The Winning Design Takes 15 Percent of the Parking off Náměstí Svatopluka Čecha. A Third of the Room Wanted More

Prague 10 published on 30 September the record of the second public hearing on the winning design for náměstí Svatopluka Čecha, held on 27 August in the Sál bratří Čapků with about forty people in the room. Two numbers in it are worth putting side by side. The scheme by ra15 a.s. cuts parking on the square by roughly 15 percent against today. And when the evening's facilitator asked who would support a deeper cut than that, something over a third of those present put a hand up — six of them residents of the square itself.

That is the opposite of how these meetings usually run. Marek Sivák of Architekti prostoru, who wrote the competition brief and chaired the evening, said as much in the record: the demand that normally dominates a consultation on a public space is for parking to be kept or expanded, and here a significant part of the 656 respondents to the earlier survey wanted it reduced instead. The answers of people living on the square or immediately around it were tracked separately, and even in that group the wish to keep the present extent of parking did not predominate.

What the district says is stopping it

Mayor Martin Valovič told the meeting he could personally imagine a sharper reduction in car traffic on the square, and then set out why the design does not contain one. Participation also produced demands to keep capacity; the 15 percent figure reflects the degree of change the survey showed support for. Anything more, he said, would need a wider systemic solution — flexible pricing in the paid parking zones, which Prague 10 has long argued for and which the city has not found the political support to adopt.

Milan Maršálek, the councillor for the environment, confirmed that changes to the zone system are being prepared at city level, including unified rules and time regimes across districts and more flexible pricing, but that they have not been approved and will probably fall to the next electoral term.

One participant was not persuaded. The record has him calling it an alibi — a row of speakers from the district and the design team all conceding they could imagine less parking, while no sharper change is actually proposed — and warning that a decision taken now will shape the square for decades, because reopening it after the rebuild will be hard. He also questioned the angled bays proposed in combination with cycle traffic.

The other argument is about hard ground

Around ten people, mostly returning from the July meeting, objected to the extent of the paved area in the southern half. The brief had asked for three functions at once — street, park and square — and the split in the room tracks that: some would minimise the square function, others ask for more children's space, and the design gives most of the inner area to the park.

The constraint nobody can negotiate is the church. The brief required the undisturbed view of the façade of Gočár's church of St Wenceslas, a composition the present sloped ground already spoils, and that rules out shading the space in front of it with trees. The cooling has to come from elsewhere: large-format stone paving, two rain gardens, retention tanks, roughly 25 cubic metres of rootable space for a medium tree, rainwater harvested from the church roof instead of going to the sewer, and a water feature whose regime changes with the weather — a few millimetres of water and jets to paddle in on the hottest days.

Jury chair Martin Rusina reminded the room what stage this is. The competition design is a concept, not, as the record puts it, scripture; Maršálek called it the zeroth phase of project preparation, and the parking question explicitly remains open for the next stages. Which is why the straw poll matters more than it looks: it is the first count of a Vršovice room asking for fewer cars than the design in front of it.