Academic literature on the topic 'Housing stock Brno'

This study is dedicated to identifying residential areas of the Metropolis of Lyon, which combines territorial and ethnic exclusion. In the framework of this study, territorial exclusion is understood as the territorial isolation of residential areas from the main residential area of the agglomeration due to the presence of various kinds of territorial barriers: water bodies, industrial and commercial areas, parklands, large highways. Ethnic exclusion in this study is understood as a partial exclusion from society (social exclusion) of population groups that are ethnically different from the main part of the population. The share of immigrants in the population of the communes and the share of social housing in the total housing stock of the communes of the Metropolis of Lyon were used as markers of ethnic exclusion. A comparison of territorially isolated residential quarters and data on the share of immigrants and the share of social housing revealed social housing quarters that combine signs of ethnic and territorial exclusion of the population: Mas-du-Taureau in the commune Vaulx-en-Velin in the north-east of the Metropolis of Lyon, Parilly and Terraillon in Bron in the east, Minguettes in Vénissieux in the south of the metropolitan area. During the interview, these social housing complexes were called by experts as the most disadvantaged and criminalized in the Metropolis of Lyon, which confirms the author’s hypothesis about the importance of territorial exclusion in the emergence and development of ethnic exclusion.

IntroductionUtopian and forward looking in tenor, official narratives of urban renewal and development implicitly promote normative ideals of progress and necessary civic improvement. Yet an underlying condition of such renewal is frequently the very opposite of building: the demolition of existing urban fabric. Taking as its starting point the large-scale demolition of buildings proposed for the NSW Government’s Sydney Metro rail project, this article interrogates the role of literary treatments of demolition in mediating complex, and often contradictory, responses to transformations of the built environment. Case studies are drawn from literary texts in which demolition and infrastructure development are key preoccupations, notably Louis Aragon’s 1926 Surrealist document of a threatened Parisian arcade, Paris Peasant, and the non-fiction accounts of the redevelopment of London’s East End by British writer Iain Sinclair. Sydney UnbuiltPresently, Australia’s biggest public transport project according to the NSW Government website, the Sydney Metro is set to revolutionise Sydney’s rail future with more than 30 metro stations and a fleet of fully-automated driverless trains. Its impetus extends at least as far back as the Liberal-National Coalition’s landslide win at the 2011 New South Wales state election when Barry O’Farrell, then party leader, declared “NSW has to be rebuilt” (qtd in Aston). Infrastructure upgrades became one of the Coalition’s key priorities upon forming government. Following a second Coalition win at the 2015 election, the state of NSW, or the city of Sydney more accurately, remains today deep amidst widespread building works with an unprecedented number of infrastructure, development and urban renewal projects simultaneously underway.From an historical perspective, Sydney is certainly no stranger to demolition. This was in evidence in Demolished Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that captured the zeitgeist of 2016 with its historical survey of Sydney’s demolished architecture. As the exhibition media release pointed out: “Since 1788 Sydney has been built, unbuilt and rebuilt as it has grown from Georgian town to Victorian city to the global urban centre it is today” (Museum of Sydney). What this evolutionist narrative glosses over, however, is the extent to which the impact of Sydney’s significant reinventions of itself through large-scale redevelopment are often not properly registered until well after such changes have taken place. With the imminent commencement of Sydney Metro Stage 2 CBD works, the city similarly stands to lose a number of buildings that embody the civic urban ideals of an earlier era, the effects of which are unlikely to be fully appreciated until the project’s post-demolition phase. The revelation, over the past year, of the full extent of demolition required to build Sydney Metro casts a spotlight on the project and raises questions about its likely impact in reconfiguring the character of Sydney’s inner city. An Environmental Impact Statement Summary (EISS) released by the NSW Government in May 2016 confirms that 79 buildings in the CBD and surrounding suburbs are slated for demolition as part of station development plans for the Stage 2 Chatswood to Sydenham line (Transport for NSW). Initial assurances were that the large majority of acquisitions would be commercial buildings. Yet, the mix also comprises some locally-heritage listed structures including, most notably, 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney (Image 1), a residential apartment tower of 54 studio flats located at the top end of the Sydney central business district.Image 1: 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney apartment towers (middle). Architect: Emil Sodersten. Image credit: Ella Mudie.As the sole surviving block of CBD flats constructed during the 1930s, 7 Elizabeth Street had been identified by the Australian Institute of Architects as an example of historically significant twentieth-century residential architecture. Furthermore, the modernist block is aesthetically significant as the work of prominent Art Deco architect Emil Sodersten (1899-1961) and interior designer Marion Hall Best (1905-1988). Disregarding recommendations that the building should be retained and conserved, Transport for NSW compulsorily acquired the block, evicting residents in late 2016 from one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing in the inner-city. Meanwhile, a few blocks down at 302 Pitt Street the more than century-old Druids House (Image 2) is also set to be demolished for the Metro development. Prior to purchase by Transport for NSW, the property had been slated for a state-of-the-art adaptive reuse as a boutique hotel which would have preserved the building’s façade and windows. In North Sydney, a locally heritage listed shopfront at 187 Miller Street, one of the few examples of the Victorian Italianate style remaining on the street, faces a similar fate. Image 2. Druids House, 302 Pitt Street Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.Beyond the bureaucratic accounting of the numbers and locations of demolitions outlined in the NSW Government’s EISS, this survey of disappearing structures highlights to what extent, large-scale transport infrastructure projects like Sydney Metro, can reshape what the Situationists termed the “psychogeography” of a city; the critical manner in which places and environments affect our emotions and behaviour. With their tendency to erase traces of the city’s past and to smooth over its textures, those variegations in the urban fabric that emerge from the interrelationship of the built environment with the lived experience of a space, the changes wrought by infrastructure and development thus manifest a certain anguish of urban dynamism that is connected to broader anxieties over modernity’s “speed of change and the ever-changing horizons of time and space” (Huyssen 23). Indeed, just as startling as the disappearance of older and more idiosyncratic structures is the demolition of newer building stock which, in the case of Sydney Metro, includes the slated demolition of a well-maintained 22-storey commercial office tower at 39 Martin Place (Image 3). Completed in just 1972, the fact that the lifespan of this tower will amount to less than fifty years points to the rapid obsolescence, and sheer disposability, of commercial building stock in the twenty first-century. It is also indicative of the drive towards destruction that operates within the project of modernism itself. Pondering the relationship of modernist architecture to time, Guiliana Bruno asks: can we really speak of a modernist ruin? Unlike the porous, permeable stone of ancient building, the material of modernism does not ‘ruin.’ Concrete does not decay. It does not slowly erode and corrode, fade out or fade away. It cannot monumentally disintegrate. In some way, modernist architecture does not absorb the passing of time. Adverse to deterioration, it does not age easily, gracefully or elegantly. (80)In its resistance to organic ruination, Bruno’s comment thus implies it is demolition that will be the fate of the large majority of the urban building stock of the twentieth century and beyond. In this way, Sydney Metro is symptomatic of far broader cycles of replenishment and renewal at play in cities around the world, bringing to the fore timely questions about demolition and modernity, the conflict between economic development and the civic good, and social justice concerns over the public’s right to the city. Image 3: 39 Martin Place Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.In the second part of this article, I turn to literary treatments of demolition in order to consider what role the writer might play in giving expression to some of the conflicts and tensions, as exemplified by Sydney Metro, that manifest in ‘unbuilding’ the city. How might literature, I ask, be uniquely placed to mobilise critique? And to what extent does the writer—as both a detached observer and engaged participant in the city—occupy an ambivalent stance especially sensitive to the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of the built environment’s relationship to modernity?Iain Sinclair: Calling Time on the Grand Projects For more than two decades, British author Iain Sinclair has been mapping the shifting terrain of London and its edgelands across a spectrum of experimental fiction and non-fiction works. In addition to the thematic attention paid to neoliberal capitalist processes of urban renewal and their tendency to implode established ties between place, memory and identity, Sinclair’s hybrid documentary-novels are especially pertinent to the analysis of “writing demolition” for their distinct writerly approach. Two recent texts, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2011) and London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), highlight an intensification of interest on Sinclair’s part in the growing influence exerted by global finance, hyper consumerism and security fears on the reterritorialisation of the English capital. Written in the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, Ghost Milk is Sinclair’s scathing indictment of the corporate greed that fuelled the large-scale redevelopment of Stratford and its surrounds ahead of the Games. It is an angry and vocal response to urban transformation, a sustained polemic intensified by the author’s local perspective. A long-term resident of East London, in the 1970s Sinclair worked as a labourer at Chobham Farm and thus feels a personal assault in how Stratford “abdicated its fixed identity and willingly prostituted itself as a backdrop for experimental malls, rail hubs and computer generated Olympic parks” (28). For Sinclair, the bulldozing of the Stratford and Hackney boroughs was performed in the name of a so-called civic legacy beyond the Olympic spectacle that failed to culminate in anything more than a “long march towards a