Ballet amidst fences: placelessness and place-attachment in one Prague suburb
Petr Gibas
Fakulta humanitních studií UK v Praze
PhD candidate
Degree: MSc.
tel.: +420 776 362 263
e-mail: gibasek@mybox.cz
address: Litevská 2603, 272 01 Kladno 2, Czech Republic
Word count: 5.437 (excl. references)
Illustrations: 6
Abstract
Jenerálka, formerly a small industrial settlement on the outskirts of Prague, has been
recently undergoing an extremely profound change. Since 1989 it has become a target
for developers offering luxurious dwellings “in one of the greenest parts of Prague”
while within a stone‟s throw of the city centre. Even if it is still called Jenerálka, it has
changed fundamentally, socially as well as materially. In the confines of Jenerálka the
old and new intermingle in an assemblage that can tell us about the overall socioeconomic
change brought about in the last two decades.
In this paper I employ the theoretical insights into place of two phenomenological
geographers – David Seamon (1980) and Edward Relph (1976) – in order to analyse
this change and to offer an unorthodox way of understanding it. Apart from a
phenomenological and visual analysis of its spatiality, my understanding of Jenerálka
is based on ethnographic methods targeting the socio-spatial practices of its
inhabitants, resulting in what Seamon calls “place-ballet”, and a potential absence of
this resulting in a situation Relph terms “placelessness”.
The paper‟s aim is to demonstrate that by analysing the materiality of Jenerálka we
can obtain an alternative way to conceive, theorise and speak about such topical issues
as suburbanisation or gentrification.
Key words
place-ballet, placelessness, phenomenological geography, suburbanisation
Introduction
Jenerálka, the place I concentrate on in this paper, is situated at the very limits of
Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic. It is still quite a small settlement
consisting of old, rebuilt or newly-built houses scattered around a green valley. For
me the place is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, part of my family comes from
there and I remember spending there a significant part of my childhood at my greatgrandmother‟s
house. Secondly, long after she died I returned there to do research on
the change wrought in Jenerálka by the fall of communism and the consequent
societal, political and economic developments. Jenerálka then became interesting for
me, since from this condensed area a lot could be gleaned and understood about the
big changes in the contemporary Czech landscape and society.
In this paper I would like to link my research experience of Jenerálka to my present
interest in phenomenological geography. Indeed, the processes Jenerálka has been
faced with could be approached by means of concepts worked up thoroughly in recent
anthropological and geographical literature on suburbanization (e.g. Champion, 2001;
Hnilička, 2005; Ouředníček, 2008) and gentrification (e.g. Lees, 1994, 1996, 2000;
Low, 2003; Phillips, 1993; Smith, 1996; for the Czech context see e.g. Temelová &
Novák, 2007). However, I believe the phenomenological approach I propose here can
illuminate the situation differently and offer an alternative way to understand, write
about and conceptualise Jenerálka‟s transformation.
In what follows, I shall first describe Jenerálka in terms of its material setting, its
spatiality, and its physical as well as discursive landscape. Then I shall present the
insights into place, space and landscape of two phenomenological geographers –
David Seamon (1980) and Edward Relph (1976) – whose works I find most inspiring.
Apart from phenomenological and complementary visual analysis of Jenerálka's
spatiality, my understanding of Jenerálka is based on ethnographic experience of it
comprising its materiality as well as the socio-spatial practices of its inhabitants.
These insights I shall use in order to re-describe Jenerálka in regard to its visual,
particular material and experiential characteristics that will help me to draw some
conclusions about the nature of the changes Jenerálka has been undergoing.
The aim of the paper is thus twofold. Firstly, it seeks to provide a phenomenologically
informed understanding of Jenerálka as a place and the changes it has sustained.
Secondly, though, by means of a phenomenological analysis of Jenerálka, the paper
intends to demonstrate that a phenomenological approach can offer a way of
approaching and theorizing urban change complementary to the aforementioned
studies in gentrification and suburbanization.
Jenerálka as a locality: an analytical description
Jenerálka is a part of Prague‟s 6th
district and stretches over three cadastres.
