The location of economic activities in a post-communist city: Twenty years of landuse change in the ostrava metropolitan area (Czech Republic)

Abstract

Twenty years of transformation processes involved a change of location for economic activities in post-communist Czech cities. Some sites lost their functional use while others were redeveloped or newly developed. Site-specific factors were crucially important for particular sites to succeed. Therefore, this paper explores associations between selected theoretically substantiated site-specific factors and four types of development sites, namely brown fields, stable sites, redeveloped sites and newly developed greenfield sites, in the Ostrava metropolitan area in the late 2000s. The results indicate that ownership structure, transport accessibility and threat of environmental burden were statistically significant discriminating factors between the four types of development sites. Further insights into the associations were gained from decision rules induced by using the rough-set method. Typical combinations of site-specific factors that classified sites as one of the four types of development sites were revealed, creating a typology of development sites in the model area.