One of Bata's many innovations was this office in an elevator, enabling him to keep tabs of divisions on various floors in his 16-story headquarters.  (Photo by Colin Woodard)

 

ZLIN, Czech Republic – It’s a factory town that’s lost the factory for which it was created: a world-famous shoemaking complex that stands, largely abandoned, in the center. In 1989, 20,000 people — a quarter of Zlin’s population — worked at the state-owned shoe company, Svit.

 

Now none do.

 

But instead of imploding like so many other post-Communist industrial towns, Zlin shows no signs of distress. From the swank stores in the newly-opened indoor shopping mall on the city’s central square to the tidy, well-maintained complexes of concrete housing blocks on the edges of town, Zlin projects a feeling of quiet middle class prosperity.

 

People tend to fruit trees in the yards of the little brick houses built for factory workers in the 1920s. Hundreds of small businesses pack the floors of a downtown building that, in the 1930s, was the shoe company’s department store. The local university is expanding by leaps and bounds, unemployment in the region is below the national average, and the crime rate is among the lowest in the country.

 

But Zlin was no ordinary factory town. It was the factory town, a model industrial city built almost from scratch by native-born cobbler Tomas Bata in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Bata Shoes quickly became the largest footwear company in the world, with operations spanning the globe.

 

As the seat of Bata’s shoe enterprise, Zlin was a daring experiment in urban planning and social engineering: a centrally-planned “garden city” with state-of-the-art factories, homes, schools, entertainment and cultural facilities. Workers received high wages, and virtually everything was controlled by the ambitious and idealistic Tomas Bata.

 

The result was the creation of a city Czechs regarded as a slice of America dropped in the middle of Central Europe, and one of the most famous assemblages of modern architecture in the world. The last Batas fled when the factory was nationalized after World War II, but something of their legacy endured the Communist’s less-successful utopian experiment. That apparently left the city better prepared for the reintroduction of capitalism after 1989.

 

“The Bata spirit somehow survived,” says Pavel Velev, executive director of the Tomas Bata Foundation, a company-funded philanthropy. “Bata brought here to Zlin many clever, smart people and these people stayed and I think their brains are here in their children and grandchildren.”

 

When Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes collapsed twenty years ago, many of its industrial cities followed suit. Steel mills and factories shed most of the workers or shut down entirely, driving cities like Miskolc, Hungary and Katowice, Poland into crisis, complete with bands of glue-sniffing children and sharply increased crime rates.

 

Zlin, by contrast, had the second highest number of new start-up businesses in the Czech Republic in the first years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. And while the post-Communist shoe factory’s nine-year death spiral damaged the local economy — the firm finally went bankrupt in 2000 — residents say most people were able to find work in new the constellation of new businesses.

 

“There were several reasons why the transition looked so smooth,” says Adam Gebrian, a native of Zlin who now works as an architect and urban planner in Prague, 150 miles to the west. “But one is definitely this heritage from the Bata times, which made it immediately the most successful city in small business.”

 

An indelible spirit

 

Tomas Bata’s imprint on Zlin’s physical landscape is difficult to exaggerate.

 

Inspired by his visits to Henry Ford’s River Rouge automobile plant and the Endicott-Johnson shoe plant in 1919 and 1920, Mr. Bata built new assembly line factories in his home village, then surrounded them with a model city. At a time when most Czechs were living without running water or electricity, Bata built thousands of modern brick houses — each with its own garden. He built a department store, museum, hospital, sport facilities, parks, and the largest movie theater in the country. Managers were trained in the company’s own business school. Workers enjoyed free health care and schooling, a subsidized grocery store, and some of the highest wages in Czechoslovakia.

 

Zlin’s population jumped from 4500 in 1920 to nearly 40,000 in 1937, when the company erected its sixteen-story headquarters building, one of the first skyscrapers in Europe. Designed by a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, it was equipped with air conditioning and a luxurious office-in-an-elevator that allowed the president to keep tabs on various divisions. (The building completed a multi-million dollar renovation in 2004, and now houses the regional government.)

 

Buildings were eventually constructed using uniform 20 foot-by-20 foot modules, which made for rapid, efficient construction and gave the city a uniform appearance, as if the town were built from a child’s Lego blocks. (The system, once perfected, was deployed at smaller Bata-built factory towns like Batawa, Ontario; Batanagar, India; Batapur, Pakistan; East Tilbury, England; and Belcamp, Maryland.)

 

“His main idea was the people and how to do something that would bring to people a better life,” says Velev. “All life was much better than in other places in our country, and many people came here.”

 

It also gave Bata — who also served as Zlin’s mayor — a great deal of control over his workforce. “He believed you wouldn’t have unions if you have people a house, a garden, movies, and a department store with subsidized prices,” says Kimberly Elman Zarecor, a specialist on 20th century Czech architecture at Iowa State University.

 

But Czechoslovakia would experience a very different utopia after World War II, when the Soviets installed a Communist regime in Prague. The Batas fled to Canada and Brazil, while their Zlin operations were nationalized and ultimately retooled to provide mass-produced footwear for the Soviet Union. The Communists renamed the brand Svit, and all but banned the Bata name. To further break associations with the capitalist past, they even renamed the city Gottwaldov, after their Stalinist leader, Klement Gottwald. (The name was changed back immediately after the Velvet Revolution.)

 

While the regime reviled the Batas as capitalist exploiters, it snapped up their architects to help build their own worker’s utopia. The company’s design office became the Institute for Prefabricated Buildings. Its staff was assigned the new task of perfecting methods to mass-produce large housing blocks. The result — the concrete panel building — now surrounds every town and city in the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the neighborhoods built during the Communist era.

 

“The big difference from Bata’s utopian vision was that after the war they never built another single-family house,” says Zarecor, who has traced the role of Bata’s building experts in postwar mass housing. “But the way of thinking was rooted absolutely in the Bata idea of prefabrication.”

 

Other engineers and researchers had come to Zlin during the war, when German occupation forces closed the universities. “Some of the academic staff from Prague and Brno found refuge at the Bata company, where there was sort of an underground university,” says Zdenek Pokluda, an archivist at Tomas Bata University, a rapidly expanding institution in central Zlin founded in 2001.

 

“People who worked at Svit and formerly at Bata understood themselves as middle class, whereas in other industrial cities it was more proletarian,” says Zarecor. “Zlin’s ethos is very intellectual, cultural, and quiet.”

 

The city faces plenty of challenges, however. While parts of the 96-acre former Bata complex have been renovated and house swank restaurants and offices of high-tech companies, others are half-empty warehouses or simply stand derelict. Wages in the region are low, and the city has poor highway and railroad links.

 

“There are a lot of things that are below average compared to other regions,” says Mr. Gebrian. “On the surface, everything looks like it is going well, but when you look carefully you can still see the effects of the collapse.”

 

http://www.globalpost.com/passport/foreign-desk/091124/tale-two-utopias