A Probe into the Culture of a Town: Zlín - A Model Town of Modernity

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s the Czech town of Zlín was shaped by a plan of the Baťa shoe company to build a model company town exemplifying the perfect organisation of physical and social space (structuring society through the structure of space and vice versa), in which there is an order to everything and everyone has a distinct position within that order. This intention was tied to the needs of a society of mass production and was based on the standardisation and normalisation not only of production and industry facilities, but also of settlements and dwellings and even of the individual activities of people and their lives as a whole. In this society, the concentration of workers in larger factories and their subordination to precise division of labour entailed the imposition of disciplinary power over their bodies and the indoctrination of their minds with corporate ideology. All this, along with the surveillance and control of the people's lives, not just at work in the production plant but also in their homes, their schools, during their leisure time activities, and even through the overall urban layout itself, combined to give the town's inhabitantsa specific collective identity. This is a story as much about the transformation of a small village community into a model town of modernity as it is about farmers, herders and craftspeople becoming modern factory workers and seeing their social field, habitus and identity changed. And it is even more the story of the function of urban space and and how its transformations usher in changes in the way of life.