IPR Has Mapped 239 Kilometres of Vanished Paths in Prague, and the City Owns 141 of Them

The landscape and green infrastructure office at IPR Praha has produced a study called Cesty — Paths — which maps the routes that have disappeared from the countryside around Prague. Writing on praha.camp on 10 September, Dominika Antonie Pfister sets out what it found. The headline number is that 3,673 kilometres of paths have vanished from Prague's metropolitan area over the past century, a distance the study compares to the span from Porto to Moscow.

Most of that is field tracks broken up by collectivisation and land consolidation in the twentieth century, though sections of long-distance trade routes and pilgrim ways are in there too. What makes the mapping more than an archive exercise is the ownership breakdown inside Prague itself. Of roughly 239 kilometres of lost paths mapped within the city, 141 kilometres lie on land owned by the City of Prague, 58 kilometres belong to the state, and the remaining 40 kilometres to other owners.

More than half the network, in other words, sits on land the city already holds. The lines are frequently still present in the cadastre even where nothing survives on the ground.

How you find a path that isn't there

The method combines several layers. The base is the so-called imperial imprints — cadastral maps about two hundred years old, from a period when the landscape still followed the natural terrain. These are compared with the current street and path network, and every line that exists in the old maps but that nobody walks today is drawn as a vanished path. Where georeferenced imperial imprints are missing, the second military survey serves instead.

Three supplementary sources fill the gaps: a digital terrain model, which picks up the fine grooves left by centuries of walking and carts; old aerial photographs taken during droughts, when the footprint of a path prints itself back into the vegetation; and the recollections and chronicles of residents.

What the study proposes doing with it

The mapped network can be overlaid on the current Prague cycling masterplan to identify which sections should be restored first — either because they lie on city land, or because they complete a missing part of the planned cycling network. At the metropolitan scale the study offers five organising principles for assembling a future non-motorised network: green radials running out of Prague into open country; routes along watercourses; routes along linear infrastructure such as motorways and railways; small landscape features left over from paths that have lost their connecting function; and local tangential links, which replace the older idea of a single ring around the whole city.

The result is a proposed network connecting Prague to the landscape units around it — the Labe, the Czech Karst, Křivoklátsko, the Brdy, the Posázaví — while opening up the farmland in between. A pilot section between Prague-Letňany and the Labe, worked up with the local action group Nad Prahou, is already ninety per cent passable.

Restoring paths need not be complicated; from mowing a strip of the route through surfacing to planting an avenue, you can gradually arrive at new paths in the landscape and a place for recreation. They must be seen as fully-fledged public infrastructure. It is therefore necessary to enter them into plans, add signage and street furniture, and take them into account in the development of areas and in transport projects.

— Marek Zděradička, director of the infrastructure section, IPR Praha

Why the framing matters

The argument running through the study is that a path is not only a transport trace. A field track was a means of access to agricultural land, but it was also where people met the landscape. Paths with accompanying greenery — an avenue, a belt of shrubs, or just an extensive grass margin — damp down erosion, catch dust, slow run-off and shelter insects, birds and small mammals. The unsurfaced surface is itself a habitat, carrying light- and drought-loving species that would not survive elsewhere in intensively farmed country.

The other observation is about the trade routes. Comparing the historic network with today's motorway map shows that more than half of the original routes still roughly coincide with it, which is unsurprising: both follow the easiest passage through the terrain. Prague was a pilgrimage hub from the Middle Ages too, and regional routes such as the Via Sancta, the St Ludmila way and the Cyril and Methodius trail still run through the city, though some of their chapels are now behind a golf course or inside a military compound.

Nothing has been decided here. Cesty is a study, not a plan with money attached, and the practical proposal is modest — use what already exists, on land the city already owns. But it is precisely the sort of document that either gets written into the cycling masterplan and the development of these areas, or does not. The complete brochure, with all the maps and a catalogue of specific sections, is available from IPR Praha.