But that’s not the surprising part. Penta’s involvement looked to have been on the cards almost since June when J&T completed its acquisition of the project’s SPV HoldCo Bubny from CPI. The surprise bit is that Penta and J&T brought in another partner for the deal — a new investment vehicle called AKIPIA fronted by the Czech arms magnate Michal Strnad.

Penta took a 50% share of HoldCo Bubny as lead developer, with AKIPIA taking a 35% share. J&T stays on in the project with just a 15% share. “The investor approach prevailed — we will serve as a passive investor,” said J&T Real Estate chairman Dušan Palcr.

The motivation for CPI to sell Bubny will have been to focus on income-producing assets. With ratings agencies breathing down its neck to reduce leverage and interest rates threatening to ratchet even higher, the decision was really an obvious one.

In truth, Bubny was probably always going to need multiple sources of capital — and development know-how. After all, the site’s expected to absorb €3.7 billion of investment between now and 2050. That would include 10,000 new apartments spread across 25 blocks, including rental and student housing, offices, hotels, schools, and a park.

It would be hard to overstate the strategic nature of the location. Not only does it sit between two metro stations (Vltavská and Nádraží Holešovice), it’s now served by two train stations, after the recent opening of the Praha-Bubny commuter rail station. On top of that, the planned Vltavska Philharmonic project is the city’s most spectacular public investment in decades and will contribute vastly to the area’s value.

Ultimately, what’s striking about the news is what it says about the Prague real estate market. The ability of Czech capital to control the local real estate market has been obvious for years, but the range of high-stakes players working together on this vast undertaking is breathtaking.

Especially AKIPIA, which was set up literally the day before this whole transaction went public. Forbes rates its founder Michal Strnad as the richest Czech, and he’s joined by the late Petr Kellner’s former in-house lawyer Tomáš Brzobohatý and Marek Šmrha, who until recently was Penta’s own investment director.

Bubny has defeated every previous owner. But with Prague’s Metropolitan plan now providing planning cover for larger undertakings, the combination of Penta’s development skills plus the financial muscle backing them might just do the trick this time.

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So I caught up online with Tomas Kaderabek of the Asociace developerů on Friday afternoon to get his take on the huge planning changes recently.

He says the biggest shift for planners and developers would result from greater simplicity and the embrac of density. That’s because the new Metropolitan Plan is far less granular, moving from dozens of land-use functions to just four. This allows for increased density and height, which are essential for creating more economical and ecological urban environments.

Also, the modernized decision-making process under the new construction law will move permitting from fragmented municipal offices to a state-managed agenda. This shift ensures the state is 100% responsible for the process, promoting consistency and reducing the administrative burden that has historically held back infrastructure project.

Municipalities should win, however, because contrary to concerns about a loss of democracy, local councils actually gain more power over their own land-use plans, says Kadeřábek. They retain the right to decide what they want for their communities, even if that means blocking a specific development.

The post Tomáš Kadeřábek (Assoc. of Developers): A giant leap for planning! first appeared on ThePrime.cz.

Four interconnected sections will house retail, restaurants, the Time Out Market concept with fifteen food vendors, and a renovated baroque riding hall that forms the development’s centerpiece.

Crestyl chose to work on Savarin with Thomas Heatherwick and his studio, for whom the project represents its continental European debut. Crestyl has already completed the first phase—restoration of the baroque Savarin Palace designed by Kilián Ignác Dientzenhofer. The restored building now houses the Mucha Museum, which opened in February with eleven reconstructed baroque sculptures adorning its facade.

Construction is scheduled to begin next year, with completion targeted for 2029. The project includes barrier-free metro access, rooftop gardens, and public green space in what was previously an inaccessible courtyard.

Beyond the main commercial spaces, the development will feature underground exhibition areas specifically designed to potentially house Alfons Mucha’s monumental Slovanská epopej (Slavic Epic), adding cultural gravitas to the mixed-use complex. The building facing Jindřišská street will contain its own private green courtyard alongside multiple restaurant concepts, while the historic riding hall will be transformed into premium event spaces for corporate and social functions.

“We’ve worked intensively on the preparations for several years, and it’s truly cost us a great deal of work and effort. Now we’ll undertake preparing the documentation for the construction permit. We expect to start the actual construction early next year, which would allow us to complete the entire project and open it to the public in 2029,” says Simon Johnson, CEO of the Crestyl Group.

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Your work has been described as revolutionary in the field of urban planning. Could you tell us about your concept of a “soft city”?

