The Concrete Plant on Rohanský ostrov Now Has an End Date. What Replaces It Has Not Been Approved by Anyone

A date has been put on the end of one of the last industrial operations on the Vltava inside the inner city. TBG Metrostav, which runs the concrete batching plant on Rohanský ostrov, says the plant will cease operations in 2028. The statement comes in a press release from Prague 8 — the occasion is a mural, but the date is the news.

The plant sits on a stretch of riverbank between Karlín and the Vltava that the public cannot normally enter — the district's release notes that the guided tours laid on for the occasion went through premises that are otherwise closed. An operator's own closing date is a different kind of fact from a planning intention: it does not need anybody's approval to happen.

The district's answer, and its own caveat

Prague 8 wants the site to become a city farm. Its stated vision is that the area should not sit as a closed, unused plot after the plant goes, but open to the public in stages: demonstration beds, facilities for teaching ecology and growing, programmes for schools and families, community use and somewhere to sit. In the longer run the site is meant to form part of an extensive Maniny park, which the district describes as comparable in size to Stromovka.

The release is unusually straightforward about the status of all this. In its own words, this is not yet a definitively approved building project but a vision for the use of the territory. That sentence is worth keeping, because visions for Rohanský ostrov have a history of being reported as plans.

Radomír Nepil, Prague 8's deputy mayor for territorial development and property, puts the argument for moving before the long-term question is settled.

We do not want such valuable land to stay closed and lifeless for years. We want to open it up to people gradually and show that such a use can make great sense for the city.

— Radomír Nepil, deputy mayor of Prague 8 for territorial development and property

The mural, and who paid for it

The picture on the plant walls was painted between 10 and 13 September by four Czech artists — Dosy Doss, Domino, Oliver Heller and Rivus — as part of the Urban Pictus festival, produced by Petr Kopal of The Chemistry Gallery, the same outfit behind the 700-metre Mural Ruzyně in Prague 6 in June. The common theme is nature reclaiming an industrial site, which is the district's vision rendered as a picture on the thing the vision would remove.

It should be said plainly that TBG Metrostav supported the mural financially and organisationally, and opened the plant for guided tours while it was being painted. Jana Solomonová, Prague 8's councillor for culture, said the point was to bring contemporary art to a place people pass every day but have no reason to stop at.

The operator's own framing is about continuity rather than departure.

Rohanský ostrov and the concrete plant here have a long shared history behind them. We therefore wanted to support a project that does not conceal the industrial character of the place, but works with it and gives it new meaning.

— Jakub Šimáček, managing director, TBG Metrostav

Read in order, the sequence is: a company with two years left on a site helps pay for an artwork about what comes after it, on a wall a district would like demolished, to illustrate a use nobody has yet approved. None of that makes the closing date less real. It does mean the 2028 figure is the only hard thing in the announcement, and everything built on top of it still has to go through the process that decides what Rohanský ostrov becomes.