Jan Mikeš holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Near Eastern Studies from Charles University, Prague. Currently, he studies Social History at the Institute of Economic and Social History at Charles University, having a semester-long internship at RECET. His is currently working on a Diploma thesis “Environmental Politics of the City of Prague in the Nineteen-Nineties“ and participating in a project of the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, called “In Search of Postmodern City: Urban Changes and Continuities in East Central Europe between Late Socialism and Capitalism (1970–2000)“.

Research interests:

• History of contemporary urbanism in Central Europe, change from compact and centralised cities towards the urban sprawl

• Environmental history of Central Europe under state socialism and capitalism

• Communism and socialism after the end of the Cold War

Current Research Project:

"Environmentální politika města Prahy v devadesátých letech dvacátého století" [Environmental Politics of the City of Prague in the 1990s]

From today’s point of view, environmental themes are concerned mainly about planetary issues, demanding action from humanity as a whole. They attract mainly progressives and left-leaning people and are increasingly divisive in the political sphere. This was, however, quite different not so long ago. At the end of the 1980s, environmental critique served as a unifying topic strong enough to mobilize large masses, left or right, educated or not, urban or rural, against the centralised state socialist regime in Czechoslovakia. Protests against the suffocating pollution of the air, chemical poisoning of waters and general destruction of the aesthetic qualities of the landscape, largely contributed to the regime’s demise in November 1989. This perceived unity of opinions survived for some time even after the Velvet Revolution. Different political parties were relatively slow to discover each other’s different visions of the appropriate action against the environmental crisis. Whereas the right imagined increased infrastructural projects, designed to clean the air, and bring the choking car traffic away from populated places, the left envisaged deep societal changes aimed at creating a society which doesn’t harm the environment in the first place.

In his work, Jan is trying to show the dynamics of these debates at the somewhat down-to-earth level of the Prague City Council in the years following the downfall of state socialism. No alliances were yet stable, no opinions were yet fully forged. Moreover, the thirty-year distance allows him to assess the successes or failures of all strategies of the time.