Wooden or tin shacks, decommissioned railway carriages, caravans, and abandoned brickworks or caves. This is what emergency housing looked like during the First Republic, created as a refuge for Prague's impoverished residents. Emergency settlements grew on the city's outskirts and in the center, for example at Na Krejcárku, in Střešovice or Veleslavín. In the second half of the 1920s, there were over twenty such colonies in Prague, housing over 15,000 people by the early 1930s. Remnants of these settlements can still be found in Prague today.

The authors of the book Zmizelá Praha: Nouzové kolonie, historian Martin Dolejský and sociologist David Platil, and Jarmila Nosálová from the Strašnice settlement Za Drahou, spoke about what these settlements revealed about Prague's development.