IAS Junior Core Fellow Petr Vašát's article and the interview

IAS CEU Core Junior Fellow Petr Vašát published an article Making city-bases: homeless places, poverty management, and urban change in Pilsen, Czechia  in Urban Geography (online first). 

The article explores how homeless people make places in the public space, while revealing some of the overlooked effects these places may have on the wider city. The article relies on extensive ethnographic research and media coverage analysis of a place called Eskalátory (the Escalators) in Pilsen, a second-order city in Czechia. Eskalátory is part of an underpass with a four-lane road, a tramway, and four outdoor escalators, altogether, forming a specific urban assemblage. The paper describes three specific assemblage enactments of poverty management, homeless placemaking, and socio-materiality, and argues the place played a crucial role in urban change involving the surrounding area. Therefore, it conceptualizes Eskalátory as a “city-base”, an assemblage produced by actors human and non-human that contributes to urban outcome. 

Petr Vašát's interview with María José Álvarez Rivadulla from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia titled The politics of the makeshift city: materiality, symbolic boundaries, and social relations in squatter settlements in Latin America was also published in Studia Ethnologica Pragensia (2020, 1: 101-109).