The LOFT 577 club café is located today in the basement of the former commercial and banking house of František Javorský on T. Baťa Avenue in Zlín, from Miroslav Lorenc, a significant Prague pupil of Jaromír Krejcar, the author of the highest number of realizations of urban houses from the period of the managed reconstruction of the center of a rural town into a commercial "city" of an industrial city. On the eve of May 1st, we experienced a lecture here by alumnus of the Brno Faculty of Architecture, Petr Hurník, a former educator of this school, now working at the Building Faculty of VSB in Ostrava.
      Urbanism, which is the field of study for the teacher from the "Municipal House" generation, presents to its students as an organic, essential part of the study of architecture, without which inspiration for creating a valuable building, let alone a coherent set, is hardly conceivable. This alone represents a significant difference compared to the understanding of urbanism during the decline of its theory at the Research Institute of Construction and Architecture from the 1960s to the 1980s, when city planning was perceived as a necessary evil, a jumble of regulations, statistics, aesthetic dogmas without the prospect of applying a creative approach, which remains evident to many former graduates to this day.
      Hurník's lecture is introduced with a series of slides of entire urban forms and details of significant European cities, illustrating five basic attributes, values of a city aspiring to fulfill the needs and emotional engagement, patriotism of its residents. There is no reason for the inhabitants of the post-industrial era, taking advantage of the benefits of concentration, a combination of opportunities for living in cities, not to simultaneously develop their emotional relationship to the place, which, as is known, significantly contributes to the formation of lifelong attitudes, worldview, and the internal freedom of the individual. The author defines five basic values of the urban environment: layering - pollution - privacy - attractiveness - closeness, extracted from personal experience, underpinned by quotations from key figures in the philosophy and sociology of the city. Layering is understood as regard for the achieved state and the will to complement it. Pollution is seen as expressions of urban life, planning practice, essentially as life itself. Privacy is considered the most significant need of a person residing in an urban-type settlement. Attractiveness refers to the spirit of the place, which is relatively independent of the aesthetic values of the environment, and is related to the number of opportunities that the place offers. The category of closeness evokes the environment of settlements in the Mediterranean (climate), or medieval fortified towns, conceived for trade, exchange of food and handicrafts in times of peace, serving as a refuge for agricultural backgrounds in times of threat.
      The explanation continues with the presentation of students' works from the "Introduction to Urbanism" course, created on the topic of elementary urban forms: squares - streets - riverbanks of ten settlements of European, state, and local significance using the proposed conceptual framework. These examples, indeed most European cities of all sizes, today show a deficit in livability due to catastrophic events, political decisions, or merely the public’s planning incompetence, arising from a lack of education, distance, and decisiveness. In convincing drawings - collages, the renewal of the urban environment of European metropolises, state centers, and medium-sized cities parades. Where else but within basic studies can one work with Roman architectural forms or on the Vienna Ring, on Ile de la Cité next to Notre Dame? "Surprisingly," students grapple with the same dilemmas in the scale of the familiar, domestic environment.
      Students are aware of the consequences of contemporary international urban policy, the role of legal frameworks including the conception of heritage care, the pressure of automobiles and the operating aspects of settlements on environmental deformation, the necessity of a structured approach, the need for education, reading not only of specialized literature, lifelong learning in the field, creating one’s own value system, the significance of personal responsibility, the need for self-confidence and humility.

      At a time when urbanism as a tradition for shaping the public environment of settlements (housing estates) has nearly disappeared due to the discrediting of the field in our country, it has become a subject of plebiscite or voting by local councils - Hurník strives to teach aspiring professionals to intonate and sing.