reSITE is an international non-profit platform based in Prague to exchange ideas about making cities more livable, competitive and resilient. Through events, it attempts to connect stakeholders across sectors involved in urban planning – policy makers, developers, non-profit organisations etc. The highlight is the annual reSITE conference, the theme of the seventh year (2018) was ACCOMMODATE. A number of trendsetters from around the world have presented future housing projects and new ways of living in cities. reSITE is also behind the pop-up Manifesto Market, which has been realised on a previously neglected plot close to the Masaryk Station, planned for development of a commercial and administrative complex designed by the architect Zaha Hadid. The initiator of the project was Martin Barry, the authors of the architecture design – Nikola Karabcová, Lucie Červená – came up from the student competition Superstudio 2017, in which their proposal received the second prize (reSITE member Elvira Islas joined them later). Manifesto Market is a hotspot of high-quality gastronomy, design and culture (the project is in cooperation with the Aero cinema network) and a pioneer in cashless payments in the Czech Republic. “Manifesto keepers symbolically ranked the Czech capital alongside London and Lisbon, where similar concepts are working successfully.”*

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reSITE undoubtedly ranks among the largest and most prestige conferences on architecture and urbanism in the Czech environment, and do well also in international comparison. In the last seven years, hundreds of Czech and international professionals presented in Prague, many of them then started cooperation with Czech municipalities (e.g. Jan Gehl designed Prague Magistrála (highway), Mark Johnson is working on the urban plan of South Center in Brno). The director of the festival Martin Barry is certainly aware of its influence, the topics and speakers should be chosen carefully. It is undoubtedly contributing that reSITE is capable of attracting many prominent personalities, presenting contemporary good quality architecture and urbanism and explaining its asset to the economic development of cities. Often, however, presented projects and strategies are trendy and look tempting, but they only have a potential for a certain part of the population at the expense of others. The theme ACCOMMODATE took into account the housing crisis, but offered solutions (e.g. Airbnb, one of the sponsors, Mini Living or WeWork & WeLive) are rather considered to be accomplices of the housing unaffordability. The original co-founders of reSITE are no longer part of the established civic association, Milota Sidorová left in 2015 due to differences of opinion, Regina Loukotová wrote an open letter to Martin Barry in 2017, criticising him primarily for letting Andrej Babiš speak on the stage and the commercial orientation of the event.

 

One of the main partners of the non-profit organisation reSITE is the investment company Penta, which also owns plots close to Masaryk Station, part of which is temporarily provided for the Manifesto Market container pop-up store. This was the subject of the student architectural competition Superstudio, but originally intended to be moderate (instead of six containers in the competition, the current Manifesto Market is made up of twenty-seven containers). The winning student team refused to rework their design to a purely commercial one, and reSITE agreed with the second team. The Manifesto Market can also be interpreted as an attempt to cultivate the area for marketing purposes, where the so far neglected plot gains its attractiveness (value) and thus also the development built on it.

 

 

* Nosek, M. (2018). Penta nechala u Masarykova nádraží vyrůst hipsterské trhy. E15.cz [online]. Available from: http://www.e15.cz/domaci/penta-nechala-u-masarykova-nadrazi-vyrust-hipsterske-trhy-1347641

 

 

Martin Barry is a landscape architect from New York based in Prague. Former Fulbright Scholar, he worked as a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He is a Fellow with the Design Trust for Public Space and a former associate in the W Architecture and Landscape Architecture studio in New York. He has led multi-disciplinary teams on complex landscape projects all over the globe, collaborating on urban waterfronts, parks, plazas and universities. In Prague, he co-founded the reSITE, a non-profit organisation that hosts an international conference on architecture and urbanism since 2012. In 2017 he founded City Crew, which focuses on branding cities and develops development strategies to involve private investment in public space. He is behind the Manifesto Market project in Prague.

 

— “The air isn’t free. There is nothing for free in the society.”

 

 

Michaela Pixová studied social geography and regional development at the Faculty of Science at the Charles University in Prague. During her PhD study, she focused on the geography of the post-socialist city. She looks at the city through the theory of Marxist geography and therefore focuses primarily on political and economic analysis of relations between spatial and social structures. In her research, she deals with spaces for alternative culture in contemporary Prague and their transformation and position in the changing political and economic context. She also deals with the concept of the right to the city, points to the importance of the active role of citizens in influencing urban development and the use of urban space. This is related to the interest in urban activism and the role of civil society in the shaping of our cities. She is a co-founder of the club PragueWatch.

 

— “The kind of city that we are helping to create – which is still essentially a neoliberal city – is actually leaving all these people behind who cannot take advantage of all these nice spaces.”

 

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camera: Tomáš Hlaváček
video editing: Tomáš Hlaváček
translation: Ondřej Kvapil, Karolína Plášková

subtitles: Karolína Plášková