In Prague, as in many European metropolises, there are large quarters of urban housing blocks, built in the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, located in the immediate vicinity of the historical core. In the period of post-Stalinist easing, these quarters faced a serious threat of demolition: considered unhealthy, devoid of value, based on an utterly unrepairable urban structure. The capitalist city was doomed to demolition in favour of a new, socialist environment. Nevertheless, within the three decades between 1958 and 1989, a new attitude was formed within the professional community of architects and urbanists: considerably less radical and more aware of the values of existing urban structures and the limitations of new development. The story of this shift between the concepts oft redevelopment and modernization is the main topic of this paper. The specific Czech version of the redevelopment-modernization dilemma can be framed by the concept of the continuation of technocratic modernity. According to the interpretation of contemporary historians, the trust in expert knowledge and the knowledge-based leadership was one of the main continuities between the post-Stalinist period of the Prague Spring, and the normalization period of the 1970s and 1980s in occupied Czechoslovakia. In this sense, the inability of those in power to deliver as promised – in respect to redevelopment and modernization, both in quality and quantity – represents an important step in the process of delegitimization of state socialism towards the end of 1980s. The break with the first, technocratic modernity was not completed in Czechoslovakia; the process of reflecting on the consequences of its own foundations was violently interrupted by the occupation of 1968, and it was not picked up again until the late 1980s. The rather hidden manifestations of such setting represent an important inner barrier for the project of Czech urban renewal.
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