Cultural, Environmental or an Anthropological typology of the City? The Concept of Genius Loci and Local Mobility in Brno in the Czech Republic

This research paper aims to presents the inconvenient approach to identify the typology of the city on the example of the Czech regional centre of Brno. This ‘town’ became ‘city’ since 1919 when 23 other municipalities were annexed (based on the project Greater Brno) according to law 213/1919. This process starts again through the suburbanization in the 90s. Brno changes its appearance and characteristic features that individual affiliated districts/villages bring to the agglomeration. These characteristics of urban areas refer to the lives of different people and different societies, their sources of livelihood, their status, but also the representation of the majority or minority society. Some areas, despite swift construction development, keep their genius loci, others change it, and others lose it. The goal of this paper is to identify Brno's urban areas according to its ‘genius loci’, conditioned by the socio-cultural, urban and environmental determinants of the given locality with a distinction not only of rural, suburban or urban but also of the cultural, historical, socio-anthropological or regional-economics. The method proceeds from semi-structured interviews and ‘tram-story’ location choice to achieve as objective results as possible in such a subjective issue as Genius loci. Then a selected application example presents Brno Bohunice. This example shows the Genius loci isn´t the case of fast development or stagnation, but different factors determine it.