Historically, it evolved in a valley around the junction of two brooks – Šárecký and
Nebušický. Divoká Šárka, a nature reserve located to the west of Jenerálka, changes
its character here and becomes Tichá Šárka, a luxurious old villa quarter stretching
along the brook to the east, to the river Moldau. Jenerálka is crossed by the
Horoměřická road that snakes down from Prague in the south and ascends to the north
where residential developments have been built around old villages such as
Horoměřice.
Although being formally divided between three cadastres, located at the intersection
of two valleys and split by a busy road, it is still perceived – by locals as well as
others – as one place, as a whole that is on the one hand rather heterogeneous but on
the other bounded by (imaginary) borders and having its own history and character.
The main built-up area is located at the Horoměřická road in the vicinity of a once
central point – a château owned by Premonstratensians who used to have a summer
residence here (Augusta, 1996; Veselá, 2006). A small chapel on a hill on the other
side of the road surrounded by houses creates a second focus for the place.
Jenerálka is a heterogeneous place consisting of various spatial and social settings that
make it an outstanding research field (see fig. 1 with letters for the location of
particular components of the Jenerálka landscape). If one stands at the chapel facing
north, one will have the château on one‟s left side together with a natural monument,
a tiny rocky ridge, called “Jenerálka” (J), and a small garden or residential colony in
the valley of the Nebušický brook (B) further on. Due to the trees one would not be
able to see on the right a pond with an old mill where two residential projects have
been built facing each other with locked gates (E). Ahead, where the Horoměřická
road (I) continues its way from Prague, old hamlets (G) and a huge garden colony (F)
are situated. On the other side, on its descent from Prague, the road passes a small,
untidy colony of breeding enthusiasts (C) and a former brickyard(D).
Ill. 1 – Prague, Jenerálka and its distinctive landscape components (lettered) 1
1
All illustrations apart from maps are the author‟s own photographs. The maps are from:
http://www.mapy.cz/ (accessed 10th April, 2010).
The heterogeneity of Jenerálka is indeed a consequence of historical development. A
former agricultural settlement attached to the château changed in the inter-war period
into an industrial one, and a few brickyards were set up here in which the main part of
the population worked. After WWII, the château was used as a research facility2
where again some inhabitants of Jenerálka used to work. In 1960, Jenerálka was
appended to Prague. The history of the château is interesting because the research
facility was closed in 1992 and subsequently sold to the European Baptist Federation
in 1994. The château was reconstructed and an International Baptist Theological
Seminary (IBTS) was set up here with a voluminous theological library. Part of the
château is used as a hotel (Augusta, 1999; Veselá, 2006).
The distinct spaces described above indeed mean that different people pop up here
and experience Jenerálka. Tourists, gardeners, animal breeders, old inhabitants,
newcomers living in old houses or in newly-built residential projects, and even a
researcher, all of them have their own image of Jenerálka because of their diverse
engagements with its different spaces. However, despite its obvious heterogeneity
Jenerálka has acquired quite the distinct and unambiguous label of a good locality to
buy a house in and make one‟s own home. This labelling predominantly uses the
image of unspoilt nature. The hotel and the way it speaks about Jenerálka is in this
sense illuminating:
“IBTS is located in a quiet part of Prague in Dejvice, which is situated very close to
the airport, underground metro and the historical centre of Prague – the Prague
Castle. You can easily get to the Prague city centre by bus in 20 minutes. The Airport
is 10 minutes far by car. The Metro is within two bus stops from the hotel. IBTS is
2
From 1947 to 1960 the château hosted an army research facility, which was assigned in 1960 to the
Research Institute of Vacuum Technology (Augusta, 1996; Veselá, 2006).
located in the greenest part of the city. Surrounded by a natural park where smog and
pollution never appears” (IBTS 2010, author‟s emphasis).
