Wooden or tin shacks, discarded railway carriages or caravans, but also abandoned brickworks or caves. This was what the temporary housing looked like that was built during the First Republic as a refuge for the poor inhabitants of Prague. Poverty colonies sprang up on the outskirts of the city and in the centre – for example, in Na Krejcárku, Střešovice and Veleslavín. In the second half of the 1920s, there were more than two dozen such colonies in Prague, home to 15,000 people in the early 1930s. Relics of these colonies can still be found in Prague today.

The authors of the book Zmizelá Praha: Nouzové kolonie (Lost Prague: Poverty Colonies), historian Martin Dolejský, sociologist David Platil, and Jarmila Nosálová, a survivor of the Strašnice colony Za Drahou, will talk about what these colonies reveal about the development of the capital city.