' practices of regeneration, but rather as explicitly post-socialist in nature, and only as a partial reading of a number of different post-socialisms, instead of being seen as representative of a singular 'post-socialist condition'. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research(c) 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Uneven transformations: Space, economy and society 20 years after the collapse of state socialism

“…4 The dispersion of regional GDP is measured by the sum of the absolute differences between regional and national GDP per inhabitant, weighted by the share of population and expressed as a percentage of the national GDP per inhabitant. 5 There is also evidence that uneven development at the urban scale has been experienced through processes of suburbanization (Timár and Váradi, 2001;Leetmaa and Tammaru, 2007) alongside the gentrification of inner urban areas and the redevelopment of city spaces (Smith, 1996;Bodnár, 2001;Sýkora, 2005;Cook, 2010). 6 There remain, of course, different opinions (and debates) on the causes and mechanisms of these actual spatial processes and forms.…”

Post-Socialist Gentrification Processes in Polish Cities

“…In the most quickly developing cities a new social group appeared, which, though not very numerous, was able to acquire luxury apartments in central districts -they were foreign specialists engaged in direct foreign investments (Cook, 2010) . This, plus the growth of the middle class, led to a growing demand for high quality dwellings in good locations, which motivated domestic and foreign developers to intensify the construction of high standard housing in central parts of large cities (Holm et al ., 2015;Kovács, 2012); 2 .…”

Explicit Definitions and Implicit Assumptions about Post‐Socialist Cities in Academic Writings

“…Similarly, particular trends and social, political and economic changes that have lead, for example, to urban shrinkage (Steinführer et al ), building of gated communities (Kovács and Hegedüs ), or development of metropolitan periphery (Golubchikov and Phelps ) have been specified. The argument that the process of regeneration in Prague “should be seen as specifically and distinctly post‐socialist” (Cook : 625) is based on observation of a particular combination of elements of the past (“the physical fabric of the city, weak municipal governance and a deteriorating infrastructure”, p. 625) with current trends (“liberalization, privatization, restitution and internationalization”, p. 625) that defined this process. Cook analysed rebuilding of one of Prague's quarters into a district of luxury housing and office development and pointed out the weakness of the municipality in relation to capital as distinctive for this case of urban regeneration.…”