In the quotation above Jenerálka appears to be an ideal place where two seemingly
incongruous characteristics merge. Jenerálka is at the same time natural and
(sub)urban. It lies in the vicinity not only of transport nodes but also of the very centre
of the city while it at the same time retains the natural purity that has irretrievably
disappeared from (late) modern urban space. Such an image of a naturally pure
locality that lies within a stone‟s throw of the city centre constitutes a principal
element of the way in which Jenerálka has been represented recently. It is no surprise
then that Jenerálka has acquired the status of a good locality, which also means
becoming expensive and at the same time luxurious – at least on a discursive or
imaginary level. This can be well illustrated by the presentation of the residential
project that has been built by a pond where an old mill called “Oak Mill” stands:
“The Oak Mill is a highly exclusive project of only eight villas of „Country Lodge
Villa‟ type, four villas of „Land House Villa‟ type, and five „Mill-house Villas‟ built
into the newly reconstructed premises of the mill. Villas are designed in a modern
classical style with the emphasis on spaciousness and elegance with the use of natural
materials and with allusions to oriental style when designing bright, capacious spaces.
Each of the villas and houses stand on its own grounds where privacy and security are
fully maintained and natural surroundings are masterfully exploited. All the villas are
beautifully oriented. The total area of the project is 13,517 m² and it also encompasses
the pond, the nearby park and recreational facilities. The project is located in the
nature reserve of Divoká Šárka, in the prestigious residential locality of Prague 6 – At
Oak mill 4. There is good access by public transport and it is conveniently located
between the airport and the city centre” (ORCO 2010 [English language online
presentation of the project], author‟s emphasis).
Here the image of a natural haven just outside the city centre is enriched by the
emphasis on luxury, safety and privacy. Privacy in Oak Mill is assured by fencing the
premises off from their surroundings. This ironically leads to Oak Mill being cut off
from the nature that makes the place so unique and to turning nature into a kind of
inert background, into scenery.
While I will get back to the act of fencing oneself off from Jenerálka and to various
fences shortly, it is also necessary to pin down another characteristic of Jenerálka that
resonates with the labelling of Jenerálka as a good locality. Again, the image drawn
by the hotel‟s presentation can be of good assistance, since it clearly states “what is
the best offer of accommodation in IBTS”. “You can stay in a real country mansion
dating from the 18th century! Wander around its buildings, quietly relax at the water
fountain and feel the history of this place.” (IBTS 2010)
The image drawn in the discourses on Jenerálka quoted above is in fact predominantly
a commodified one. Location, nature and history, all three main components of the
image are commodified and as such they figure in a market presentation of Jenerálka,
but as regards history, this also materializes here in its commodified form – old
grindstones displayed in front of a luxurious restaurant, an old inscription re-installed
into the body of a repaired bridge (Ill. 2), old château buildings precisely renovated
and painted.
Ill. 2 – The commodified past at the bridge leading to the IBTS Hotel
This is a different past from the one materialised on the site of a former small garden
colony uprooted because of the Oak Mill development project (ill. 3). A collapsed
fence along a road with derelict and switched-off public lights showing a lawn with
narcissuses here and there still sketching blossomed trails of perished flowerbeds.
This other image, reified only by my taking a shot of it with my digital camera, shall
remind us that history and past surround us everywhere we go. But it shall also draw
our attention precisely to the fact that regarding the past, landscape, the space of our
movement and experience does have a palimpsest-like nature stemming precisely
from the fact that landscape is more a process than a static spatial domain (Gibas &
Pauknerová 2009). As a result of commodification, this process of the past‟s having
been inscribed into the space of our experience becomes reified, static (see e.g.
Shanks & Tilley 1996) and in consequence potentially depersonalised.
Ill. 3 – The past lurking in the present:
Remnants of a garden colony that gave place to the Oak Mill project
Place and landscape: a theoretical intermezzo
At this point, it is necessary to make a short theoretical detour before getting to the
phenomenological or experiential dimension of Jenerálka as a place or landscape.
This detour will help me to clarify my theoretical position and at the same time to
theoretically support the following re-description of Jenerálka in terms of
phenomenological (or experiential) analysis.
The metaphor of landscape as a “marvellous palimpsest” (Maitland quoted in Gojda,
2000, p. 54) has been more dynamically and thus aptly restated by Barbara Bender,
who perceives landscape as a “time materialising” because like time “landscape never
stands still” (Bender, 2002, p. 103). Landscape thus represents a medium that holds
traces of the past and of the processes by which the past has been continuously reinscribed.
But one can ask where in such a view of landscape there is a place for the
human being. Is the human being a kind of a reader who reads out of the landscape its
traces the way the historian decrypts a palimpsest?
