Prague, July 14 (CTK) – The City of Prague plans to revitalise its neglected green areas to make visitor-friendly parks of them, and also to establish brand-new parks in the mushrooming modern neighbourhoods, Lidove noviny (LN) writes on Thursday, adding that up to 207 parks may be founded in the city in the years to come.
The daily refers to the new Metropolitan Plan that is to come into force as of 2020.
Parks are lacking mainly in the neighbourhoods on the right bank of the Vltava River.
Moreover, there are 125 areas in Prague that can be dubbed “a city jungle” because they are green enough but totally neglected, with dense ugly bushes often inhabited by homeless people, LN writes.
“The natural character of these places should be preserved. At present, these areas are inaccessible with prams, there are no paths and people fear to enter them…We want to focus on these areas so that something starts to be done with them,” Eva Cervinkova, from the City Hall’s Institute of Planning and Development, is quoted as saying.
She said the 125 “city jungles”, often brownfields, spread on a total of 1,324 hectares, which is 2.5 percent of the city’s area and 4.4 percent of its built-up area.
Prague, with 1.2 million inhabitants, has 714 parks now. At first sight, this is quite enough, but the problem is that they are not spread evenly across the city, the daily writes.
The Institute has completed an analysis of the park deficit, which shows that cultivated green areas are mainly lacking in the right-bank neighbourhoods of Vrsovice, Nusle, Karlin, Prosek and Strasnice, and also in Holesovice on the left bank of the Vltava.
Furthermore, the eastern part of the city has too few alleys and gardens surrounded by blocks of flats.
“We have proposed to establish parks in brownfields, or areas that have been unused,” Cervinkova said, referring to the Metropolitan Plan.
The plan does not guarantee that all of the proposed 207 parks will really be established. Its goal is only to highlight the places that are suitable for this purpose, the daily writes.
On the other hand, the Metropolitan Plan proposes that selected “city jungles” be fully or partly used to build new houses and streets, the paper says.