theme park without a theme” (11), a site emblematic of the bland shopping mall architecture of what Sinclair derisorily terms “the GP [Grand Project] era” (125).As a literary treatment of demolition Ghost Milk is particularly concerned with the compromised role of language in urban planning rhetoric. The redevelopment required for the Olympics is backed by a “fraudulent narrative” (99), says Sinclair, a conspiratorial co-optation of language made to bend in the service of urban gentrification. “In many ways,” he writes, “the essential literature of the GP era is the proposal, the bullet-point pitch, the perversion of natural language into weasel forms of not-saying” (125). This impoverishment and simplification of language, Sinclair argues, weakens the critical thinking required to recognise the propagandising tendencies underlying so many urban renewal programs.The author’s vocal admonishment of the London Olympics did not go unnoticed. In 2008 a reading from his forthcoming book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), at a local library was cancelled out of fear of providing a public platform for his negative views. In Ghost Milk Sinclair reflects upon the treatment of his not yet published docu-novel as “found guilty, with no right of reply, of being political but somehow outside politics” (115). Confronted with the type of large-scale change that underpins such projects as the Olympic Games, or the Sydney Metro closer to home, Sinclair’s predicament points to the ambiguous position of influence occupied by writers. On the one hand, influence is limited in so far as authors play no formal part in the political process. Yet, when outspoken critique resonates words can become suddenly powerful, radically undermining the authority of slick environmental impact statements and sanctioned public consultation findings. In a more poetic sense, Sinclair’s texts are further influential for the way in which they offer a subjective mythologising of the city as a counterpoint to the banal narratives of bureaucratised urbanism. This is especially apparent in London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), in which Sinclair recounts a single-day street-level pedestrian exploration of the 35-mile and 33-station circuit of the new London Overground railway line. Surveying with disapproval the “new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops” (20) that have sprung up along the route of the elevated railway, the initial gambit of the text appears to be to critique the London Overground as a “device for boosting property values” (23). Rail zone as “generator for investment” (31), and driver of the political emasculation of suburbs like Hackney and Shoreditch. Yet as the text develops the narrator appears increasingly drawn to the curious manner in which the Overground line performs an “accidental re-mapping of London” (24). He drifts, then, in search of: a site in which to confront one’s shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to walk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything. (London Overground 127)Summoning the oneiric qualities of the railway and its inclination to dreaming and reverie, Sinclair reimagines it as divine oracle, a “ladder of initiation” (47) bisecting resonant zones animated by traces of the visionary artists and novelists whose sensitivity to place have shaped the perception of the London boroughs in the urban imaginary. It is in this manner that Sinclair’s walks generate “an oppositional perspective against the grand projects of centralized planning and management of space” (Weston 261). In a kind of poetic re-enchantment of urban space, texts like Ghost Milk and London Overground shatter the thin veneer of present-day capitalist urbanism challenging the reader to conceive of alternative visions of the city as heterogeneous and imbued with deep historical time.Louis Aragon: Demolition and ModernityWhile London Overground was composed after the construction of the new railway circuit, the pre-demolition phase of a project is, by comparison, a threshold moment. Literary responses to impending demolition are thus shaped in an unstable context as the landscape of a city becomes subject to unpredictable changes that can unfold at a very swift pace. Declan Tan suggests that the writing of Ghost Milk in the lead up to the London Olympics marks Sinclair’s disapproval as “futile, Ghost Milk is knowingly written as a documentary of near-history, an archival treatment of 2012 now, before it happens.” Yet, paradoxically it is the very futility of Sinclair’s project that intensifies the urgency to record, sharpening his polemic. This notion of writing a “documentary of near-history” also suggests a certain breach in time, which in the case of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant is mined for its revolutionary energies.First published in book form in 1926, Paris Peasant is an experimental Surrealist novel comprising four collage-like fragments including Aragon’s famous panegyric on the Passage de l’Opéra, a nineteenth-century Parisian arcade slated for demolition to make way for a new access road to the Boulevard Haussmann. Reading the text in the present era of Sydney Metro works, the predicament of the disappearing Opera Arcade resonates with the fate of the threatened Art Deco tower at 7 Elizabeth Street, soon to be razed to build a new metro station. Critical of the media’s overall neglect of the redevelopment, Aragon’s text pays sympathetic attention to the plight of the arcade’s business owners, railing against the injustices of their imminent eviction whilst mourning the disappearance of one of the last vestiges of the more organic configuration of the city that preceded the Haussmann renovation of Paris:the