David Sim: A soft city is fundamentally about creating urban environments that work at a human scale. It’s about designing cities that foster connection rather than isolation, that make daily life easier and more enjoyable, and that facilitate sustainable living through proximity and accessibility.

How does this approach differ from conventional urban planning?

Conventional planning often prioritizes efficiency, infrastructure, and sometimes monumental architecture. These elements certainly have their place, but the soft city approach begins with the human experience – how people move through space, interact with neighbors, access daily needs, and find comfort in their environment. We focus on creating permeable, connected neighborhoods where people can live, work, and play without long commutes or car dependency.

Your background is in architecture. How did you transition into focusing on the broader scale of urban planning?

Architecture gives you an understanding of buildings and spaces, but I became increasingly interested in what happens between buildings – the public realm where city life unfolds. At Gehl Architects, we believe that understanding human behavior is essential to good design. So while my training was in creating structures, my passion evolved toward creating environments where human interaction can flourish.

You’ve worked on projects across different countries and cultures. How do you adapt your principles to different contexts?

The fundamental human needs remain consistent – safety, comfort, connection, access to necessities – but how these needs manifest varies widely based on climate, culture, and context. Before proposing any solutions, we spend considerable time observing how people actually use spaces in a particular city. This empirical approach helps us design interventions that respect and enhance local patterns of life rather than imposing foreign concepts.

Climate change is increasingly affecting our cities. How does your approach address sustainability?

Sustainability is embedded in the soft city approach. When neighborhoods are compact, diverse, and walkable, car dependency naturally decreases. When buildings are designed with passive climate solutions appropriate to their location, energy consumption drops. When people can access daily needs within a short walk or bike ride, both emissions and stress levels fall. Sustainable cities and livable cities are really two sides of the same coin.

What’s one simple change that could make most cities more livable?

If I had to choose just one thing, I’d say increasing the permeability of neighborhoods – creating more connections between places so people can move freely on foot or by bike. This might mean adding pedestrian pathways, removing barriers between developments, or converting some car infrastructure to mixed-use public space. When people can move easily through their neighborhoods, everything else – social connection, access to services, physical activity – becomes easier too.

What gives you hope about the future of urban environments?

I see tremendous energy around reclaiming cities for people, particularly from younger generations who are questioning car-centric development patterns. Many cities that were designed primarily for vehicles are now systematically reorienting toward human needs. Each successful project creates enthusiasm and momentum for more changes. The pandemic also highlighted the importance of having livable neighborhoods where people can meet their daily needs close to home. There’s growing recognition that the quality of everyday life matters profoundly, and that’s exactly what the soft city approach aims to enhance.

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The post A Conversation with urban planner David Sim first appeared on ThePrime.cz.

How do municipalities currently use their land ownership and what prevents them from dedicating more real estate to affordable housing projects?

We can only go by our own experiences with selected cases, as we don’t have a more detailed analysis available. However, in practice, we often find that cities and municipalities view land and property ownership primarily as a source of problems: they must address potential changes to the zoning plan, develop infrastructure, and if they consider building affordable housing, they must primarily manage the preparation and implementation of the construction itself, ideally within one electoral term. Relationships with potential local opposition and the mayor’s willingness to bear financial responsibility often play a decisive role.

If municipal rental apartments are involved, responsibility for the proper management of their operation and maintenance must be added. This is a really significant problem, and if the municipality doesn’t adequately control quality during construction, then new rental housing development may really not be worth it. That’s why we consider establishing a housing cooperative and contributing development land to it with building rights to be more appropriate.

Nevertheless, if I had to give a one-sentence answer: municipalities lack the capacity. However, this is not insurmountable – they can hire an external project manager for both preparation and implementation of construction who will solve everything based on the careful analysis of data, and a qualified evaluation of all the risks. The Czech Republic has hundreds of authorized experts in construction.

What are the most common pitfalls that local governments face when trying to develop affordable housing, and how can authorized engineers help overcome these challenges?

The foundation is to establish a strategic plan, define housing needs, number and structure of apartment sizes depending on whether they are intended for seniors, young families with children, or preferred professions. Plus prepare a volume study for the required number of apartments and their size. Authorized individuals can also help with defining requirements for construction quality, layout, accessibility, energy intensity, use of renewable energy sources… The same applies to defining requirements for the durability of materials used with an expected lifespan of at least 25 years. This is important not only for rental housing but also for housing financed by mortgage or cooperative share. The building should last without major modifications at least until it’s paid off.

