Opening the city: cultural armature of city of Brno

Adriana Holland


In my final paper I will sketch the case study of town of Brno through the concept of cultural
armature as it was introduced in work of Jaworsky, Levitt, Cadge, Hejtmanek and Curran (2012).

Brno, as the whole of Czech Republic, is not an immigrant country from historical point of view.
However former Czechoslovakia used to be a multicultural space until the Second World War. We can
say that historically there has been an experience with otherness, though suppressed by 40 years of
ethnical and national homogeneity, with few exceptions (Greek immigrant wave in late 40´s). With
opening the borders after 1989 the country is receiving more “people in move”. The town of Brno has
a growing number of immigrants from both, Western countries and the countries of the third world.
According to Czech Statistical Bureau the number of foreigners in Brno tripled over last 10 years
(from 9500 in 2001 to 38 000 in 2011). The municipality of Brno is trying to attract mostly the
highly skilled workers to settle down in Brno as it was stated in many media appearences over the
years. In my paper I would like to study how the city with not very strong immigrant history is
coping with immigrants and how it is responding to their growing numbers with respect to highly
skilled and low skilled ones. I believe my final paper could be a contribution to the field,
although regarding its limited scope it will be more or less a sketch of a case study which would
need an elaboration in wider research.


Hence, my key question will be: What is the cultural armature of Brno? Is there a difference
between policy toward highly skilled immigrants and low skilled immigrants?


There is a vast number of literature on migration and urban studies. Although until the cultural
turn in sociology, the main emphasis in this field was put on economic issues, leaving cultural
aspects aside. Therefore my paper will use the cultural sociological perspective and the
transnacional lens. The main concept used in the final paper will be the concept of cultural
armature which describe the city according to “(1) history and cultural geography, (2) urban
self-presentation, (3) cultural responses to demography, and (4) prevailing ethos toward immigrants
particularly evident in municipal responses” (Jaworsky, N. B. et al., 2012: 78). Due to scope of
this paper I will not be able to interview the municipal representatives as it was done in the
original study of Jaworski et al. to analyze the latter of the four, the primary source of my data
will be the internet presentation of Brno municipalities concerning the immigrants.


I believe my paper will help to understand the intended transition of Brno from down scale to low
scale or even up scale city (Glick Schiller N., Caglar, A., 2013) through the transnational and
cultural perspective.