great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums. (Aragon 14)In light of these concerns it is tempting to cast Paris Peasant as a classic anti-development polemic. However, closer interrogation of the narrator’s ambivalent stance points to a more complicated attitude towards urban renewal. For, as he casts a forensic eye across the arcade’s shops it becomes apparent that these threatened sites hold a certain lure of attraction for the Surrealist author. The explanatory genre of the guide-book is subverted in a highly imaginative inventory of the arcade interiors. Touring its baths, brothels and hair salon, shoe shine parlour, run-down theatre, and the Café Certa—meeting place of the Surrealists—the narrator’s perambulation provides a launching point for intoxicated reveries and effervescent flights of fancy. Finally, the narrator concedes: “I would never have thought of myself as an observer. I like to let the winds and the rain blow through me: chance is my only experience, hazard my sole experiment” (88). Neither a journalist nor an historian, Paris Peasant’s narrator is not concerned merely to document the Opera Arcade for posterity. Rather, his interest in the site resides in its liminal state. On the cusp of being transformed into something else, the ontological instability of the arcade provides a dramatic illustration of the myth of architecture’s permanency. Aragon’s novel is concerned then, Abigail Susik notes, with the “insatiable momentum of progress,” and how it “renders all the more visible what could be called the radical remainders of modernity: the recently ruined, lately depleted, presently-passé entities that, for better and for worse, multiply and accumulate in the wake of accelerated production and consumption in industrial society” (34). Drawing comparison with Walter Benjamin’s sprawling Arcades Project, a kaleidoscopic critique of commodity culture, Paris Vaclav similarly characterises Paris Peasant as manifesting a distinct form of “political affect: one of melancholy for the destruction of the arcades yet also of a decidedly non-conservative devotion to aesthetic innovation” (24).Sensitive to the contradictory nature of progress under late capitalist modernity, Paris Peasant thus recognises destruction as an underlying condition of change and innovation as was typical of avant-garde texts of the early twentieth century. Yet Aragon resists fatalism in his simultaneous alertness to the radical potential of the marvellous in the everyday, searching for the fault lines in ordinary reality beneath which poetic re-enchantment challenges the status quo of modern life. In this way, Aragon’s experimental novel sketches the textures and psychogeographies of the city, tracing its detours and shifts in ambience, the relationship of architecture to dreams, memory and fantasy; those composite layers of a city that official documents and masterplans rarely ascribe value to and which literary authors are uniquely placed to capture in their writings on cities. ConclusionUnable to respond within the swift publication timeframes of journalistic articles, the novelist is admittedly not well-placed to halt the demolition of buildings. In this article, I have sought to argue that the power and agency of the literary response resides, rather, in its long view and the subjective perspective of the author. At the time of writing, Sydney Metro is poised to involve a scale of demolition that has not been seen in Sydney for several decades and which will transform the city in a manner that, to date, has largely passed uncritiqued. The works of Iain Sinclair and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant point to the capacity of literary texts to deconstruct those broader forces that increasingly reshape the city without proper consideration; exposing the seductive ideology of urban renewal and the false promises of grand projects that transform multifaceted cityscapes into homogenous non-places. The literary text thus makes visible what is easily missed in the experience of everyday life, forcing us to consider the losses that haunt every gain in the building and rebuilding of the city.ReferencesAragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Taylor Watson. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Aston, Heath. “We’ll Govern for All.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Mar. 2011. 23 Feb. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/state-election-2011/well-govern-for-all-20110326-1cbbf.html>. Bruno, Guiliana. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies.” Ruins. Ed. Brian Dillon. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. 76-81.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Museum of Sydney. Demolished Sydney Media Release. Sydney: Sydney Living Museums 20 Oct. 2016. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/2016/12/05/new-exhibition-demolished-sydney>.Paris, Vaclav. “Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (Autumn 2013): 21-39.Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009.———. London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015.Susik, Abigail. “Paris 1924: Aragon, Le Corbusier, and the Question of the Outmoded.” Wreck: Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory 2.2 (2008): 29-44.Tan, Declan. “Review of Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair.” Huffington Post 15 Dec. 2011; updated 14 Feb. 2012. 21 Feb 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/declan-tan/ghost-milk-ian-sinclair-review_b_1145692.html>. Transport for NSW, Chatswood to Sydenham: Environmental Impact Statement Summary. 25 Mar. 2017 <http://www.sydneymetro.info>. Sydney: NSW Government, May-June 2016.Weston, David. “Against the Grand Project: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (Summer 2015): 255-79.

