Urban Shrinkage and Everyday Life in Post-Socialist Cities: Living with Diversity in Hrušov, Ostrava, Czech Republic

Shrinking cities face the challenge of strategically selecting areas for investment. This entails a movement of money as well as people and upsets the social patterns of everyday life. In Ostrava, post-socialist shrinkage interacts with identity politics towards the Roma minority, profoundly changing the image of and community life within neighbourhoods. The growing literature on shrinking cities has addressed these questions from a planning and governance point of view, but has largely neglected the impact of shrinkage and shrinkage planning on the lives of ordinary people. In this paper, we focus on the declining working-class neighbourhood of Hrušov in Ostrava, which has undergone severe shrinkage. Based on interviews, the case study reveals the background and the socially unequal consequences of the process. It shows how everyday life in the community – consisting of an older Czech population that is increasingly replaced by incoming Roma families – changed drastically and how the inhabitants actively set up new livelihood strategies in response to these changes.