The elevated attention which social sciences have been recently paying to citizens’ struggles over urban space is a testament to the central role cities play in contemporary processes of neoliberalization, globalization, and the transforming nature of democratic governments. It is precisely in cities where the expansion of global capital, democratic decline, the crumbling of the welfare state, and the resulting inequalities and injustices are felt and contested the most intensely. This book is dedicated to urban struggles which are fought in the cities of contemporary Czechia, a small country in Central Europe whose citizens abandoned communism in 1989 to join a degenerated version of an idealized Western democracy and prosperity they had spent forty years longing for. In this country, damaged by its totalitarian past and poorly equipped with the basic pillars of democracy, cities were set to become easy prey for the new predatory version of capitalism, especially in the context of the ongoing processes of post-socialist transformation, which further exacerbated and distorted the ramifications of the new regime and undermined the development of already weak state–society relationships. It was only a matter of time before Czech urban populations woke from their initial enchantment with the newly gained freedom and Western-style consumption and overcame their previous inexperience with active citizenship, finally rising up against the post-socialist version of the neoliberal assault on cities.
Despite the large body of literature and research dedicated to contemporary urban social movements and urban conflicts (see Purcell 2002; Mayer 2009; Leontidou 2010; Harvey 2012; Novy and Colomb 2012; Jacobsson 2015; Gualini et al. 2015; Hou and Knierbein 2017; Domoradzka 2017), the topic remains rather understudied in Czechia. A few of my own publications represent exceptions (Pixová and Sládek 2016; Pixová 2018), as do publications where urban conflicts constitute the context for the study of other phenomena (Horak 2007; Durnová 2015). The Czech squatters’ movement has also received some coverage (Piotrowski 2011; Pixová and Novák 2016). The situation in Czech cities is nonetheless endowed with many distinctive peculiarities which can contribute to the wider debate about urban conflicts and urban social movements and expand our knowledge about the different character of neoliberal restructuring in various local contexts. The Czech case attests to the importance of paying attention to the way grassroots movements in non-Western contexts conceive of and interpret neoliberal restructuring, and to how these frames affect the character of urban conflicts, especially through the rise of pro-democratic populist movements which enter electoral competition.
In this book, I present some of the main conclusions and discoveries from four years of research on Czech urban grassroots movements conducted between 2014 and 2017. I explain why it took almost two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain for the people of Czechia to start realizing democratic capitalism was not bringing the quality to their cities they had been hoping for, and to start addressing a plethora of urban problems by means of grassroots activism. This awakening corresponded with similar developments in other countries of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe towards the second half of the 2000s. It could be connected to accession to the European Union in 2004 and the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (see Guasti 2016), during which a growing mass of people began to question the previously unchallenged role of the free market and the taken-for-granted path towards democratic consolidation. I also pay attention to the fact that grassroots activists in Czech cities have tended to frame their newly incurred critique of post-socialist urban processes as a domestic problem, detached from the deeper systemic changes on the international and global scale. From their perspective, a whole plethora of urban problems appear as the outcome of Czech politicians’ lack of professional competence and their propensity to abuse power for private gain, which are shortcomings many activists blame on the totalitarian legacies and immaturity of the post-socialist democracy and which also play a role in limiting citizen opportunities to influence urban processes and policymaking outside the formal political realm (see Pixová 2018). I will thus also elaborate on the fact that local interpretations of urban problems have in several cases contributed to the rise of populist movements, which according to Aslanidis (2017) have the potential to determine democratic processes, as well as ‘movement parties’, in other words, the transition whereby extra-institutional movements become political parties during crises of legitimation in which traditional political elites fail to respond to citizens’ grievances (see Caiani and Císař 2018). In doing this, I draw on empirical data from the observation of several Czech urban grassroots movements which joined the partisan electoral competition as a ‘last resort’ to create opportunities for the democratization of their respective municipalities and local urban processes.
The structure of the book is as follows. The introductory chapter provides a theoretical conceptualization of urban grassroots movements and their role in contemporary cities, particularly in the context of neoliberal urban restructuring. I will also outline the basic characteristics of the political process theory and explain why I chose it as an analytical framework for researching and analysing Czech urban grassroots movements and the frequent tendency of their members to become part of formal politics. In line with this theory, I will also introduce the spatial and sociocultural context of Czech urban grassroots movements. A brief overview of the specifics of Czech cities and their development in recent history will provide the reader with a better understanding of the kind of matrix Czech urban grassroots movements emerged from and react to. An introduction of the character of Czech civil society, its conception of political culture and democratic organization, and the vulnerability of this conception to the reproduction of a democratic deficit will contextualize the emergence of urban grassroots movements in the Czech society and culture. I will then discuss the significance of local perspectives in identifying the main driving forces behind urban conflicts in Czech cities, which will lead us towards the role of corporate state capture in Czechia and the way in which different forms of power abuse for private profit affect urban processes at the municipal level.
Chapter 2 of the book consists of four case studies featuring different cities whose local conflicts illustrate how the democratic deficit and brokerage of political power at the local state level translate into urban processes and into the grievances of urban grassroots movements and their ability to affect change. The first three case studies are from medium-sized cities in three different regions—Jablonec nad Nisou in North Bohemia, České Budějovice in South Bohemia, and Prostějov in the Haná region of Moravia. The last one is the capital city of Prague, located in Central Bohemia, where I focus in more detail on urban conflicts in three different municipal districts. One such conflict would expand to a second Prague district and, eventually, to the entire city. Each case study will delineate the emergence and development of local urban grassroots movements and the urban conflicts they engage in as well as assess the movements’ success in achieving their goals.
In the final chapter of the book, I use the political process theory to analyse the case studies and other empirical data collected during the research (based on more than sixty qualitative interviews, some of which are anonymous in the text) as well as insider experience from the field of urban activism. I will identify how urban grassroots respond to the situation in which the abuse of power affects urban processes, urban space, and urban life. My focus will be on the following questions: What do the grassroots movements demand, what are their goals, and what strategies do they employ to achieve them? Which political opportunities, mobilizing structures, framing processes, and action repertoire affect the movements’ ability to achieve their goals? And finally, what were the longer-term effects of their achievements in terms of improving urban processes and tackling the democratic deficit in Czech cities?
1.1 Urban Grassroots Movements and Their Role in Contemporary Cities
In reference to civic activism concerned with urban space and urban life, Castells (1977, 1983) was the first to use the term ‘urban social movements’. Jacobsson (2015), on the other hand, described various kinds and scales of civic activism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) which concerned themselves with urban space and urban life through use of the term ‘urban grassroots movements’, which I personally find more fitting to the situation in the region. Both terms ...