Prague 7 Paints Three Streets Around Its Holešovice Schools, With a Fourth Due in September

Prague 7 spent July and August repainting the road and pavement surfaces of three streets around the schools near Nádraží Holešovice. Rajská, Plynární and Jablonského now carry coloured graphics applied under the district's asfalt art programme, and the district says Antonínská will get the same treatment during September.

The account here is the district's own; there is no independent assessment of the work.

What asfalt art is

The district describes asfalt art as a form of tactical urbanism: durable coloured coatings applied directly to roads, pavements and other public space, which allow a street to be changed quickly without construction work. The stated aim is both visual and functional — to enliven the street and to make it safer.

Public space should not be just a grey surface between buildings. We want it to be pleasant and alive, and to naturally invite considerate movement. Where we can, we try to plant trees or add beds, and now we have also tried asfalt art, which offers a way to enliven public space quickly without major construction works.

— Jan Čižinský, mayor of Prague 7

The safety claim is the district's and is not backed in the release by measurement. What the release does document is the material: the coatings used are products intended for multifunctional sports surfaces, pedestrian zones and cycle paths, specified so that the treated surface performs better than plain asphalt after application.

Why these streets

The three streets sit close to Nádraží Holešovice metro station and to a cluster of schools — ZŠ Bratrská, the Holešovice business academy, the higher vocational school of fashion design and the secondary technical school of clothing. Pupils and students from those schools contributed the designs.

Antonínská, the September site, is a different kind of street. The district notes it forms an important link between Strossmayerovo náměstí and Vltavská metro station, and that it runs near ZŠ Strossmayerovo náměstí; local pupils are again working on the design. That is the same school the district and TSK were working around on 28 August, when they blocked the transit shortcut at the junction below sv. Antonín with bollards and changed signage — reported here last week. The paint arrives a fortnight behind the bollards, on adjacent ground.

Both projects were prepared by the artist Jakub Karlík, who works in street art, graphics and design and has completed public-space commissions in the Czech Republic and abroad. In Prague 7 he also worked on the visual treatment of the Spot Holešovice playground and sports ground.

Where it sits in the district's record

Deputy mayor Hana Třeštíková, whose brief covers culture, sport and neighbourhood relations, placed the painting in a run of commissions: murals to Nicholas Winton and to Milada Horáková, and a new street gallery in the passage through the Molochov block.

That framing is honest about what this is. Asfalt art is being run by the district as art in public space that happens to sit on the carriageway, not as a traffic engineering measure — there is no kerb build-out, no bollard, no change to the geometry a driver actually negotiates. Painted crossings and intersection murals are used elsewhere on the argument that the visual friction slows drivers down; whether that holds depends on the design and on the street, and neither is settled by a press release.

What is settled is that four streets around Holešovice schools will look different this term than last, that the pupils who walk them drew what is on them, and that it cost the district a summer's painting rather than a construction contract. Read next to the bollards at Strossmayerovo náměstí, it looks like the cheap end of the same programme — and the question the coming term answers is whether it stays a supplement to the physical measures or starts standing in for them.