The convergence of suburban homes and digital media and communications technologies is set to undergo a major shift as next-generation broadband infrastructures are installed. Embodied in the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network (NBN) and the delivery of fibre-optic cable to the front door of every suburban home, is an anticipated future of digital living that will transform the landscape and experience of suburban life. Drawing from our research, and from industry, policy and media documents, we map some scenarios of the NBN rollout in its early stages to show that this imaginary of seamless broadband in the suburbs and the transformation of digital homes it anticipates is challenged by local cultural and material geographies, which we describe as a politics of spectrum. The universal implementation of policy across Australia faces a considerable challenge in dealing with Australia’s physical environment. Geography has always had a major impact on communications technologies and services in Australia, and a major impetus of building a national broadband network has been to overcome the “tyranny of distance” experienced by people in many remote, regional and suburban areas. In 2009 the minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), Stephen Conroy, announced that with the Government’s NBN policy “every person and business in Australia, no-matter where they are located, will have access to affordable, fast broadband at their fingertips” (Conroy). This ambition to digitally connect and include imagines the NBN as the solution to the current patchwork of connectivity and Internet speeds experienced across the country (ACCAN). Overcoming geographic difference and providing fast, universal and equitable digital access is to be realised through an open access broadband network built by the newly established NBN Co. Limited, jointly owned by the Government and the private sector at a cost estimated at $43 billion over eight years. In the main this network will depend upon fibre-optics reaching over 90% of the population, and achieving download speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s. The remaining population, mostly living in rural and remote areas, will receive wireless and satellite connections providing speeds of 12 Mbit/s (Conroy). Differential implementation in relation to comparisons of urban and remote populations is thus already embedded in the policy, yet distance is not the only characteristic of Australia’s material geographies that will shape the physical implementation of the NBN and create a varied spectrum of the experience of broadband. Instead, in this article we examine the uneven experience of broadband we may see occurring within suburban regions; places in which enhanced and collective participation in the digital economy relies upon the provision of faster transmission speeds and the delivery of fibre “the last mile” to each and every premise. The crucial platform for delivering broadband to the ’burbs is the digital home. The notion of the connected or smart or digital home has been around in different guises for a number of decades (e.g. Edwards et al.), and received wide press coverage in the 1990s (e.g. Howard). It has since been concretised in the wake of the NBN as telecommunications companies struggle to envision a viable “next step” in broadband consumption. Novel to the NBN imaginary of the digital home is a shift from thinking about the digital home in terms of consumer electronics and interoperable or automatic devices, based on shared standards or home networking, to addressing the home as a platform embedded within the economy. The digital home is imagined as an integral part of a network of digital living with seamless transitions between home, office, supermarket, school, and hospital. In the imaginary of the NBN, the digital home becomes a vital connection in the growing digital economy. Communications Patchwork, NBN Roll-Out and Infrastructure Despite this imagined future of seamless connectivity and universal integration of suburban life with the digital economy, there has been an uneven take-up of fibre connections. We argue that this suggests that the particularities of place and the materialities of geography are relevant for understanding the differential uptake of the NBN across the test sites. Furthermore, we maintain that these issues provide a useful model for understanding the ongoing process and challenges that the rollout of the NBN will face in providing even access to the imagined future of the digital home to all Australians. As of June 2011 an average of 70 per cent of homes in the five first release NBN sites have agreed to have the fibre cables installed (Grubb). However, there is a dramatic variation between these sites: in Armidale, NSW, and Willunga, SA, the percentage of properties consenting to fibre connections on their house is between 80-90 per cent; whereas in Brunswick, Victoria, and Midway Point, Tasmania, the take-up rate is closer to 50 per cent (Grubb). We suggest that these variations are created by a differential geography of connectivity that will continue to grow in significance as the NBN is rolled out to more locations around Australia. These can be seen to emerge as a consequence of localised conditions relating to, for