Could you start by briefly describing what participation is?

Participation is the process of involving the public in decisions about what the city should look like and what should happen there. It means giving people the opportunity to share their needs, comments, and ideas regarding planned projects. We then process these suggestions and begin to adjust our proposals accordingly. The goal is for changes in the city to be created together with the people they affect.

Why is participation important for urban planning?

When we talk about participation, we always say the same thing to both children and adults. The city deals with many issues, such as technical infrastructure, green spaces, or transportation. But often, the human scale is missing. In my opinion, the most important value of a city is the people who actually live there. Without people, the city wouldn’t function, which is why it’s important to pay attention to how they perceive it. Only locals know what life is really like in specific streets and neighborhoods. Without their experiences and perspectives, the city cannot be fully understood or well-planned.

In 2025, the Office of Participation launched a new project Your City, Your Space. It is a traveling participatory game. How did the whole idea come about?

We had long been looking for a way to incorporate more playfulness into urban planning while also adding educational elements. The result is a two-year project that, thanks to an Erasmus+ grant, is aimed primarily at young people aged 13–30 and will gradually visit six locations in Prague. We want not only to show children and teenagers that their opinions on the shape of their surroundings matter, but also to reach parts of Prague where we haven’t yet been with our participatory efforts during the nine years of our office’s existence.

What does this look like in practice?

In each location, the program begins with a day for primary school pupils, where they are introduced to the basics of urban planning through games and team tasks. This is followed by an outdoor public event featuring five activity stations.

For the game itself, we designed a total of five game stations. These include a large interactive graph, a wheel of fortune featuring roles in the city, a plexiglass window facing the public space where participants can write or draw what they feel is missing in the area, a memory game featuring new construction projects for Prague Tomorrow, which builds on our app of the same name, and finally, a participatory Jenga game with questions designed to encourage participants to reflect on public space and other topics. Participants visit each station, receive a stamp at each one, and a reward awaits them at the end. We want to show that getting involved in city planning can be fun and accessible to everyone.

The project was tested in June 2025 in Horní Měcholupy, and in the fall it visited Kunratice and Slivenec. How did the first visits to these locations go?

Each location was completely different, but we were delighted by the public’s interest everywhere. In Horní Měcholupy, around 150 people showed up, and the children were very active because they are already familiar with the principles of participation, for example from school participatory budgets. In Kunratice and Slivenec, on the other hand, the lack of activities for teenagers was a recurring theme.

Overall, we enjoyed seeing how the children reacted. The younger ones, up to about fifteen, jump right in; they enjoy the game-like format and want to explore what it means to get involved. Adults are a bit cautious at first because it looks very playful at first glance, but once they come, they mainly want to talk about specific projects in the area. We write down all the suggestions and pass them on to the city districts.

What are further plans?

The project runs until summer 2026, so we still have three locations ahead of us this spring: specifically Prague 8, Prague 9, and Prague 11. After the pilot ends, however, we’ll still have the game equipment. We’d like to continue using the traveling game at all possible IPR Prague events. We’ve already presented it at Archirun, for example, or at the Prague City Hall Open House.

What other projects are you currently working on?

I’d like to mention two locations that, coincidentally, are both very special—they’re located right in the heart of Prague. The first is Chotek Gardens, a park that is set to undergo a planned transformation over the next few years. The Prague Castle Administration has announced an architectural competition for the park’s renovation. As part of the preparation for this, in November 2024 and January 2025, we carried out the first phase of public participation both on-site and online. We conducted an anthropological survey and a questionnaire, and organized guided walks. We will now follow up with the second phase in the spring of 2026.

The second historically significant site is Karlov. This site is particularly interesting because it involves the first zoning study within the Prague Heritage Reservation. The first phase of public engagement took place in the spring of 2025, during which we collected data from the public; the second phase will take place after the zoning study is completed.

The Office of Participation has now also started teaching at the university.

Yes, last year we launched our first participation course at the university. We collaborated with faculty members at the Faculty of Social Studies at Charles University and developed a course that we ran as an office. We designed it for about twenty-five students across the faculty and focused primarily on practical application. Participants worked on their own projects and presented them at CAMP at the end. The course isn’t purely theoretical; we strive to make it as applicable as possible for fields such as sociology, public policy, or geography, where participation makes a lot of sense.

Which groups typically participate, and which ones are missing?

In the case of in-person participation, such as meetings or mobile containers, the people who most often get involved are simply those who have the time for it. Typically seniors, parents with children, and sometimes students. This was evident at Karlov; it worked well there. On the other hand, what we lack most are young people between the ages of 18–45—that is, young adults and younger active workers. They are usually the busiest with work and family, so they participate only minimally. Participation then most often occurs in connection with specific local projects, because people easily understand what is going to happen and how it will affect them. With strategic plans, engagement is lower; they are more demanding and abstract for the public. I think that’s a shame.

How long have you been working at IPR Prague? How are roles divided in your office?

I joined the institute in 2018, halfway through the Metropolitan Plan campaign. I spent my first month in the field in a participatory container, talking to people. That was perfect. Since the beginning of 2025, I’ve been tasked with leading the Office of Participation, and I’ve officially been in charge since October. But we’re a very small team—we only have three core members. We’re assisted by external collaborators and students, whom we usually bring on for individual projects. We all have more or less similar responsibilities.

Participation is seasonal. From April to June and from September to October, we have our peak season, when events, brainstorming sessions, and evaluations take place. We work evenings and weekends. That’s quite unique. Outside of the season, we sit in the office and prepare new projects. What I enjoy most about this job is the variety. One moment we’re planning, the next we’re getting markers and stickers ready for an event. It can never be monotonous.

How has participation changed in recent years?

Participation is much more of a standard practice today. Both political leaders and civil servants count on it, and it’s often a requirement for obtaining European grants. The problem, however, is that even though people are participating more than before, it’s still not as much as we’d like. They also still tend to view participation more as a battleground than a space for cooperation, so we’re looking for new ways to motivate them. One way is to create a unified online participatory platform. Today, information is fragmented—the IPR has its own website, the Regional Development Portal has its own, and city districts handle it differently. It would be great to have one place where people can easily learn about all the projects. We’re working on that now, and I hope we’ll succeed soon.