Expert: Prague has more tourists than Venice, people no longer feel at home there
Does Prague still belong to the people of Prague?
That’s a big question. Tourists in Prague have been increasing for a long time. And nowadays it can be said that Prague is one of the cities most visited by tourists. In the world at all.
More than, say, Venice?
It is to take. In terms of the number of tourists, it is more than in Venice. Prague’s problem is that the ratio of the number of inhabitants to the number of tourists is roughly five times higher in favor of tourists.
So what would your answer be to the question of whether Prague belongs to the people of Prague?
Prague still belongs to the people of Prague. At the same time, the people of Prague are beginning to notice that in certain respects and in certain places the city is moving away from them.
Is it even worse during the holidays?
Holidays are one of the peaks of the tourist season, especially for foreign tourism. A large influx of tourists in the Czech Republic takes place especially around Easter. Then, of course, in July and August, when the number of tourists in Prague is the largest. There, however, it is somewhat balanced by the fact that in the Prague environment there is an outflow of residents during the holidays. And then, of course, before Christmas, when everyone stays in Prague.
When almost 600,000 people, which is roughly half of Prague’s population, flock to Prague during the holidays, what will it do to the city?
Different things. It must be looked at from the point of view of the quality of life of the residents and actually tourists. That city is getting crowded. Tourism is trying to grow in the long term, every year. And the main impacts are overcrowding of public transport, overcrowding of streets. At the same time, there are long-term effects, which is an effect on the real estate market, an effect especially on rental housing. Which we can observe in such an overflow between rental housing and those apartments that can be rented on so-called digital platforms for short-term accommodation, such as Airbnb et al.
Michal Lehečka
Urban anthropologist from the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague. He specializes in the development of post-socialist cities. It deals with the issue of housing estates, which is interested in the relationship of residents to the public space of these residential units. He works as a community coordinator for the Černý most housing estate. He writes about urban planning on the website a2larm.cz.
In any case, the influence of tourists is most noticeable in the center. How did it change?
The center is changing over a long period of time. Sometime around 1989, approximately 600,000 tourists came to Prague. And those numbers have been rising for a long time, and then show a very strong increase just in the last 6, 7 years. Various tendencies related to the functioning of Prague Airport can be read from this. After the crisis in 2008, it showed a decrease in flights and connections arriving here in Prague. And of course, they began to slowly rise again during the boom, but they never rose to the value that was around 2008. At the same time, despite this decline, the number of tourists has been increasing in recent years. This means that they probably arrive differently or those flights are more full. they probably claim that the Prague airport does not have enough capacity.
Prime Minister Andrej Babiš wants to pour 50 billion crowns into the expansion of the Prague airport. So you think this is a bad idea?
For me, in terms of, for example, climate change, this is not a very good idea. The ecological footprint of the airport is a major, drastic, issue of the environment in the entire city.
From the point of view of tourism, it is also worth considering, because the city is currently in a state where the further increase in tourism can cause it really major problems. From the point of view of the infrastructure, from the point of view of the functioning of the city, from the point of view of the daily functioning of the working population.
How to imagine the fundamental problems? Can’t we get on the subway?
We can’t get on the subway. It was seen a lot around Christmas. I will tell an anecdotal story that happened to me just before Silvestre. I was riding a tram and a fairly large group of foreign tourists boarded it. Their guide started marking roughly 80 tickets at a time in the tram marker. And I was sitting where the marker was, and I suddenly decided that it decided me in a certain way. Then, when I thought about it as an anthropologist, I realized that this is exactly the situation when, as a city dweller, I realize that something is changing here, that it is a thing that offers my comfort in it. Even if it’s a banality.
Such anger at the tourists that them “are occupying their city”, do you think most Prague residents feel?
I don’t want to generalize it as annoyance, it’s more of a certain sharpening. Professional literature refers to this as symbolic displacement. This means that those people stop feeling at home in their place of residence, or at least their perception of home changes. They can move away from the localities where they live, because the traffic changes, not only the residents change, but other people appear in that locality. In the inner parts of the city, where the population has been decreasing for a long time due to mass tourism, it is currently increasing for a long time. And that is precisely because of these short-term accommodations in the form of Airbnb. And local communities have to deal with very pressing problems that arise from tourist traffic, which fundamentally changes from the everyday productive life in the city.
Do you mean, for example, disturbing the peace at night, noise?
It can be disturbing the night’s peace. Some houses become passers-by, those houses are open, people are constantly changing there. It leads to a certain disorder in the social areas of the buildings. And at the same time, it is also reflected in the public space. Prague is alive 24 hours a day, as night clubs and bars in the center are open.
“Good” tourists cannot be separated from others
However, the current management of Prague wants to target decent and good tourists, at least according to their words. That is, those who do not have problems associated with, for example, noise, alcohol, disturbing the peace at night. Is it going well?
I’m not entirely sure it would work. But at the same time, I probably wouldn’t distinguish between decent and good tourists.
So it’s impossible to say: We only want those who go to exhibitions and concerts in Prague, we don’t want those who come here to get drunk?
I can’t think of a simple tool to separate one group from the other. But some group activities that result from tourism and have some negative effects can of course be regulated in a certain way. We know examples from all over the world. Currently, many cities – Amsterdam, Venice, Barcelona for example – are actually trying to regulate tourism in a certain way. At the same time, they are trying to launch various campaigns on social networks to inform tourists about how they should behave.
