Seventy meters in a sixty-year-old apartment. The exhibition shows how people live in Prague
You will probably hardly come across a bigger sofa in Prague. It has an area of eight square meters, which is roughly the same as the area of the smallest Prague apartment on the market.
From the comfort of a megalomaniacal piece of furniture designed by architect Benedikt Markel, from today until the end of April at the Center for Architecture and Urban Planning (CAMP), which falls under the Prague Institute of Planning and Development, you can study data on housing in Prague, but also how specific They live in Prague.
According to the 2021 census, there are a total of 721,332 apartments in the capital. The average one is about seventy square meters, but in new buildings, smaller apartments of around fifty square meters are already being built. Exhibitions can also find this in a number of numbers and graphs for large-scale projections.
“We are opening a very important exhibition for us. Almost everyone in the city is interested in housing, but everyone is interested in it from a different point of view. And the debate is very difficult,” reminds Ondřej Boháč, director of the Institute of Planning and Development.
“If you own an apartment in the city, you usually don’t want to see construction around it, if, on the other hand, you don’t have housing, or you want to move to Prague and stay here after your studies, then on the contrary you are looking for new affordable apartments. The debate is very difficult and full of emotions, and the ambition of the exhibition is to provide basic facts and context,” he states.
The visitor to the exhibition will learn, for example, that compared to other successful cities in Europe, Prague is doing worse in terms of the pace of new housing construction. In the last ten years, an average of four housing units per thousand inhabitants were built in Prague. At the same time, five apartments were created for the same number of inhabitants in Munich and even ten in Warsaw.
The average apartment in Prague is about sixty years old, and only a fifth of the currently occupied apartments are from the last two decades. Even on the basis of these data, one can get an idea of the fact that few new apartments are being built in the metropolis.
On the other hand, even the existing Prague apartments are not completely used. IPR experts estimate that roughly six percent of properties are empty, and in the city center up to a third are apartments. But the analysis of city planners differs significantly from the census data, which estimates the number of unoccupied apartments to be even higher.
Many units are inhabited by people who do not have a permanent residence in Prague. But this is also a serious state problem – the metropolis does not receive contributions from its budget for the services it provides for these Prague residents.
Roughly eighty percent of all housing construction since 2000 was provided by private development. In the future, Prague wants to continue with other forms of construction, so that the offer on the market is wider. For example, cooperative construction or the building of apartments by the capital itself, or by the Prague Development Company, which already manages more than six hundred thousand square meters of land, is at stake.
Up to eight thousand apartments could be built on them within a five to ten year horizon. “Prague is expected to grow by around four hundred thousand inhabitants by 2070. Therefore, it is very important how and where these people will live in Prague,” explains the current mayor Zdeněk Hřib. “According to the Housing Development Strategy, which we approved last year, nine thousand new apartments should be created every year, which means approximately one completed apartment per hour.”
The basic audio-visual part of the exhibition, showing data on housing or a map of construction within Prague, is complemented by an audio and text part, in which the opinions of various actors in the debate surrounding housing and housing construction are heard. For the exhibition, members of the VOSTO5 theater recorded a sound montage from the opinions of politicians, developers or people wishing to own real estate.
Data and opinions are also accompanied by an audiovisual essay on the current form of housing – Houses, apartments, people. It was prepared by screenwriter Eugen Liška with CAMP’s audiovisual production manager Martin Vronský from the materials of photographer Vojtěch Veškrna. In his photographs, he captured the homes of the residents of Prague, from attic buildings with a view of the center and flats in blocks of flats to homeless shelters.
The graphic data processing is done by Oficina and Ex Lovers studios, the music was prepared by the musician and producer Aid Kid in collaboration with Jakub Jurásk. The exhibition also includes a sofa the size of the smallest Prague apartment, designed by architect Benedikt Markel. The carpet on the same theme was prepared for the exhibition by artist Anna Štajgová from the Masopust studio.
“Anyone can become a part of the exhibition. We invited the public to share photos of their homes on social networks under the hashtag #TadyBydlimJa and show how they live,” adds Štěpán Bärtl, head of CAMP.