The Prague Metropolitan Plan should be completed in June next year

Prague – The new Prague zoning plan, whose discussion began in 2018, is expected to be completed and ready for approval by the city leadership in June next year. This autumn, an updated version will be published following the current round of public comments, to which the public will be able to respond for the third time. This was announced to journalists today by representatives of the Prague City Hall. The new planning document will replace the current plan from 1999 and is intended to improve and simplify urban planning in the metropolis.

The current plan was approved in 1999 and can still be valid only based on an exemption from the Ministry of Regional Development. The preparation of the so-called Metropolitan Plan was approved by the city council in 2013 under Mayor Tomáš Hudeček (then from TOP 09), and five years later the city’s Institute of Planning and Development (IPR) published its draft and the city hall department began discussions.

In the first round of public consultation, approximately 45,000 comments or objections were received. The city hall department incorporated these, and a further round took place in 2022, during which, according to today’s statement by the director of the municipal department of urban development, Filip Foglar, about 18,327 submissions were received. The department is now finalizing their processing, and according to the director, it has accommodated or partially accommodated 70 percent of the comments from city districts.

The updated draft is planned to be published by the department in mid-October, followed by a month-long period for comments, and then two full-day public discussions. After that, the department will incorporate the received comments again and prepare the final draft for approval by the city council and the city assembly. "We anticipate the approval of the Metropolitan Plan in a year," summarized Deputy Mayor Petr Hlaváček (from STAN). Foglar added that comments can be submitted online via the Citizen’s Portal, and the office will use artificial intelligence to pre-sort duplicate submissions.

According to IPR Director Ondřej Boháč, the current plan, which is over a quarter of a century old, is already outdated. "It’s like a Škoda Favorit, and that is truly not a car for the 21st century," he said. He added that among the advantages of the new document are the unlocking of brownfields and support for affordable housing, incorporation of all transport structures, protection of facilities and green spaces in housing estates, protection of panoramas and height regulation, different forms of regulation depending on the character of individual locations, the digitization of future changes, and the obligation of planning contracts with investors in cases where their land is appreciated, even if it is not necessary to change the plan.

During the discussion of the document, city representatives also consulted with ministries, which also provided comments. During the first discussion, according to Foglar, feedback came from 14 ministries, and during the second from nine. The most complicated issue, according to Hlaváček, was dealing with requests from the Ministry of Culture due to UNESCO protection and the Ministry of the Environment regarding soil protection. "We are now in a position where the state ceremoniously agrees with the form of the Metropolitan Plan as proposed," added Boháč.

The plan proposal was previously criticized by, for example, ecological or heritage organizations. Initially, there were disputes surrounding its preparation, which led to the temporary departure of its main author, architect Roman Koucký, from the IPR. Eventually, he returned to the head of the institute's team preparing the plan after winning a selection process.