Ostrava, in the past nicknamed the steel city of the republic or the city of coal and steel, represented during the socialist period and afterwards the main industrial city of the republic. The social official visual images of the city and life in it represented a happy urban life with glimpses of shining future. Ostrava was visualized as an embodiment of progress made possible and conditioned by the indrustralization and related changes of the urban landscape and everyday life.
The conceptual debate on recently quite a fashionable topic of landscape is, at least within Czech academia, deeply influenced by the concepts and imagery of natural sciences. In this article, we advocate an alternative concept of landscape, that developed by anthropology of landscape. We understand landscape to be a widely conceived "way of seeing", way of grasping, experiencing and understanding the world, rather than simply a piece of reality out there. In the first part of the paper we present, how anthropology of landscape theorize its subject. In the second we offer two applied examples – analyses of prehistoric and (post)industrial landscape. The main aim of the article is to balance otherwise natural science driven debate about landscape and to return to the concept of landscape what it lacks – human experience.