Jankovcova Is Being Cleared Before the Builder of Its School Has Been Chosen

The plot on Jankovcova street in Holešovice is being demolished. Praha 7 said on 6 October, in a statement on its own website, that clearance works are in progress on the site of the planned Jan Vodňanský primary school and that the public contract for the building itself is being run at the same time. The source is the district promoting its own project, and the schedule it gives is not a date.

We have been investing in our schools for a long time, because many of them sit in buildings over a hundred years old. At the same time we are increasing their capacity. Praha 7 is growing, new flats are appearing and the number of children is rising. That is why we spent recent years preparing the project for a new school, which will be the first newly built primary school in Praha 7 in more than a hundred years. Demolition works are now under way on the plot, the contractor tender is running at the same time, and we want to start building soon.

— Jan Čižinský, mayor of Praha 7

The order of operations

When Prague's assembly voted the last of the money through on 10 September — a repayable 165.8-million-crown advance towards a building then costed at 903 million — the open question was the schedule. ČTK reported at the time that the contractor tender had gone out in July and that construction was expected to begin in the autumn.

A month on, the autumn start has become a cleared plot and a tender that has not closed. That is not unusual sequencing for a municipal project: demolition is a separate, smaller contract, and getting it done while the main tender runs saves weeks later. It does mean the only firm fact about the building contract is that nobody has signed it, and "soon" is doing the work that a date would otherwise do.

550 or 570

The district now describes the school as 18 classrooms for roughly 570 pupils. The figure reported by ČTK in September, when the financing was approved, was 18 classrooms for about 550. Neither source explains the difference and we are not going to resolve it: the classroom count is the same in both, and the pupil number is the one that moves.

It matters a little more than a rounding error should, because the case for the building is arithmetic. Praha 7 runs six primary schools with 3,370 places between them, all of them full, and the district's own demographic study expects about 4,500 children aged six to fourteen living in Praha 7 by 2029. Twenty places either way does not change that, but the district has quoted three capacities for this school in three years — 540 at competition stage, 550 in September, 570 now — and it is the number the whole scheme is justified by.

What else the district is spending on

The new school is the largest item but not the only one. The statement lists a roof completed at ZŠ Letohradská in September, ahead of its original deadline, after work that began last December; a roof reconstruction at ZŠ Tusarova due to start around the turn of the year; a fourth stage of rewiring at FZŠ Umělecká over the summer holidays, with the final stage planned for summer 2027; and another full electrical replacement being prepared at ZŠ Fr. Plamínkové. A rebuilt playground in the atrium of ZŠ T. G. Masaryka was finished at the start of the summer with an outdoor classroom, and a group for 24 children opened at Ortenovo náměstí 36, a building the district bought in 2023 and which now also houses the base for its home care service.

Deputy mayor Hana Šišková described the approach as taking the buildings in stages so that teaching is disturbed as little as possible, with priority given to the services that wear out — wiring, roofs, kitchens, canteens, then gardens and sports grounds.

The street comes back with it

The school's form came out of an international architectural competition won by a team led by Josef Choc. It will have a large-capacity kitchen, a multifunctional canteen that can serve as an assembly hall, a garden and outdoor sports facilities, and a gymnasium with an outdoor pitch on the roof looking out over the river.

The part worth watching is outside the fence. Praha 7 says it will also rework the surrounding public space and bring back Přádelní, a lane that had disappeared. In a quarter whose street grid was broken up by industry and has been slow to knit back together, a school is an odd instrument for restoring a street — but it is the instrument that has the money.