What Are the Greenest Czech Towns As Seen from Space? Karlovy Vary, Prague, Ostrava...
... or Karlovy Vary, Liberec and Zlín. The ranking changes when not only cultivated green space but also “city jungles” and woods are included. Karlovy Vary (in the photo) wins in both disciplines. Have a look at both charts based on the analysis of satellite imagery and see how your town has fared.
Geographers from the European Environment Agency (EEA) have created a computer program capable of “computer learning and reasoning”. It “looked” at each section of the studied area. Depending on what shapes and colours it “saw”, the program labelled the sections using twenty-one categories: urban area, industry, agricultural land, building site, dock, road etc.
The result of this process are highly detailed geographical data published as the Urban Atlas. Czech Radio has added the boundaries of Czech regional capitals and from the resulting file it has calculated the share of green space in their total areas.
According to the EEA, green space can be of two kinds: either visibly cultivated land used for recreational purposes (primarily parks, but also zoological or botanical gardens) or higher vegetation cover without recreation use (woods and forests). In order to be calculated in the share, either of the types needs to be open to the public and at least ten metres wide.
This is one of many possible methods. What are its limits?
Other lists of green cities (by this we mean international charts, we have not found a similar Czech assessment) usually compare several indicators to which different weight is ascribed. If the weight changes the result changes too. The area of a town’s green space detected by satellites was supposed to be the only and easily verifiable indicator. It has turned out that the situation is much more complex.
The most vociferous voices against this method come from towns that have not fared well. On the contrary, the winners approved of it and confirmed that the results are close to their own measurements.
The first complication arises in understanding what it means to “fare well”. Does a large share of green space in a town automatically mean a better life for its citizens? All addressed urbanists, architects as well as citizens agree that it is not so. The distribution, accessibility, diversity and quality of green spaces is important. It does not make an inhabitant of a concrete estate any happier if their city area contains a beautiful 30-hectare wood “just” ten kilometres away.
Another catch lies in the delineation of a town’s boundaries. In the Czech Republic border lines often follow bureaucratic logic rather than replicate the factual area of settlement. If we divide the area of public green space by the area of the whole town, a few villages merged with the town in a referendum for political reasons can have a significant effect.
The difference between a park, a wood and an overgrown waste dump may not always be discernible from space and the EEA computer program is not infallible either. For example, in Zlín they harbour the suspicion that the program may not have understood the ground plan of the town and its public spaces.
Besides, the division into categories used by the EEA may not always fully depict reality. It may not include cemeteries as public green space, which some towns count as a space for leisure time. For example the Brno Central Cemetery with its area of 56 hectares is the largest cemetery in the Czech Republic and for many people in the neighbourhood it does play the role of a park open to the public.
As we can see, some towns (Zlín, Jihlava, Plzeň, Brno) can profit from the inclusion of woods, others (Prague, Ostrava, Pardubice, České Budějovice) lose. How come? And to what extent does the view from space reflect reality? We have tried to find answers in maps as well as among inhabitants of individual towns.
1. Karlovy Vary
20.58% park space (1st position in ranking), 48.99% including woods (1st place)
Anyone who has ever flown to Karlovy Vary aboard a plane will testify that it is an exceptionally green town. It is the same if you arrive by car along old Pražská street and go past Goethe lookout tower and the Imperial Hotel to the centre.
The computer analysis of satellite maps confirms the first impressions of visitors: the town’s green space used for recreation forms a fifth of the total municipal area. If we include woods within its borders, the percentage of green space approaches fifty per cent. Both numbers are twice as high as the second town in the ranking, the capital of Prague.
“It is historically determined,” explains Jan Kopál from the Karlovy Vary Town Council. “Spas have always been associated with fresh air and calm. The greenery on the surrounding hills helps to accumulate water that comes to the surface down in the valley as curative springs. It also forms the so-called therapeutic landscape which plays an important role in healing.”
