IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

Prague’s Blanka tunnel project has been a site for assembling social relations in the capital city and the Czech Republic for decades. Today it continues to trigger controversies surrounding practices of planning, negotiation, and contestation of this project. This paper focuses on a critical moment of breakdown; a collapse in Stromovka park, that provides a particular ‘visibility’ and a deeper insight into the tunnelling process and questions the relationship between the park’s natural heritage and the man-made in city making. The collapse of the tunnel is a lens into three modes of Prague; or three modes of engagement between nature and technology: the ‘green Prague’ (nature is out there); the ‘safe Prague’ (nature is predictable); and ‘modern Prague’ (nature must be tamed). By following the actors surrounding the collapse of the tunnel: city council members, the mining authority, engineers, citizens associations representing the public, critical journalists, geologists, and scientists, we see how the natural becomes multiplied. The collapse, as a ‘failure of the technical gesture’ (Simondon 2016) separates what is usually blended in the repetitive act of using the park as a site of relaxation and connection to nature: as long as it works, both nature and infrastructure are invisible. Through an ANT methodology, the paper maps the practices that allow us to account for the active participation of experts and non-experts whose actions multiply the many modes of the park and the city. This points to the necessity of new forms of engagement in city design, forcing a rethinking of natural-technical relations.