Can these ideas work in a way that would truly help a significant number of Czechs without changes to the zoning system?

What we often encounter is the problem of exempting land from the agricultural land fund. The conversion of industrial or generally older buildings or complexes is also a persistent problem. And also longer timeframes for changing zoning plans. But another issue is crucial, which I’ve already mentioned: very careful data analysis. It should be noted that the problem of financially inaccessible housing concerns only a few localities or regions in the Czech Republic. In this respect, our situation is similar to many other European countries. It is also necessary to ensure that residential buildings are in line with the changing age structure of the population in individual settlements. This also applies to civic amenities. However, building affordable housing in the regions may not solve the inaccessibility in Prague, Brno, and the Central Bohemian Region.

If taxes continue to be distributed through a centralized system by the state, will municipalities have sufficient motivation to take on the risks associated with construction?

That’s a very good question. Subsidies are only associated with municipal rental housing. Personally, I appreciate the activity of the State Investment Support Fund, which provides qualified counselling to cities and municipalities free of charge. I also appreciate subsidies for responsible preparation of project plans and documentation. But as ČKAIT, we are convinced that legislative changes equalizing the conditions for establishing and operating housing cooperatives with unit owner associations could be much more effective. Moreover, cooperative housing, which has a tremendous tradition in the Czech Republic, is basically self-financing. And as such, it doesn’t have to burden public budgets. In addition, there is a great benefit in that cooperative members associate their housing with permanent residence. Thus, they are a benefit to the municipality or city both economically and in terms of activity.

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The post Robert Špálek (ČKAIT): Towns should donate land for cheaper resi first appeared on ThePrime.cz.

As it’s set up, the system relies far too much on developers both to dream up how towns and cities should evolve. It forces investors to do the heavy lifting of pushing through planning changes themselves. But that should be the city’s job. Specifically, it should be the mayor’s responsibility. I recently saw Luděk Sekyra give a fascinating lecture at a ULI event on how he spent nearly 20 years coming up with the urban plan for the massive Smichov City development. It was pretty incredible to see how many different variations the project has gone through over all those years.

But why did a private investor have to do all that? How can such a Hurculean task be left up to a single company, when there’s such a vast array of competing forces at work in such a huge zone? The city should be the one saying what it wants, creating the regulation plan and setting the rules.

On reflection, that was one of the main take-aways from “Planning for Prosperity” a 2-hour workshop ThePrime organized together with PRK Partners. It focused on the ongoing reform to planning legislation that’s underway and brought together local, regional and planning officials. PRK Partners was represented by Roman Pečenka, who also happens to be a mayor. He said one reason mayors don’t tend to get involved is because planning is “long-term work and not something immediately visible in the village. Perhaps that’s why this isn’t a popular topic among mayors, but I believe that’s a huge mistake.” He also pointed out that both the powers and the responsibilities of mayors seem to be gradually reduced to the point where even the ones who have a vision for their town lack the instruments with which to carry it out.

Another of the speakers, Ondřej Boháč, director of Prague’s power Institute for Planning and Development (IPR), pointed out how well the Czech Republic had survived the recent floods. Yes, there was damage, he said. But under the circumstances, all the emergency services worked efficiently and in a coordinated way, lives were saved and countless disasters were averted. The reason, he said, is that in emergencies, society simply allows mayors to take over. They’re given the power almost by default. And it works. “If we trust the mayors in times of dire emergency,” asked Boháč, “why can’t we trust them to do the right thing in daily life?”

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The post Kupka: Construction law fix could take longer than 18 months first appeared on ThePrime.cz.

The reservoir created by original plans for the dam would have wiped out the village of Nové Heřminovy. An updated, smaller plan called for just the partial inundation of the municipality. Still, the state didn’t actually request planning permission until 2017 and it wasn’t until 2021 that formal proceedings actually began. In the meantime, Nové Heřminovy held a referendum that rejected the dam’s construction and lost its case to block construction in the supreme court.

The environmental group Hnuti Duha opposes the dam’s construction, claiming it’s ridiculously expensive and will end up offering minimal protection. It proposes using less radical measures, such as setback levees, which would be placed further away from the river and give the water space to spread out during floods. “We always pointed out that the dam would be slow, expensive, and that we were afraid it wouldn’t be built anytime soon. They kept saying no, everything will be finished by 2022…We could only have slowed the beginning of construction by 60 days, but we didn’t even do that.”

