Ostrava is a 2015 European Culture Capital hopeful. The candidacy, which in his endorsement Václav Havel calls “an effort to recognize, appreciate, and develop even the less conspicuous beauty of our country and our cities,” is the impetus behind Ostrava 2015, an urban and cultural revitalization project designed both to place Ostrava on the European culture map and improve the daily life of Ostrava residents. Central to the vision is the introduction of culture clusters, or planned environments that concentrate cultural institutions and spaces to create a “mutual synergy” between interactive parts. While architects of the Ostrava 2015 envision generating a dynamic culture cluster that places Ostrava on a European culture map, a second ambition is to improve the daily and cultural lives of city residents. How do project planners include ethnic minorities in this vision for an improved life? How will members of ethnic minorities and their communities be impacted by, or participate in, Ostrava 2015? Do communities actively participate in aspects of the planning process? Does culture, in fact, of the type represented by Ostrava 2015 have the capacity to benefit local communities of ethnic minorities, and how?
Ostrava 2015 has four components—five construction initiatives, improved networking between Ostrava cultural institutions and the larger European cultural community, increased education in arts management, and improved quality of life, including an emphasis on ecological sustainability, an important response to the externalities of the city’s industrial legacy. The first component, deemed Buildings, is “the main investment activity of the Ostrava 2015 project.” The Black Meadow Cluster is the largest of the five construction projects envisioned by Buildings. The project will transform Black Meadow, a presently unutilized former industrial site advantageously located in the city center, into a culture cluster with a music hall and pavilion and a gallery with temporary exhibitions.
The Black Meadow Cluster plans are comprehensive. Aside from music and visual arts institutions, the project will found an educational complex for pre-school, elementary, and high school students; residential housing integrated into the complete cluster environment; and the “humanization of the Ostravice River” for the public usability and enjoyment of the waterfront. Public documents state: “All of this together should create the conditions for a happy life.” As with all urban revitalization projects, one question is: for whom? How do planners take care to distribute both costs and benefits of comprehensive revitalization across social groups in the city?
What place do Ostrava’s minorities have in the vision for the 2015 city? On the one hand, Ostrava 2015 aims to attract international recognition and tourism to the city, giving the project a cosmopolitan character. Yet the vision also has a local scope: to improve the long-term cultural life of the city and the daily lives of residents. The incorporation of education, housing, and environment within the scheme demonstrate the Cultural Capital candidacy’s symbolic impetus to transform the city. Due to its industrial past and the brownfield sites that remain its symbols, aspects of Ostrava’s landscape can be seen as a tabula rasa upon which culture clusters can be erected. Yet no site is vacant in the city: as city planners build upon vacant physical space, they equally build upon the occupied social space of the city, including its diverse residents and the inequalities, conflicts, and interactions that characterize their cohabitation.
My research objective is to interview representatives of the 2015 project in Ostrava. Given its pivotal location in the Ostrava 2015 imagination, I will focus my questions on the Black Meadow Cluster project. In addition, I would like to interview local leaders not involved or peripherally involved in the planning process, hopefully including local activists or leaders within ethnic minority communities or organizations, to hear their take on the scheme. Special attention is paid to integration of members of ethnic minorities into the plans for housing and education.
Resources permitting, I will also visit Pécs, Hungary—the current European Culture Capital—on another occasion to conduct less in-depth series of interviews on the impact or participation of Culture Capital status on ethnic minorities in Pécs, one of Hungary’s most ethnically diverse cities and the home of nine local minority governments. If Ostrava wins the Culture Capital selection round in September, could the project’s implementers learn something from the Pécs experience, relative to the impact or participation of ethnic minorities?
Note: All quotes are referenced to the Ostrava 2015 website: www.ostrava2015.cz
Image derived from Official Website of Ostrava City: http://www.ostrava.cz/
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