A Change of Plan: What Prague’s Urban Planning Reform Reveals about the Post-Socialist City

Václav Orcígr and Conor O'Dwyer

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Abstract: Why do state-socialist legacies persist in urban governance, and what brings them to an end? We examine Prague’s Metropolitan Plan, adopted in 2026 after fourteen years of contestation, to reassess two explanations of governance in the “post-socialist city:” political clientelism and weak civil society. Combining statistical analysis of spatial-plan revisions across Prague’s boroughs with process tracing based on field interviews and documentary sources, we find little systematic evidence that dominant-party clientelism sustained the inherited planning regime. Instead, the reform process reveals a transformed civil society. Competing networks of urban reformers mobilized around planning flexibility and institutional responsiveness, entered municipal politics, and ultimately negotiated a compromise that substantially reshaped the urban- planning system. Prague thus challenges accounts treating post-socialist legacies as durable constraints producing policy stasis. We argue that their effects depend on evolving state-society relations, political competition, and civil-society organization, with implications for comparative theories of urban governance and post-socialist transformation.

Date: 2026-11-03
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:f4auh_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/f4auh_v1

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