Otrokovice

During the interwar years, Otrokovice, a small village of farmers and craftsmen, underwent an unprecedentedly intensive development, which transformed it within a decade into a modern industrial centre with 8,000 (1938) inhabitants and a wide range of commercial, cultural, educational, and sports services. The representatives of the internationally successful Baťa shoe concern, headed by Tomáš Baťa, tactically chose a free, cheap and marshy area near the original historical town, seemingly unsuitable for construction, in order to build the first of a series of their sister production units there. From the beginning of the 1930s, they tried to adapt the unstable, often flooded area for their business plans, first of all by backfilling the land and regulating the Morava River. In the years 1933–⁠1935, the technologically complicated operation of floating soil from the nearby Tresný hill began. The soil disturbed by the water was transported using wooden troughs to the valley of the emerging industrial area, and thus the terrain was raised by several metres.

The new factory colony informally referred to as Baťov (the entire settlement bore the name Baťov only in the years 1939–⁠1946) was supposed to balance the shortcomings of the rapidly growing Zlín, especially its lack of free building plots and lack of water important for the production process. Auxiliary production plants were placed in Baťov with the intention of aiding further expansion: tanneries, paper mills, hosiery mills, chemical workshops, and a power plant. Thanks to the excellent transport accessibility from the whole country and the short distance from the home town of Zlín, Baťov soon gained key importance. In 1936, the head of the company, Jan Antonín Baťa, referred to it in the company press as "the child of a lucky star, the child of Zlín." In the future, Otrokovice was to provide Zlín with an excellent transport infrastructure (road, rail, air, with a separate international airport, and shipping with a wharf and connections to the shipping channel with the importing of coal from the company's mines in Ratíškovice). František Lýdie Gahura gave the Baťov factory town a well-thought-out concept of a garden city divided into separate functional zones (factory, residential, social, and educational quarters). Vladimír Karfík, on the other hand, designed a set of public buildings surrounding the central park square, school campus, and swimming pool. Corporate housing was categorised according to the age of the employees, their position, and family status into dormitories for the youngest students, bachelor apartments for workers without families, and family houses for married employees. During the 1930s, the management of the Baťa company also purposely provided its employees with space for leisure activities as part of the construction of factory premises in Czechoslovakia. These were meant for employees to develop and become educated, bringing them closer to modern urban life. The residents of Otrokovice therefore had at their disposal, among other things, a sports field, a lecture and cinema hall, restaurants, dining rooms, games rooms, and a library in the Community House. The ballot card of the Baťa employees won the municipal elections in 1938, thus the life of the entire town was officially connected with the operation of the industrial enterprise.

After the Second World War, the company was nationalised and the construction activity in the city focused on the restoration of housing and production capacities as part of the two-year economic recovery plan from 1947-1948. After the political and economic coup in 1948, with the nationalisation of the construction industry, mass housing came to the fore, this time dependent instead on the dominant industrial company of national central planning.

 

 

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