The Diverse Prague

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Prague is not just a bridge and a castle, just as it is not just the Old Town, Vinohrady and housing estates. It consists of a plethora of unique places whose interrelationships create the city as we know it today. Let's look at Prague through the eye of an urbanist or an urban planner and try to unravel its urban diversity.

Every city is made up of many urban patterns or types of development, which differ from each other in terms of how the street network is designed or how buildings look and are distributed in space. Urban patterns and their form correspond to the period, purpose and social consensus within which they were created. What is interesting, however, is that these structures can be found and described in the city.

The variety of structures makes Prague what it is, a city of layers and cultural richness.

The form and composition of the urban patterns affect its inhabitants on a daily basis, from the permeability of the city allowing for comfortable movement on foot to the capacity and accessibility of housing. Without a deeper understanding of how Prague looks and functions today, we cannot plan well for how it should look and function in the future. Understanding its urban structure can be the first step.

Urban patterns can be found in many ways. We look at them through data.

To understand how a city is laid out, we measure everything from the size and shape of buildings and their distance, to the connectivity of streets and other metrics that describe the built environment. As a result, the data tells us how many “basic” types of urban structures Prague has and where they are. “Basic” because we can always look deeper and distinguish further differences within pattern, as we will show below.

Prague has a lot of patterns, but the basic ones are 19. That sounds like a big number when you think about what the different city districts look like and how similar some of them are. So which ones are they? We can take a look at a few examples (if you're interested in more, we recommend looking at the map on its own or peeking at the  Prague 2020 Planning analytical material. 

But even urban patterns do not exist in a vacuum.

They are similar other and form natural groups that create a hierarchy, as we can see in the picture below. From this we can choose which detail we want to work with or feel free to go deeper as in the case of the historic centre. The simplest view of the composition of Prague will offer us a division into 7 groups bringing together our 19 basic urban types.

Circular taxonomic tree. It is often used in biology, where it depicts the evolutionary relationships between different biological species. It can also represent the relationships between individual taxonomic units.

What do these structures capture besides the way they are built?

A lot of things, like the history and the changing approach to the city. Let's look at a few phases of Prague's development and see how the different types of urban structures relate to them.

While the period of a pattern’s creation is one of the most defining aspects of its form, it is not only history that we can read in urban structures.

The way the types of urban patterns are put together creates unique places, with varying degrees of diversity.

And here again we can borrow an analogy from nature, this time from ecology. Species diversity in a given place (biodiversity) can be described mathematically. Let's illustrate this with the example of coloured dots representing different types of urban structures.

How we perceive diversity when we move through the city?

In exactly the same way, we can describe the diversity of urban structure from the perspective of a person moving through the city. We draw a similar circle around each building in the city and measure how diverse its surroundings are, or how likely it is that two random buildings in its surroundings belong to the same type of urban form.

We perceive diversity differently when we walk, ride a bike or tram, or drive. Simply because we encounter a varied number of patterns. However, it should be noted that sometimes diversity is positive, that is when quality places are encountered, and sometimes less so, that is when peripheral and chaotic places are encountered.

Pedestrian’s perspective

Imagine you are walking through the city. In some places, it seems like you're walking through the same neighbourhood for 5, 10, even 15 minutes. This means that the neighbourhood is very homogeneous, with very little variety in urban structures. Simply put, there is always the same pattern, or a few similar ones.

Cyclist’s perspective

We have more speed and range on the bike, which changes our perception of what is diverse. One doesn't perceive distance as much as time. And if we move faster, we see more in the same amount of time.

For a cyclist, a small neighbourhood is no longer enough to perceive it uniformly, but he or she necessarily needs a larger one.

Driver’s perspective

Driving by car offers the largest radius. Driving a car offers the highest speed and radius of movement around the city. Diversity will thus appear different.

Whether the diversity of these places is indicative of their higher or lower quality is left to the reader's discretion. Our answer would be simple, and not very useful "It depends on the definition of quality, and that is very variable."

Prague is not just one city. It has many characters made up of different types of urban patterns. It's not just a bridge and a castle, it's a city of diversity.

A city that is made up of many types of buildings. But it's not just what it looks like that matters, but how it's put together. All types of structures meet and interact in often very original ways. There are few places in Prague that could be considered homogeneous. Is this good or bad? It depends on what kind of city we want to live in. And each of us can influence that.

•  Institute of Planning and Development 

•   Prague 2020 Planning analytical material