For example, Dubrovnik has limited the number of ships allowed to dock in the port of Bruges “they have rounded up their own promotion and the Netherlands is trying to promote destinations other than just Amsterdam, for example by advertising: Do you want to visit Amsterdam? How about visiting Harderwijk instead? Do you want to inspire Prague?
She could be. In a certain partial way, it is already happening here, because the Czech Republic has been trying to promote places other than Prague for the last few years. At the same time, we know that there are relatively few mass tourist destinations in the Czech Republic, typically Kutná Hora and Český Krumlov.
And it is also crowded.
They have similar problems there. Of course, those measures can be different, for example, Amsterdam went about it in even harsher forms. He very drastically increased the fines for public order violations. At the same time, they canceled such guided tours through the famous neighborhoods inside Amsterdam, which are known mainly because of sex tourism.
What about a council tax increase, is that the way to go?
A council tax increase is definitely the way to go. At the same time, we know from the Czech attempt to increase the tourist tax per head and day, which was linked to Airbnb, that Czech legislation does not allow for too wide a variance. The fee could not be increased much. And the city’s financial contribution will continue to be very limited.
Is it even appropriate to limit tourism? After all, it brings hundreds of billions annually to the coffers not only of Prague, but also of the entire Czech Republic.
It is necessary to ask what kind of city elected representatives, local governments and residents want. And tourism, of course, represents an important segment of income for the city. Some fundamental regulation in this regard is probably not in order, but at the same time, you need to constantly think about where the line is, when it is too much. And I fear that currently in Prague, due to the fact that the regulations have been insufficient in recent years, it puts me in a situation where we are actually already catching up with something that is very difficult to stop at this moment. And it really only offers to prepare a set of relatively fundamental regulations that will help prevent negative impacts.
What would you do first?
That’s probably not a question entirely for me, because I rather observe the phenomena. The solution probably lies with elected representatives, perhaps even with some urban planners.
What do you think would help?
First of all, I would really try to connect the functioning of the city: local residents and tourists. This is exactly what Barcelona is trying to do, which is trying to bring people together so they can have fun.
Local residents often take certain groups of residents to themselves and explain to them how things work in that city. The moment I establish this somewhat personal relationship with a guide, an informal guide, we can get people to understand that the cultural background of that city is a little different from the one they come from. And that some things in our context are not decent or decent to do.
Airbnb has a major impact on the city
We also said Airbnb. A platform for shared living, which, however, has shifted to a commercial basis over the years. According to Deloitte’s analysis, accommodation platforms such as Airbnb will eventually displace residents of the wider center of the capital. But that’s already happening, isn’t it?
Yesterday, for example, I looked at the AirDNA platform, which provides basic statistical information about Airbnb in Prague in particular, but not only about it. And there are some 11,500 offers in total. When I clicked on them according to zip codes, roughly 9,000 of them are in the wider center, which is the historical core, Karlín, Žižkov, Vinohrady and Smíchov. They are mostly whole apartments. This means that four fifths of those apartments are offered in the center. So it really has a rather fundamental effect on the city. At the same time, it must be said that there are also other problems that do not result from short-term tourism or result from the globalization of housing. Much of the real estate in the city is currently being converted, often into apartments that are 1+1 in nature, but for example, such short-term residential apartments can be bought by people who already own properties around the world.
But how do you want to arrange for the old residents to stay in the center if they simply don’t have the means?
This is not possible at this moment without some regulation and in the current property structure of the capital city of Prague. Roughly 95 percent of real estate in Prague is actually privately owned, only 5 percent of real estate is owned by the city or city districts. Maybe less than 5 percent because some privatizations are still going on. Therefore, the space for an active social policy of the city is quite limited.
Compared to Vienna, for example.
Compared to Vienna as other cities especially in the West. It is quite common in post-socialist countries. It is a consequence of the policy after 1989, the so-called drive to buy with a big bang. The leapfrog privatization that took place here in the 1990s, in the 2000s. In some countries of the Eastern Bloc, it took place even more forcefully than in our country.
Okay, we’re short on urban apartments, we’ve got a problem with Airbnb. Has the management of Prague moved on this problem?
Currently, it seems not too much. And given that the program statement of the coalition was after last year’s municipal elections, when affordable housing was the most important topic, it turns out that after about a year, not much was achieved. Except that the social policy of housing in the area of social housing and housing for marginalized and endangered population groups is changing quite fundamentally. From the point of view of the mainstream, that is, the middle class, new incomes are being offered, the number of tourists is increasing, the number is increasing precisely through shared platforms.
Even abroad, no one has figured out how to solve problems with Airbnb?
There are, of course, partial solutions, but they can be bypassed. Berlin solved this for a long time by capping the rent in certain locations. A person can rent a maximum of one additional property, if we were talking about those shared apartments. In Amsterdam, he is only allowed to rent it for 30 days a year. But of course, residents who want to make money from what they own are trying to find ways around it. Across Europe, the vast majority of people only rent one extra property. For example, most often in the Netherlands it is about 90 percent of all users. In the Czech environment, one rental property is typically the case for only 70 percent of users. In Prague, there are roughly 7 percent of providers who offer 5 or more properties.