Complementary to this is an approach to landscape introduced by Tim Ingold, who
understands landscape in terms of “taskscape”, or, socially constructed space of
human activity (Ingold, 2000). Landscape comes into being in the form of a
taskscape, or in other words, through human engagement with the surrounding
material world. Landscape is thus always a landscape to be experienced and lived by
somebody; it consists of pieces of engagement – places having meaning (rooted in
human engagement and activity) that interconnects them with other places into a
whole, into landscape as taskscape.
Here phenomenology comes into play, because we can ask whence and how the
meaning of place arises. And it is exactly at this point that I want to turn attention to
two key phenomenological geographers who have both engaged with the issue of
place. While Edward Relph (1976) draws on existential analysis that leads him more
to a static view of place, David Seamon (1980) attempted to conceive place more
dynamically as a kind of synergy. It must be said that since their time, or since the
cultural turn of the 1990s, the interest of geography has shifted towards spatial rather
than placial issues as being more politically and socially acute as well as having
greater critical potential (Massey, 2005).
However, phenomenology did not disappear completely but has fuelled rethinking of
space-and-place in contexts as diverse as social/environmental psychology (e.g.
Altman & Low, 1992), architecture theory (Seamon, 1993) or anthropology (Low &
Zúñiga, 2003). Most recently, the phenomenological approach to place and landscape
and the embodied experience of space has been taken up by anthropologicalarchaeological
research on landscape (see Tilley, 1994; Tilley & Bennett, 2004; 2008;
Bender, Hamilton, Tilley, & Anderson, 2007). This renewed interest in
phenomenology is I believe based on the assumption that phenomenological analysis
of place can offer an alternative way to speak about places (like Jenerálka).
Relph‟s (1976) understanding of place is based on the binary opposition of space and
place in which space is conceived as a potentiality while place acts as its realization,
or in the words of Yi-Fu Tuan: “place is security, space is freedom” (Tuan, 1977, p.
3). The essence of place, according to Relph, lies in the experience of “insideness”
that radically differs from “outsideness”. While space is a potentiality over which we
can slide, place only comes into being by the act of plunging inside that potentiality.
To be “inside” the place means to belong to the particular place, to identify oneself
with it. The more inside one is, the more identified with the place one becomes. Being
“inside” and “outside” the place can however be experienced with varying intensity,
on different levels. “Existential insideness” represents the most intimate, the deepest
experience of and identification with the place, since it denotes belonging to the place
in terms of deep and absolute immersion. Home is such a place of existential
insideness when “place is experienced without deliberate and self-conscious reflection
yet is full of significance” (Relph, 1976, p. 55). Existential insideness has its
counterpart in “existential outsideness”, a wilful, deliberate alienation from place, an
intellectual homelessness (see Relph, 1976, p. 34-55).
According to Relph, places can be approached in two opposing ways. The authentic
sense of place encompasses and acknowledges the whole complexity of place as a
source of meaning and identity, while the inauthentic sense of place perceives places
only in terms of their appropriate characteristics. Inauthentic sense of place results in
places that lack the substantial character of place and are thus rather “placeless”
insofar as they do not act in the ways authentic places do existentially. Placelessness3
resulting from inauthentic sense of place cannot sustain the existential meaning places
have for us and thus represents a reckless and potentially dangerous approach to
places and spatiality in general.
David Seamon (1980) has based his theorization of place on the same binary
opposition of space and place but has worked it out in a very different way. He pays
attention to the ways people move through space and argues that by means of routine
movements people become familiar with space. Again, routine movement is
unreflective rather than reflective or rational; it is habitual, repeated and coordinated
by the bodily intentionality he calls “body-subject”. This intentionality stems from our
being our bodies and operates the most routine and mundane tasks that stretch across
time and space. Driving to work, washing the dishes or going for the morning
newspapers can all stand as examples of such “time-space routines”, as Seamon terms
these, however complicated, habitual tasks operated by the intentionality of bodysubjects.