If all goes well from here on in, construction could begin by 2027 and offer some level of protection by 2032. Finance Minister (and ex-mayor of Opava) Zbyněk Stanjura told Hospodářské that a new law on strategic investments needs to be passed. “I know it sounds harsh, but at this moment, a village of about 300 people, through its referendum, is preventing the protection of at least 100,000 people…This majority has the right to protection.” At the same time Stanjura told HN the situation is delicate. “We need to think it through carefully. You can’t write laws on a day when you’re filled with anger. But we need to speed up the approval processes…”

“This tool has to be exceptional—you can’t declare every construction project to be in the public interest and ignore the interests of those living there. But this is an exceptional case….the flood in Krnov and Opava was a 100-year flood. If the dam in Nové Heřminovy had been built, we would be talking about a once-in-five-year flood.”

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One of ASPC’s roles is act as a decision maker in cases when conflicts arise over planning issues between government ministries. But its most important job was that of creating a unified methodology that all towns and municipalities would use to create their new digitized master plans.

In one of her last acts as ASPC Deputy director, urbanist Milota Sidorová submitted into the country’s legal registry what amounts to an enormous manual that will now guide the planning work of all Slovak towns. They’ve been given until 2032 to complete new master plans under the new rules — and to do so in the prescribed digital format. Sidorová points out that while it’s an enormously complex document with excruciating levels of detail, it marks the first time Slovakia’s registry of law includes pictures.

The government is applying both the carrot and the stick to make towns stick to the 2032 deadline. On the motivation side of things, the ASPS will provide cities with preset blank data files for creating spatial plans to be used with freeware software (QGIS) or a proprietary version (ARCGIS). These will be made available along with funds and training resources. Towns who refuse – or fail – to produce a new plan in time simply lose their right to issue assessment statements on whether a construction plan is compliant with a spatial/zoning plan. (Regional governments will take over that job.)

The ambition of this new system taking root in Slovakia is stunning. By forcing all towns to create master plans using a single data structure for their data model, it will become possible to have a unified approach to storing and presenting them to the public. Along with the greater transparency made possible by digital documents, the master plans themselves have been simplified by reducing the number of colors assigned to different functions and making them more intuitive.

The program towns use to create their master plans will have four mandatory spatial regulations along with 15 optional spatial regulations that city planners can choose from. The four mandatory items are:
-the degree of development (meaning how much can be built on a given piece of land)
-height regulations (to avoid random, unregulated high-rises construction)
-vegetation regulation (to set a minimum level of vegetation for a given plot)
-public space regulation

The last of these is the one Sidorová says she’s especially pleased with. “We’ve made it clear that public space doesn’t just mean roads for cars, which is how it’s often interpreted here,” she says. “Public space also means green areas, space for pedestrians and for cyclists. You have to combine these elements into the creation of public space.”

The result is that planners will now have to make room for all four of these elements. “So often in Slovak and Czech villages, you’ll have a church, a bar and a municipal building along with a road, but that’s it,” she says. “People don’t have any space to be together. “This will push them to really think. If they have just one common space where people can come together, this is a huge push for local mayors to redesign those spaces in order to add maybe some traffic-calming elements to create, say, a nice little plaza.”

The new legislative conditions also enable towns who want greater control over their development to add additional regulations to their master plans. These optional “layers” include choosing where urbanistic landmarks belong, the urbanistic form of development, the interconnection of public spaces, construction plot sizes, or what roofs should look like. Planners can even specify acceptable color palettes or what level of water permeability is acceptable and where. Once an optional regulation is included in the digital master plan model, it becomes mandatory for all investors. Because their large size means they have somewhat unique planning needs, Bratislava and Košice are treated separately. Each has a metropolitan land-use plan that takes their specific development needs to take into account.

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The post Milota Sidorová on Slovakia’s digital urban planning revolution first appeared on ThePrime.cz.

It’s clearly a prestigious thing to build a new concert hall, but CZK 9.4 billion is quite a lot of public money. How do you explain the wide acceptance of the project, especially since classical isn’t exactly for everyone.

Perhaps the most important thing to say is that it’s not just a concert building for 1,800 people who want to listen to challenging classical music. From the very beginning we thought of it as a national music center. It’s not supposed to be a building that gets dressed up only in the evening concerts but lies empty and dark during the day.

How does the building achieve this?

