1) PRAGUE AND ITS FRONTIER OF URBAN AND NATURAL LANDSCAPE This project is rethinking inflexible urban planning with attempts to visualize alternative future for the city expansion and its evolution within existing administrative borders. Choosing Prague as an example of the city tissue following local geographical specifics that cause sudden alternations of urban landscape and wild nature, the project results in a manifesto of new urban frontier that utilizes the close proximity of urbanized and vacant neighborhoods and illustrates practical applications of this researchbased vision in future city planning.
2) ADMINISTRATIVE BORDER OF PRAGUE From an administrative viewpoint, the border of Prague is defined as a circular trajectory on a map. It has a diameter large enough to absorb the whole richness of local geomorphology with its rhythm of urbanized clusters and vacant natural zones. Hence on many places on its perimeter, crossing the administrative border is only noticeable on road-signs.
design of a new city frontier
City of Prague
map of The Czech Republic
3) GEOMORPHOLOGY AND HUMAN HABITATS Geographically, Prague is known for its plateaus and valleys divided by steep slopes of diverse rocky landscape. From an urban viewpoint it means densely urbanized islands surrounded by wild nature in areas of hardly accessible land that were not suitable for human settlements.
ADMINISTRATIVE BORDER NATURAL BORDER
administrative border of Prague is just a trajectory on the map
natural grow of human habitats folowing geographical features of Prague
clusters of urban islands in Prague
4) GREEN CHOCKS
For that reason, specific qualities of the city can be experienced: Uninhabited green zones of either abandoned wild nature or city forest stretched away from outside of the city border deep into the city center in parallel with an urban tissue with high population density. For citizens this means that one can travel from outside the city to its very center without even entering suburban or urban zones. And vice versa, for someone fleeing from the civilization this phenomena means to exchange tedious journey to the official city borders for only a little step aside from built to un-built land while staying within a perimeter of the metropolis.
6) NEW CITY FRONTIER MANIFESTO a typical example of suburbanisation on the administrative border
In a reaction to above findings we propose to reevaluate existing borders of Prague. New borders should be defined through city’s tangible features and its topology rather then politics of landowners and commercial development. This newly defined frontier will have a potential to heal numerous symptoms of contemporary cities including “the urban sprawl” and depopulation of the city centers by combining qualities of countryside and urban living.
green zones streching away from the city centre
allotment gardens in gaps between urban and natural landscape
5) DEGRADATION OF EXISTING VALUES
Sadly, such desirable and precious features are nowadays highly underestimated. Instead of treated as special zones within the city, the edges of vacant green areas are due to their unsuitability for conventional city development defined as residual zones and in better cases left abandoned. In worse but also more common cases such areas are being degraded to suburban and suffer from the same symptoms as “the urban sprawl” on the actual administrative border of Prague.