The Prague Tomorrow? exhibition showcased dozens of construction projects that, if implemented, would change the face of Prague significantly in the coming years—projects of various sizes, in various locations, and in various stages of development. From the first ideas, through projects in the design and planning process, to projects nearing completion. The list of new buildings was not exhaustive, but presented a careful selection of projects whose final outcome was influenced by a variety of circumstances.

One of the main propositions advanced by the new Metropolitan Plan is the need to stop spreading into the surrounding nature and rather to develop unused space within the boundaries of the city. Although Prague is a historical city with continuous and uninterrupted development, today it conceals within its boundaries a vast amount of unused space. Some urban planners claim part jokingly that Prague “is as holey as Swiss cheese”; others call these places “scars on the face of the city”. The scars refer mainly to sites that have lost their original industrial or transport importance and are now unused, neglected and polluted. Sometimes they are referred to as “brownfields”. Urban planners from the Prague Institute of Planning and Development call them “transformational land”. The total area of such sites has been calculated at an incredible 1466 hectares, with the most important and largest covering an area of 234 hectares. Wenceslas Square, the second biggest square in Prague, would fit into such an area more than fifty times. In addition to their desolate state, these sites have another thing in common: their future is more or less uncertain, their fate being conditional on a host of influences and circumstances.

In order to be able to develop this “no-man’s land” successfully for the benefit of everyone, we first have to assess its current state and realise that although it is absent from our “mental maps”, it continues to exist on maps of the city. Therefore the exhibition included a special AV presentation titled Places That Are Waiting. Thanks to the unique wide-screen projection of CAMP the audience had the opportunity to see some of the transformational lands of Prague in a way that they had never seen them before.

The exhibition represented the first step on the way to building a comprehensive construction project database that was later made accessible both physically at CAMP and online on a website. Special attention was paid to the transformational areas. Each of them was to be gradually presented together with the plans of public and private investors who are interested in these locations, from restoration of nature on the banks of the Vltava River around Císařský ostrov and plans to create city districts on the location of former railway stations, to visions for new cultural and educational centres. The plans for using transformational areas may be as diverse as the locations themselves, but they do have one thing in common: they are waiting for us to start paying attention to them.