The most complicated and interesting part of the project was figuring out the overall program for the building. Because the goal is to ensure it’s used 24×7. That’s the approach taken by most of the modern concert halls we visited and studied. Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie has classrooms and a variety of studios that are always busy. Paris’s new philharmonic is a huge musical hub with a range of classrooms, studios and presentation rooms. It’s used by everyone from amateurs to semi-professional musicians to young musicians preparing for a professional career.

The Vltavska philharmonic will have three auditoriums: the classic main hall, a chamber music hall and a third one we call the ‘black box’. This is a multifunctional hall that has an offering designed to appeal to people who would otherwise never set foot in a standard classic music concert hall.

But there’s also another interesting portion of the building: the creative hub, centered around the music section of the Prague City Library. It includes a dozen rooms of different sizes, with recording studios, a study and classrooms. The goal is for the building to be used from morning until night by people from around the country. We see it as a piece of national infrastructure that should be used for as many purposes as possible. I think we can all agree that we need culture in our lives. The philharmonic should be a vehicle that offers as much of it as possible of the highest quality.

What stood out about the winning bid? Did it surprise the jury in any way?

In putting together the competition’s conditions, we were thinking of the building rather horizontally and envisioned lots of people streaming through the building, even if they weren’t going to a concert. We also wanted to bring people up onto the roof somehow. But the winners took that idea and made it the guiding principle of their whole design. They took the idea of a city square and turned it into architecture by stretching it up to the roof. This matched our goal of creating a sort of connection between the building, the transportation hub and the river. We didn’t just want people looking at the building, we wanted them to go walking there. We specified that there should be a public lobby, or some type of passage that would draw them through the building. But they surprised us by pulling people upwards.

Another interesting aspect that featured in a few of the bids was that the geometric design of the main concert hall very carefully mirrored the outer geometry of the building. That’s not very common. Usually, the building looks much different from outside than it does inside, so that’s an interesting detail.

In a project of this size and complexity, the brief itself is of crucial importance.

If you want a good result, you have to have a good brief. You can’t solve anything once a building is under construction. At that point you just lose time and money, so it’s really all about the brief. And in our opinion, the winning team simply understood best what we wanted: a center for music, multiple layers, a connection both with the river and with public transport, and as much openness as possible.

Is that why the winning bid was accepted so easily by the public?

It was crucial, because you can’t win over the public just with pictures. You have to find the broadest possible consensus and that takes a lot of work. That has to be worked into the project management system itself. We knew that even the working committee managing the project had to be directly in contact with the political sphere. It’s public money, so politicians are responsible for it. That’s why from the beginning, members of the governing coalition were involved in the commission, but so were members of the opposition. We were trying to be as open as possible, to communicate with everyone. That was a huge part of our job.

There’s something inherently special about a new concert hall, but this one is quite significant.

The fact that it’s been 120 years since Czechs built a new concert hall on this scale has nothing to do with our construction law. It’s not about our politicians or the government – it’s about us. About our mentality. A nation that isn’t able to dream; a nation that can’t produce and realize a vision is a nation that’s stagnating. And stagnation precedes a fall. This building is important to me on principle because it shows that we’re still okay. We need to remind ourselves that we still have the skills for this. As a society we have to succeed in this in order to move forward.

Prague wouldn’t be half the city it is without the Vltava, yet the city doesn’t have many buildings that feel closely connected to it. How do you explain what the river adds to the project? 

It’s atavistic. Everyone sees water positively. We need to drink it, we need it to live, we use it for transportation, and for power. And more and more these days, we find it beautiful to look at and to live near it. Prague is magical and the river is completely wrapped up in it. Even the name is important. Once the idea of calling it Vltavská filharmonie came up, the search was over. No one even tried to think up any other names after that. I realized later why the name ‘Vltavska philharmonic’ was so fascinating even for me, someone from Southern Bohemia: the water flowing by the philharmonic comes from “us”. The Vltava is our national river. It’s the longest one flowing through the country and it’s connected with Czech music. So, the name works on a strategic level by showing that this isn’t just a Prague project – it’s a national one.

Do you think all the teams in the competition realized this?

I don’t know for sure if all the teams of architects understood all this. But we’ve never had such a successful international competition here. It was incredible to have so many high-quality teams in an era when even the best studios think very carefully about where to invest [their time and resources]. With those 19 models there placed one next to the other, you could really see what it looks like in the big leagues. Speaking with them afterwards, they said that for architects who want to leave their mark, there’s nothing better than a philharmonic hall. And Czechs really are known for their music.

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