Various time-space routines spontaneously performed through the dynamism
of me-body (body-subject) can meet in a particular space and merge into a kind of
time-spatial synergy Seamon calls “place-ballet”. What can, according to Seamon,
arise from the amalgamation of individual time-space routines within the place-ballet
of a particular space is a feeling of familiarity or at-homeness4
. “People come together
3 Landscape is based on the notion of place. Landscape without places is landscape without meaning
and vice versa. Placelessness weakens the identity of places to the extent that places start to look and
feel the same. Paraphrasing Marc Augé, placelessness is a situation in which places ceased to have
anthropological qualities and became non-places (Augé, 1995).The result of this more and more
common placelessness is a “flatscape”, a landscape shallow in meaning and significance, lacking the
intentional depth of authentic places (Relph, 1976, p. 78). A placeless landscape is absurd because it
ceases to be landscape and becomes a prefabricated emptiness.
4
At-homeness is the experiential situation of belonging to a place that stems from an existential
insideness. As Seamon put it, at-homeness is “the usually unnoticed, taken-for-granted situation of
being comfortable in and familiar with the everyday world in which one lives and outside of which one
is “visiting”, “in transit”, “not at home”, “out of place” or “traveling”(. …) The components of athomeness
(…) are rootedness, appropriation, regeneration, at-easeness and warmth.” (Seamon, 1979, p.
70).
in time and space as each individual is involved in his or her own time-space routines
and body-ballets. They recognize each other and often partake in conversation. Out of
these daily, taken-for-granted interpersonal dynamics, these spaces of activity evolve
a sense of place that each person does his small part in creating and sustaining”
(Seamon 1980, p. 161).
Seamon‟s view of place as emerging within an interpersonal time-space synergy of
place-ballet is much more dynamic than Relph‟s existentially autobiographical place
concept. However, in both of these attitudes, individuals are perceived as rooting and
being rooted in places; the familiarity of place, the place-attachment and thus the
place itself comes into being as an accretion of significance in time either through
autobiographical or interpersonal processes that make space become place. In this
sense we could even understand Relph‟s and Seamon‟s place concepts to be linked by
an emphasis on “emotion-spatial hermeneutics”, by the very fact that “meaningful
senses of space emerge only via movements between people and places” (Davidson &
Milligan, 2004, p. 524).
Jenerálka as a place: an experiential re-description
Here we can get back to the account of the past materialised in the landscape, or,
throughout the places and spaces of Jenerálka. The commodified past materialised in
artefacts scattered around Jenerálka and that protrudes in an overall approach to its
materiality and representations can be confronted by a more subtle manifestation of
the process in which “what is now becomes what has been” (Rendell, 2006, p. 98).
As our detour into the realm of the phenomenological geography of Relph and
Seamon demonstrated, the past and the present intermingle in particular places,
resulting in places becoming livelier, acquiring significance and meaning – differing
for each person involved. Place is simultaneously the place of memory and the
present, it is a kind of time-space by-pass connecting our present to our past and
becoming an anchor of our place-attachment. Memories that spring for us from the
materiality of the place are not (at least generally) deliberately induced but rather
spontaneous. By contrast, the commodification of the past (by means of artefacts as
well as discourses) is in fact a process of freezing-up the past and its personal or
autobiographical level in particular.
However, Jenerálka is not a place of memory-as-commodified-history. This is partly
because the interconnection of personalised past and present is inherent in any place
in general, but also because Jenerálka is a place where people live, act, meet, know or
do not know each other, go for walks etc. It is a place where everyday life goes on;
everyday life whose flow deposits the past onto the space and continuously recreates
it as a place. Thus even the artefacts of a commodified past can in time acquire their
own past that is not displayed in and by means of them and that has little in common
with the past reified by them. In other words, due to time and energy they can acquire
a significance for someone not predictable from their commodified present.
Everyday life and autobiography merge in time and strengthen the feeling of athomeness,
the experience of existential insideness, the attachment to place and thus
the place itself. Jenerálka as a place thus also comes into being as a place-ballet. So if
we want to ask about the change it has been undergoing since 1989 we have to focus
on how the place-ballet of Jenerálka has been transformed, or, with regard to the
phenomenological nature of my inquiry, how the material setting of the place-ballet
has changed and how this alteration of conditions has influenced, strengthened or
weakened the socio-spatial dynamics at Jenerálka.
