The gilt on the golden city? Transnational professionals and the production of exclusionary spaces in post-socialist Prague

Abstract

Over the last twenty years or so there has been a significant amount of research conducted within human geography relating to world cities, transnational elites and post-socialist transformation. The bulk of the research relating to transnational elites has been concerned with the role played by such individuals in (re)producing economic knowledge in ‘Western’ global cities, whilst their everyday lives, practices and spatialities have been largely neglected. In contrast to treating the everyday lives of these individuals as being contingent and taken-for-granted, this thesis unpacks the everyday lives and spatialities of these individuals and examines how they contribute to socio-spatial exclusion in the city of Prague, Czech Republic. The thesis argues that by understanding the everyday (spatial) practices of these professionals we can being to gain a more nuanced understanding of the geographies that they produce. I illustrate the importance of everyday practices in the production of exclusionary spaces by focusing upon: (i) the production and consumption of luxury residential property; (ii) the social networks of expatriates and the spaces that these networks produce; (iii) the time-spaces of their everyday lives; (iv) expatriate consumption practices. By focusing the research on these four categories, it has been possible to examine: (i) the exclusionary spatial forms produced by expatriate professionals; (ii) the processes and practices that produce such spaces and; (iii) critique the commonly held misconceptions that these individuals are normatively constructed as being ‘elitist’.