The Metropolitan Plan Is Now Binding — and the Architect Who Drew It Says It Lost the Thing It Was For

Prague's Metropolitan Plan took effect on 1 September, replacing the zoning document the city has been governed by since 1999. The council approved the final text at the end of May; the fourteen years of drafting behind it end here, and from Tuesday every building permit in the city is read against the new document rather than the old one.

What the plan does has been described often enough. What has not been assembled is who is unhappy with it, and it turns out that the objections point in opposite directions.

What is now in force

The Institute of Planning and Development, which drafted it, puts the case in terms of where building is allowed to go. The plan opens large areas that had no adequate use — brownfields above all — and it introduces height regulation, which the 1999 plan did not have. City figures give it room for 350,000 flats, mostly on those brownfields. It carries every planned transport scheme inside it, including the completion of both ring roads and the high-speed rail lines, which the city expects will speed those up.

The plan reasonably concentrates construction where the conditions for it are suitable, that is above all on brownfields and within reach of rail transport. All the key development and transport projects are entered in it, and at the same time it protects urban and housing-estate greenery, and Prague's heritage values.

— Petr Hlaváček, deputy mayor of Prague for spatial and strategic development

IPR's director, Ondřej Boháč, describes the shift as one of method rather than of permissiveness:

The plan abandons the mere delimitation of the functional use of areas and replaces it with an emphasis on the structure of the city. It therefore allows what people need to be built flexibly, while preserving predictability in the areas that matter — that is, how the city looks, how it works, and how a person feels in it.

— Ondřej Boháč, director of IPR Praha

ČTK adds two mechanisms the institute's own release does not mention. There are several places where buildings of up to a hundred metres will be possible. And in some areas development is conditioned on planning contracts — agreements under which an investor contributes to public infrastructure.

Three objections, and they are not the same objection

Local associations, the NGO Arnika and several city councillors including deputy mayor Jana Komrská (Jsme Praha, formerly the Pirates) hold that the document did not adequately reflect the comments the public submitted, that it endangers green areas, that it favours development companies, and that it densifies building without resolving the civic amenities that density needs.

The sharpest objection, though, comes from the other end. Roman Koucký, the principal author of the original draft, says that during the proceedings the plan lost the flexibility that was supposed to be its main asset — and that it lost it to the comments incorporated primarily from state organisations and ministries, not from the public.

Read together, those two complaints describe one process from its two ends: a document that the public says did not listen to it, and that its author says listened to the ministries until the idea was gone.

The property market's complaint is the third and the least expected. A survey by the Association for Real Estate Market Development among its members found the plan broadly welcomed.

The results show a fairly strong conviction among our members that the new plan is a step in the right direction for Prague's development. At the same time it is apparent from the answers that no immediate effect can be expected from its entry into force.

— Zdenka Klapalová, president of the Association for Real Estate Market Development

Klapalová added that on the market's reading the plan will show in Prague's development significantly only in about four years. Her members also find the height regulation insufficiently ambitious in places: they would allow tall building on a still larger scale than the plan does.

One discrepancy worth noting

The two sources count the public's involvement differently. IPR says the public had the chance to influence the plan during three rounds of public discussion, in 2018, 2022 and 2025. ČTK describes 2018 as the publication of the first draft, followed by the so-called joint proceeding at which ministries and authorities lodged their comments, with two rounds of comment for the public and the city districts in 2022 and 2025. Whether 2018 counts as a public round is exactly the point the critics are arguing about, so we report both counts rather than settle it.