CityDeal Goes from Five Cities to Twelve, and Starts Arguing About Who Sets the Rules

CityDeal, the platform linking the planning institutions of Czech cities, has grown from five cities to twelve over recent months, IPR Praha announced on 21 August. Liberec, Karlovy Vary, Olomouc, Jihlava, Ústí nad Labem, Tábor and Opava have joined the founding group of Prague, Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň and Zlín. Further cities are in talks about joining.

The more interesting line in the announcement is not the growth. It is what CityDeal now says it wants to do with the numbers.

From swapping notes to naming the problem

The platform's original purpose was practical: connect specialists in urbanism, spatial planning and city development so they can share experience and raise the quality of public debate. The August statement adds an explicitly political second aim — opening a public debate about how Czech cities are governed, what instruments they need, and where responsibility in the planning system should lie with cities and where with the state.

IPR's director put the grievance plainly.

"Although every city is different, we surprisingly often run into the same problems. Cities bear responsibility for their development, but a whole range of the instruments and rules that determine it originate outside them. That is what we want to change."

— Ondřej Boháč, Director, IPR Praha

The specific barriers the participants name are the complicated division of competences, the difficulty of coordinating institutions, and rules that take only limited account of the differences between individual cities.

That last one is the substance of the complaint, and it is what the platform's diversity is meant to evidence. Twelve cities of very different sizes and histories hitting the same wall is a stronger argument for flexibility than Prague making the case alone.

"Each city, given its history and layout, deals with somewhat different challenges and needs a certain degree of flexibility so it can respond to them."

— Ondřej Vysloužil, Director, MAPPA Ostrava

What is actually being shared

Underneath the reform talk is a working exchange. The cities share experience with running architectural and urban design competitions, planning transport changes, involving the public, and drawing up spatial plans and municipal building regulations. Those that already use such regulations are jointly working out how to amend them to match new legislation — which is a concrete, dated problem rather than a general aspiration.

The planning offices also take cues from one another on transforming public spaces, preparing new districts, coordinating large development areas and communicating those projects to the public. Olomouc, preparing an urban design competition for the transformation of its market hall and former bus station, is drawing on Brno's experience.

"We are in intensive contact, whether it concerns building regulations or, say, solutions for public space. Thanks to sharing experience in the CityDeal initiative we know and can offer solutions that work in practice."

— Karel Adamec, Director, KAM Karlovy Vary

One concrete product of the collaboration is a manual on a data-based approach to detailed planning. Digitalisation and the data approach are among the threads linking the cities in the initiative.

Why this matters from Prague

Prague has spent years building instruments — its own building regulations, its Metropolitan Plan, a planning institute with real capacity — that other Czech cities largely do not have. The risk in that position is isolation: a city arguing for exemptions on its own reads as a city asking for special treatment.

Twelve planning offices making the same argument at the same time is a different proposition. It also cuts the other way, and the announcement is candid about it: Olomouc borrowing Brno's competition experience is not Prague exporting practice, it is a network in which Prague is one node among twelve. Whether that translates into any change to the division of competences is not something an announcement can settle. What has changed so far is the number of institutions willing to say publicly that the division is wrong.