example, installation policy, a focus on cost, and installation logistics. Another significant factor, unable to be addressed within the scope of this paper, is the integration of the NBN with each household’s domestic network of hardware devices, internal connections, software, and of course skill and interest. Installation Policy The opt-in policy of the NBN Co requires that owners of properties agree to become connected—as opposed to being automatically connected unless they opt-out. This makes getting connected a far simpler task for owner-occupiers over renters, because the latter group were required to triangulate with their landlords in order to get connected. This was considered to be a factor that impacted on the relatively low uptake of the NBN in Brunswick and Midway Point, and is reflected in media reports (Grubb) and our research: There was a bit of a problem with Midway Point, because I think it is about fifty percent of the houses here are rentals, and you needed signatures from the owners for the box to be put onto the building (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project). …a lot of people rent here, so unless their landlord filled it in they wouldn’t know (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project). The issue is exacerbated by the concentration of rental properties in particular suburbs and complicated rental arrangements mediated through agents, which prevent effective communication between the occupiers and owners of a property. In order to increase take-up in Tasmania, former State Premier, David Bartlett, successfully introduced legislation to the Tasmanian state legislature in late 2010 to make the NBN opt-out rather than opt-in. This reversed the onus of responsibility and meant that in Tasmania all houses and businesses would be automatically connected unless otherwise requested, and in order to effect this simple policy change, the government had to change trespass laws. However, other state legislatures are hesitant to follow the opt-out model (Grubb). Differentials in owner-occupied and rental properties within urban centres, combined with opt-in policies, are likely to see a continuation of the connectivity patchwork that that has thus far characterised Australian communications experience. A Focus on Cost Despite a great deal of public debate about the NBN, there is relatively little discussion of its proposed benefits. The fibre-to-the-home structure of the NBN is also subject to fierce partisan political debate between Australia’s major political parties, particularly around the form and cost of its implementation. As a consequence of this preoccupation with cost, many Australian consumers cannot see a “value proposition” in connecting, and are not convinced of the benefits of the NBN (Brown). The NBN is often reduced to an increased minimum download rate, and to increased ISP fees associated with high speeds, rather than a broader discussion of how the infrastructure can impact on commerce, education, entertainment, healthcare, and work (Barr). Moreover, this lack of balance in the discussion of costs and benefits extends in some instances to outright misunderstandings about the difference between infrastructure and service provision: …my neighbour across the road did not understand what that letter meant, and she would have to have been one of dozens if not hundreds in the exactly the same situation, who thought they were signing up for a broadband plan rather than just access to the infrastructure (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project) Lastly, the advent of the NBN in the first release areas does not override the costs of existing contracts for broadband delivered over the current copper network. Australians are often required to sign long-term contracts that prevent them from switching immediately to the new HSB infrastructure. Installation Logistics Local variations in fibre installation were evident prior to the rollout of the NBN, when the increased provision of HSB was already being used as a marketing device for greenfield (newly developed) estates in suburban Australia. In the wake of the NBN rollouts, some housing developers have begun to lay “NBN-ready” optic fibre in greenfield estates. While this is a positive development for those who a purchasing a newly-developed property, those that invest in brownfield “re-developments,” may have to pay over twice the amount for the installation of the NBN (Neales). These varying local conditions of installation are reflected in the contractual arrangements for installing the fibre, the installers’ policies for installation, and the processes of installation (Darling): They’re gonna have to do 4000 houses a day … and it was a solid six months to get about 800 houses hooked up here. So, logistically I just can’t see it happening. (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project) Finally, for those who do not take-up the free initial installation offer, for whatever reason, there will be costs to have contractors return and connect the fibre (Grubb; Neales). Spectrum Politics, Fibre in the Neighbourhood The promise that the NBN will provide fast, universal and equitable digital access realised through a fibre-optic network is challenged by the experience of first release sites such as Midway Point. As