Ill. 4 – The busy road faced by blank, solid fences
Due to the extensive suburban developments in Jenerálka and at other more or less
similarly “luxurious” localities just outside Prague, the road crossing Jenerálka from
north to south has become busier and busier. Since the (original) houses in Jenerálka
stand predominantly along the two roads, the other one leading along the Tichá Šárka
valley and being much calmer, the whole situation has resulted in a material change
represented predominantly by fences (ills. 4 and 5). The sides of gardens or houses
facing the busy road became blind and solidified against the noise and pollution,
which – if one wanted to be ironic – surely never appears here. One of the houses on
the road is even fenced with a high, plastic anti-noise barrier (ill. 5). This barrier
seems to be a definite and highly rational reaction to growing traffic. However, the
consequences for the place-ballet are rather negative, since solid fences preventthe
most place-making activity in the place-ballet of a small, condensed community –
random chatting over the fence.
Barriers to the place-ballet at Jenerálka are not only related to traffic. The pond at Oak
Mill was a part of public space until the residential project was finished. The adjacent
garden colony used to be crossed by a tourist path that led to the pond and continued
to Tichá Šárka. The project engulfed the pond, fencing it off from Jenerálka with a
solid, opaque fence that stripped Jenerálka of another potential location for place-
ballet.
Ill. 5 – The house with an anti-noise barrier
Fences and gates have come to visually dominate the area, having, as they do, security
and privacy as a discursive reason for their existence. There are however many forms
of detachment to be found at Jenerálka. Two gated communities, Oak Mill project and
the one it faces across the pond, are not only segregated by gates and fences, but also
by the presence of guards and CCTV cameras that oversee their spaces. Significantly
the cameras are not just the property of these communities. The house with the antinoise
barrier is also guarded by cameras and further detached from Jenerálka by the
absence of a bell and nameplate at the letterbox – another barrier to place-ballet as
well as to the growth of the place in terms of social familiarity.
Ill. 6 – The same calm road, two radically opposite approaches to public space
To build a solid fence in such a way does not necessarily represent a natural reaction
to the rising noise and pollution caused by traffic. There is a place offering a clue to
understanding what has been going on in Jenerálka. Just before you come to the north
end of the built-up area a small road turns off the main, busy road. On both sides of
the entrance to the road, two houses stand facing each other across the narrow
roadway. Both border on the main road with solid fences. But while the house on the
right faces the small road with the same solid fence, the house on the left does not (ill.
6), since there is no practical need for such a barrier. I witnessed a neighbourly chat
over the picket fence and realised how material setting informs and influences placemaking
and place-ballet, since on the other side such a situation could never happen.
When I talked to the people in Jenerálka, I realised another substantial feature – the
landscape of Jenerálka represents, at least for long-term residents, a social rather than
a material landscape.
“There lives the Křiklán family. Next to them Bareš. It belonged to the Kyčka family,
you know. Old Kyčková had a daughter who married Bareš. He died and left a son
who lives there now with his family. Next to that, the Vodenka family used to live.
But he sold it, old Vodenka. Before he died, he sold it(. …) There are new people
living there now. One has the front, and the other the back. But these are total
strangers.”
This is how one old resident described Jenerálka to me. His (much longer) speech
about who used to live where and which house belonged to whom clearly illustrates
how the place is comprehended - it is perceived in terms of its biography and that of
those who inhabit it. Some lawyer bought the house on the right side of the small road
(ill. 6), rebuilt it, and with its fence cut it off not only from the physical landscape but,
what is more important, from the social, narrative, or biographical landscape of
Jenerálka also. The same applies to those who inhabit the house with the anti-noise
barrier as well as those from the gated communities and other fenced-off houses. They
all go by car rather than by public transport, and thus cannot wait at the bus stop, they
are not to be seen gardening and cannot be approached and consequently incorporated
into the place with the name Jenerálka.
However, this does not mean that these people live and inhabit the place
inauthentically. What I am trying to elucidate is not that because of newcomers
unwilling to plunge into its social landscape Jenerálka has become placeless, although
it can feel that way. What has been happening at Jenerálka is I believe a collision of
two approaches resulting in the re-materialization of Jenerálka. Jenerálka re-formed
by place-ballet and based on (auto)biographical existential insideness has been eroded
into an archipelago of small, fenced-off units, homes that in themselves still must
have borne the existential qualities Relph credited places with – but they do not share.
