APPROACHES TO STUDY OF RECYCLING URBAN SPACE IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC: DEVELOPMENT AND PERSPECTIVE

This paper deals with the issue of recycling urban spaces, specifically abandoned and unused areas (brownfields) in the Czech Republic. Regeneration of these areas is important especially because of their economic, social and environmental burden. Previous researches on recycling urban space, however, neglected the study of the revitalization process to some extent. Thus, a recycling space may be seen through the concept of a network, explicitly through the Actor-network theory (A-NT). This allows the perception of recycling spaces as a network mobilization. In this context, recycling spaces does not mean the actual material reconstruction of territory from one function to another, but an emergence of new network space, or more precisely transformation of one network space to another. The aim of the paper is to highlight major benefits of A-NT for the study of recycling spaces. In addition to theoretical background linking A-NT with the process of revitalization the paper provides a concrete example of recycling urban space where the application of A-NT reveals a network structure of stakeholders, which would remain partially hidden when implementing existing approaches to brownfield regeneration.