Firstly, I want to speak critically about the recent urbanization on former public land at large de-urbanized but strategic terrains vagues (often along civic infrastructures of central train and bus stations, riverbanks) and explain new patterns of urban control and exclusion that characterizes these architecturally homogenized corporate zones. Secondly, I would compare case-studies from Prague, Brno and Bratislava using the critique of urbanalization of public space (Francesc Muňoz, 2008) that can uncover these forms of architectural homogenization as forced and planned standardization of entire city quarters that are predetermined to be socially segregated and typologically outdated before being even built.
Maria Topolcanska is an assistant professor of architecture theory at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She works in the fields of theory of housing in the context of postindustrial and postsocialist urban culture. She is co-author of Bratislava: Atlas of Mass Housing, 1950 – 1995 (2012) and PAP#1 Pýcha a předsudek: právo na bydlení (Pride and Prejudice: right to housing, 2023).