Radan Haluzík – Nature in the City, or the City in Nature?

Where can nature be found in the city? And not only the kind that boldly pushes its way into every available space, but also rare and even protected forms of nature? Why does Prague have more protected areas than some protected landscapes far beyond the city? Is access to nature and peaceful recreation in the urban environment a luxury for which there is simply no room, or is the reality more complex?

What kind of city do we actually want, and what kinds of open or seemingly empty spaces can we preserve for rest, for animals, and for plants? Are the city and nature really as fundamentally opposed as we tend to think?

Together, we will look at the city from an inverted perspective. We will set aside familiar assumptions, exercise our urban imagination, and explore realistic visions of an attainable urban future in which things might work a little differently.

Radan Haluzík

Radan Haluzík is a social anthropologist and ecologist whose research focuses on the social life of things, architecture, urban inner peripheries, and contemporary armed conflicts. More broadly, he is interested in the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

His many years of field research on conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus resulted in the book Why Men Go to War (Proč jdou chlapi do války, 2018). At the Center for Theoretical Study of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, he led a research team exploring vacant spaces and emerging urban wilderness, culminating in the publication of The City Inside Out: Vague Terrain, Inner Peripheries and Places Between Places (Město naruby: vágní terén, vnitřní periferie a místa mezi místy, 2020).

His most recent book, Turbo-Countryside: Full Landscapes and Empty Houses (Not Only) in the Balkans (Turbo-venkov: plné krajiny a prázdné domy (nejen) na Balkáně), examines the crisis of the global countryside and the search for new architectural and urban forms in response to it.

He works at the Center for Theoretical Study of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Info

Speaker | Radan Haluzík
Date | 2 October 2026, 18:00
Venue | Tyršův dům – Human Lab
Address | Újezd 450/40, 118 01 Malá Strana
Entry | Free