These detached localities do not integrate into a larger whole of Jenerálka. On the
contrary, they bite off pieces of space from it. Jenerálka thus became a perforated,
eroded landscape regarding both its physicality and materiality and its sociality.
Conclusion
In this paper I approached Jenerálka, a small (sub)urban settlement on the outskirts of
Prague, from two viewpoints. I described it in terms of its spatial properties according
to the discourses that are held about it. I thus sketched the image of Jenerálka as a
locality ideal for living due to its natural character, historical roots and location close
to the city centre. Then I plunged into the waters of phenomenological or experiential
geography in order to understand how the concepts of space, place and landscapes can
be related to each other as regards the human experience of the material world around.
And in the end I tried to re-describe Jenerálka for its experiential qualities and thus
concentrated on its materiality (and the visible necessarily standing side by side with
the material).
Drawing on Relph‟s and Seamon‟s insights on place-making and hence implicitly on
place-attachment too, and by exploring fences and various ways of detaching re-built
or newly constructed houses and projects, I showed how Jenerálka, a socially and
biographically supported place continuously re-created by place-ballet, has been
eroding into a perforated landscape where some of its space began to be occupied by
small, detached localities turned aside from the place they physically belong to.
What I wanted to show is that the erosion of the place called Jenerálka has its own
material expression in the many ways of detachment and segregation that reinforce
the erosion process as such. This however does not mean that Jenerálka has
necessarily been becoming a placeless flatscape. Rather, it has begun to be
constructed as a place for which a larger socio-experiential geography ceased to play
an important role. In this sense, Jenerálka can not only be grasped by a
phenomenological geography that helps to disclose, describe and understand the
erosion process, but that on the other hand also shows the limits of such an approach
lying exactly in the fact that within phenomenological geography the idea of how
space becomes place is evaluative and despite all efforts rather inflexible.
The inflexibility lies in an implicit assumption that place can be authentically
experienced from the inside as a personal-and-social entity only. The core of the
problem lies in the social being understood as bounded by the immediate physicality
of the place. Despite all the differences, the phenomenological understanding of place
both Relph and Seamon hold in theory is exactly the same as what old residents,
instanced here by the guy talking about the social biography of Jenerálka, live in their
lives. Both Seamon and Relph tell in different words about place stemming from an
undifferentiated space due to a personal autobiography (“insideness”) intertwined
within a social synergy (“place-ballet”) taking place here, on the spot. Place is not a
locality but a locale of settled personal and social times. Place stems from its very
own space and is bounded by it. In other words, what the phenomenology of Relph
and Seamon implicitly presupposes is a very special kind of fixed spatiality. And this
spatiality and the place based on it nicely correspond, according to my research
experience, with the way Jenerálka exists for its old residents and how they exist in it.
The newcomers have brought change to Jenerálka and to Prague surroundings in
general. We can understand in terms of socio-economic development the changes that
have materialised in the form of suburbanisation and gentrification, as many studies
mentioned in the introduction do. But what phenomenological inquiry shows is that it
is not just a visual or material change that goes hand in hand with the wave of new
residents bringing their own segregative aesthetics with them. What lies beneath is a
fundamentally different demand regarding the space that is to become place. The new
and the old intermingle in Jenerálka, but the new and the old are the expressions of
different kinds of spatiality being in play.
I believe the sense of place of those living in gated communities is not
phenomenologically dissimilar to the one of Relph, Seamon or old Jenerálka residents
although it could not look less alike. It is still experientially based on existential
insideness and reinforced by place-ballet. But all this happens in a different spatiality
– it simply does not happen predominantly in Jenerálka. That is why Jenerálka has
become a porous, eroded and seemingly placeless place. I tried to show in short that
the erosion process can be productively approached by phenomenology. A new
understanding of the place in question could be achieved. Now it is time to start
investigating closely the new spatiality because of which Jenerálka has been falling
apart. In this venture, I expect phenomenology to prove illuminating too.
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