evident above, and due to a number of factors, there is a likelihood in supposedly NBN-connected places of varied connectivity in which service will range from dial-up to DSL and ADSL to fibre and wireless, all within a single location. The varied connectivity in the early NBN rollout stages suggests that the patchwork of Internet connections commonly experienced in Australian suburbs will continue rather than disappear. This varied patchwork can be understood as a politics of spectrum. Rod Tucker (13-14) emphasises that the crucial element of spectrum is its bandwidth, or information carrying capacity. In light of this the politics of spectrum reframes the key issue of access to participation in the digital economy to examine stakes of the varying quality of connection (particularly download speeds), through the available medium (wireless, copper, coaxial cable, optical fibre), connection (modem, antenna, gateway) and service type (DSL, WiFi, Satellite, FTTP). This technical emphasis follows in the wake of debates about digital inclusion (e.g., Warschauer) to re-introduce the importance of connection quality—embedded in older “digital divide” discourse—into approaches that look beyond technical infrastructure to the social conditions of their use. This is a shift that takes account of the various and intertwined socio-technical factors influencing the quality of access and use. This spectrum politics also has important implications for the Universal Service Obligation (USO). Telstra (the former Telecom) continues to have the responsibility to provide every premise in Australia with a standard telephone service, that is at least a single copper line—or equivalent service—connection. However, the creation of the NBN Co. relieves Telstra of this obligation in the areas which have coverage from the fibre network. This agreement means that Telstra will gradually shut down its ageing copper network, following the pattern of the NBN rollout and transfer customers to the newly developed broadband fibre network (Hepworth and Wilson). Consequently, every individual phone service in those areas will be required to move onto the NBN to maintain the USO. This means that premises not connected to the NBN because the owners of the property opted out—by default or by choice—are faced with an uncertain future vis-à-vis the meaning and provision of the USO because they will not have access to either copper or fibre networks. At this extreme of spectrum politics, the current policy setting may result in households that have no possibility of a broadband connection. This potential problem can be resolved by a retro-rollout, in which NBN fibre connection is installed at some point in the future to every premises regardless of whether they originally agreed or not. Currently, however, the cost of a retrospective connection is expected to be borne by the consumer: “those who decline to allow NBN Co on to their property will need to pay up to $300 to connect to the NBN at a later date” (Grubb) Smaller, often brownfield development estates also face particular difficulties in the current long-term switch of responsibilities from Telstra to the NBN Co. This is because Telstra is reluctant to install new copper networks knowing that they will soon become obsolete. Instead, “in housing estates of fewer than 100 houses, Telstra is often providing residents with wireless phones that are unable to connect to the Internet” (Thompson). Thus a limbo is created, where new residents will not have access to either copper or fibre fixed line connections. Rather, they will have to use whatever wireless Internet is available in the area. Particularly concerning is that the period of the rollout is projected to last for eight years. As a result: “Thousands of Australians—many of them in regional areas—can expect years of worse, rather than better, Internet services as the National Broadband Network rolls out across the country” (Thompson). And, given different take-up rates and costs of retro-fitting, this situation could continue for many people and for many years after the initial rollout is completed. Implications of Spectrum Politics for the Digital Home What does this uncertain and patchwork future of connectivity imply for digital living and the next-generation broadband suburb? In contrast to the imagined post-NBN geography of the seamless digital home, local material and cultural factors will still create varied levels of service. This predicament challenges the ideals of organisations such as the Digital Living Network, an industry body comprised of corporate members, “based on principles of open standards and home networking interoperability [which] will unleash a rich digital media environment of interconnected devices that enable us all to experience our favorite content and services wherever and whenever we want” (Vohringer). Such a vision of convergence takes a domestic approach to the “Internet of things” by imagining a user-friendly network of personal computing, consumer electronics, mobile technologies, utilities, and other domestic technologies. The NBN anticipates a digital home that is integrated into the digital economy as a node of production and consumption. But this future is challenged by the patchwork of connectivity. Bruno Latour famously remarked that even