Abstrakt
Krymska Street in the Vršovice District is a part of the broader city centre of The Capital City of Prague (the Czech Republic). Since the Vršovice District was historically an independent market town, the locality has a small-town atmosphere with residents' strong ties to this place.
Now, the area is changing under the continuous gentrification process. Meanwhile, the whole district gradually transforms commercially and socially, the original residents of Krymska Street, people who live there for more than twenty years, remain.
Next to these residents, some entrepreneurs founded new spaces of consumption, transforming the neighborhood into a trendy and vibrant destination. The entrepreneurs, who perceive themselves as socio-cultural activists, act as a unified movement.
Not just the local street festival, but all their activities are presented as an effort to transform culturally and socially deprived street into a vibrant area. They frame their collective identity by using the symbolic boundary between alternative culture and mainstream, between civic engagement and passive citizens, between well-educated individuals and individuals without knowledge, between a liberal lifestyle and a conservative maintaining of status quo.
They use this strategy to counter the opposition and critique. This narration also dominates in the media that present entrepreneurs' efforts as an activistic creation of a more community-based and artsy neighborhood without a mainstream culture and chains.
Their activities seem to be not motivated by economic yieldings, but at the same time, they remain local entrepreneurs who live (wholly or partly) on the earnings generated by their enterprises that are the primary cause of commercial gentrification of the locality. Based on the one-year-long ethnographic research, in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and residents, and narrative analysis of media, the research identifies how entrepreneurs formulate and use their collective identity as activists to legitimate their efforts in social and cultural transformation of the street and how does it relates to they entrepreneurship that is problematized by residents who recognize it as the cause of commercial gentrification of the locality.