Cultural events in Prague’s public space

Urban experiments through small scale or temporary interventions in the public space are a great way of discovering the potential of systemic urban transformations. Citizens can directly experience the impact of proposed changes on their daily life. City represen­tatives can evaluate the potential impact of full­-scale or long­-term interventions and coordinate cooperation of key departments that are needed for implementing the proposed solution. 

For example, diverting traffic in order to turn a street into pedestrian space for a limited amount of time can demonstrate both positive and neg­ative effects a long-term change could have for the local community and the city as whole. This can inform public discussion and support informed decision making. Cities can experi­ment with placing simple furniture into previ­ously under­used public spaces and let citizens discover how this space can be used and use this feedback to invest in more permanent solutions. 

Cultural interventions can bring atten­tion to challenges of the city or specific area by highlighting the problem or by expressing how positive change could look like. 

Local community festivals, neighbourhood events and fairs can be a great way of bringing citizens together and creating intensive shared experiences in public spaces. These cultural events can be combined with other short­-term interventions in public spaces (eg., temporary change of space use). Festivals can address community development in general or have dedicated themes such as sustainable food production, circular mobility, energy transition or celebration of diverse cultures. Individual events are one­-time interven­tions. For long­-term impact, they need to be rooted in long­term process­-based projects and used together with other types of interventions (relational art interventions, participatory urban interventions). 

Exhibitions and installations can produce, repli­cate or transfer process learning by recreating real life experiences, stimulating emotions and provoking discussion. For example, Prague devel­oped the Urbania exhibition to showcase learn­ings generated by direct involvement in smart city pilot projects to a broader audience through creating transformative experiences. The exhi­bition was designed together with the local cre­ative sector and social scientists. The emphasis was put on spaces for reflecting on the experi­ence with other participants to help them trans­ late the lessons into their professional and personal life. The participants’ feedback from the exhibition was then used as additional input for defining challenges for Prague.