the most extensive and powerful networks are local at every point. Although he was speaking of actor-networks, not broadband networks, analysis of the Australian experience of high-speed broadband would do well to look beyond its national characteristics to include its local characteristics, and the constellations between them. It is at the local level, importantly, at the level of the household and suburb, that the NBN will be experienced in daily life. As we have argued here, we have reason to expect that this experience will be as disparate as the network is distributed, and we have reason to believe that local cultural and material factors such as installation policies, discussions around costs and benefits, the household’s own internal digital infrastructure, and installation logistics at the level of the house and the neighbourhood, will continue to shape a patchworked geography of media and communications experiences for digital homes. References Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN). National Broadband Network: A Guide for Consumers. Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU) and ACCAN, 2011. Barr, Trevor. “A Broadband Services Typology.” The Australian Economic Review 43.2 (2010): 187-193. Brown, Damien. “NBN Now 10 Times Faster.” The Mercury 13 Aug. 2010. ‹http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2010/08/13/165435_todays-news.html›. Conroy, Stephen (Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy). “New National Broadband Network”. Canberra: Australian Government, 7 April 2009. ‹http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/media/media_releases/2009/022›. Darling, Peter. “Building the National Broadband Network.” Telecommunications Journal of Australia 60.3 (2010): 42.1-12. Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE). “Impacts of Teleworking under the NBN.” Report prepared by Access Economics. Canberra, 2010. Edwards, Keith, Rebecca Grinter, Ratul Mahajan, and David Wetherall. “Advancing the State of Home Networking.” Communications of the ACM 54.6 (2010): 62-71. Grubb, Ben. “Connect to NBN Now or Pay Up to $300 for Phone Line.” The Sydney Morning Herald 15 Oct. 2010. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/connect-to-nbn-now-or-pay-up-to-300-for-phone-line-20101015-16ms3.html›. Hepworth, Annabel, and Lauren Wilson. “Customers May Be Forced on to NBN to Keep Phones.” The Australian 12 Oct. 2010. ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/customers-may-be-forced-on-to-nbn-to-keep-phones/story-fn59niix-1225937394605›. Howard, Sandy. “How Your Home Will Operate.” Business Review Weekly 25 April 1994: 100. Intel Corporation. “Intel and the Digital Home.” ‹http://www.intel.com/standards/case/case_dh.htm›. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Neales, Sue. “Bartlett Looks at ‘Opt-out’ NBN.” The Mercury 28 July 2010. ‹http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2010/07/28/161721_tasmania-news.html›. Spigel, Lynn. “Media Homes: Then and Now.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4.4 (2001): 385–411. Thompson, Geoff. “Thousands to Be Stuck in NBN ‘Limbo’.” ABC Online 26 April 2011. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/26/3200127.htm›. Tietze, S., and G. Musson. “Recasting the Home—Work Relationship: A Case of Mutual Adjustment?” Organization Studies 26.9 (2005): 1331–1352. Trulove, James Grayson (ed.). The Smart House. New York: HDI, 2003. Tucker, Rodney S. “Broadband Facts, Fiction and Urban Myths.” Telecommunications Journal of Australia 60.3 (2010): 43.1 to 43.15. Vohringer, Cesar. CTO of Philips Consumer Electronics (from June 2003 DLNA press release) cited on the Intel Corporation website. ‹http://www.intel.com/standards/case/case_dh.htm›. Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Wilken, Rowan, Michael Arnold, and Bjorn Nansen. “Broadband in the Home Pilot Study: Suburban Hobart.” Telecommunications Journal of Australia 61.1 (2011): 5.1-16.

The diploma thesis is a summary describing of the current housing situation in the area of the city Brno. It deals with comparing the normal rent of flats in different localities of the city and consider amendments to the lease in terms of amenities and size of dwelling. The figures are divided into flats for a 1+1, 1+kk, 2+1, 2+kk, 3+1, 3+kk, 4+1, 4+kk. Charting the market and its price in the lease is done both text and graphics.

This thesis aims to analyze trends in the area of residential properties within selected locality over a selected period of time. Introduction chapter explains basic terminology of real estate market and later unveils the way how is residential market integrated into real estate market as such. It also describes factors that have significant impact on supply and demand. Next chapter describes residential market and distribution of its particular sectors. Main chapter analyzes selected parameters which affect residential market in the South Moravian Region. Key parameters are demographic movement, income and living standards of residents and its relationship to household, residential construction trends, etc. The final chapter is concerned with housing condition of council flats and houses in the area of Brno metropolis. The analyses contains the trend monitoring of selected factors over a selected period of time.