The Prague Metro: Socialism, Time and Space, c. 1950-2000

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The Prague Metro is almost coeval with the 20thcentury history. Although it was only opened in 1974, the first plans date to 1899. And since then, Prague has undergone several regime, temporal, and spatial changes, as well as rule of different ideologies. Thisproject aims to examine the history of the Prague Metro and its construction from the perspective of cultural history, examining the complexity of meanings surrounding it, and particularly exploringconcepts of time and space. In doing so, I hope to contribute tocurrent debates on different forms of modernity - liberal capitalist, Stalinist, post-Stalinist and post-socialist. It willstart with the bigger picture of different visions of the Prague Metro and then centre on the socialistand postsocialist eras.Historians of socialism are movingaway from earlier totalitarian perspectives, focused on the politics of oppression, in favour of studying the interplay of public and private spheres, seeing it in its complexity. The Prague Metro can be seen as "a laboratory of modernity"and, by contrasting and comparing it with other modernities both diachronically and synchronically to show it as part of European modernity. Furthermore, nothing has been written on the Prague Metro so far, apart from a few popular books, which treat history purely descriptively, with only anecdotal research and a lack of analysis. The Metro as a signifier appears on various levels of discourse, which I want to examine, from high politics to technocratic debates to everyday commuting. The central issue is the abstract notion of modern temporality and its concrete imaginations and realizations in the space of the Metro. The construction came at a time of heightened interest in the future along with a waning belief in technocracy and a birth of distinct "socialist science", which presumed no contradiction between the norms of science and everyday life. The Metro was a time machine to both the future (manifestation of technology) and the past (display of national legacy), which it linked together (by ideology). A new space of experience was growing under Prague which drafted a new horizon of expectations. The Metro offers a perspective through which to analyse the changing regimes of time and historicity in the age of time-space compression in the West and timelessness of late socialism despite continuing teleological proclamations of the ideology. Meanwhile, after 1989, the Metro was no longer presented as "a work of the Czechoslovak people", the federation stopped financing its construction and the frescoes were covered with kiosks, as the layers of memory literally transformed. The legacy of the past, anticommunism and nostalgia can all be observed in the ways in which the Metro was renamed, reshaped, and remembered under postsocialism. However, I understand the Metro not as a mere part of discourse, but as a concrete space, which people pass through. My thesis will therefore take account of the spatial turn in historiography, which calls for more emphasis on the spaces that do not merely document, but mediate, segregate, market, display, or ignore. The cosmology of abstract concepts of socialist and other modernities contrasts with the phenomenology of spaces which create the existential foothold wherein the subjectivities experience the gathered meanings, the character of a place. The technological utopia enters the framework of the real, the state's rationale consolidates the world through space. The Metro makes it possible to explore the changing mental image of the city as a modern project and a space in time. I wish to read not only the texts, but also the space and its (audio)visual representations. There are several Prague-based archives, which include official documents, expert journals, newspaper, official magazines, film and television production. Biographical literature makes possible the inquiry on subjectivities.