The exceptional expanse of the Karlovy Vary green space was helped by other factors, too: the town as it is nowadays was formed by a gradual merging with neighbouring villages; green interstices have remained between them. Besides, a large section of the town lies in the Slavkovský les protected landscape area.
The town also tries to expand its green space. A provisional little park was established last year in close vicinity to the Karlovy Vary Municipal Theatre where there had been an ugly vacant lot since the 1960s, which the locals have dubbed the Stone Pit. “The plot was undeveloped and overgrown with vegetation. Later it was fenced with an ugly-looking fence behind which rubbish piled up and homeless people and drug addicts gathered,” says spokesman Kopál. “Last year after an agreement with the owner, the town removed the fencing, cleaned the area and turned the flat part of the land into a little park – even though I admit it’s temporary.”
There are more examples of increasing numbers of recreational green spaces: the newly adapted bend of the river Ohře, the Rolava lido or the area between the Sokolovská, Horní Kamenná and Dolní Kamenná streets with St. Urban Church, unkempt for a long time, where the so-far newest park has been opened.
2. Prague
9.33% park space (2nd position in ranking), 18.77% including woods (10th place)
The ratio of green space to built-up area is unusually high in the Czech capital, even in comparison with Europe. That’s what architects and urban planners agree on. But they disagree on whether that is a good thing. And also on what should be done and how to improve green space in Prague.
“According to some surveys we have the largest portion of public green space in Europe. However, we are not good at working with it. Instead of quality public space they are more often urban jungles,” says Adam Švejda from the Prague Institute for Planning and Development (IPR).
According to him, Grébovka in Vinohrady, Přátelství Park in Prosek or Lannova Park on Nábřeží Ludvíka Svobody are examples of quality urban park space. On the other hand, Karlovo Square does not play the role it could. Not many people want to leave the street and enter the impermeable wall of trees and bushes. That is why it would be good to cut back the overgrown vegetation at the edges of the park.
One of the most discussed plans of the IPR is the intensification of development in the wider centre of the city. “Prague has a huge amount of unused transformation areas, such as the plots around train stations Bubny, Smíchov or Holešovice. They take up the area comparable to Prague 6. They can be used for building new quarters with flats, shops, cultural buildings and parks, but it is beyond the city’s current possibilities to transform them all into functional localities. Prague thus needs to decide which of them are a priority,” explains Švejda. According to his colleagues’ calculations the current borders of the city could theoretically hold further 432 thousand people.
Experts differ in their opinion on the construction of new quarters. “Colleagues from the IPR plan from their desks and computers, instead of walking around the city, looking and thinking,” says an older architect and the head of the Bubeneč sobě civic association Jiří Gebert. “The so-called concentration is a dogmatic interpretation of the wrong translation of the word density. Originally it did not mean only accumulation, but also complexity and variation. And that is exactly what modern development woefully lacks.”
“Urban concentration does not mean only greater building density, but primarily heterogeneity of activities in a city,” argues the IPR spokesman. “A living city for us is a city where there is a large concentration of various activities. Our core objective is to increase the quality of people’s lives.”
Architect Gebert emphatically disapproves of the whole Metropolitan plan prepared by IPR which includes proposals for a more intensive development of Smíchov and Holešovice: “Based solely on the statistic data that Prague has more green space than Vienna, our city planners infer that there is an opportunity to give these areas up to aggressive development... In my opinion it is a crime on the city and its inhabitants. If Prague really has more green and open space than other cities, it should work on this quality and cultivate it. It is the only way it will preserve its world uniqueness.”
3. Ostrava
6.76% park space (3rd position in ranking), 20.16% including woods (9th place)
Viewed from space the Ostrava agglomeration looks like a town interspersed with large parks. That is why it ranked third in the list based on an analysis of satellite images.
“You can see that Ostrava is a green town even when looking down from the town hall tower,” adds the town’s mayor’s spokeswoman Andrea Vojkovská. “Apart from 156 hectares of parks there is for example the revitalised Ostravice embankment or the 1100 hectares of suburban woods.”
Silesian journalist and poet Ivan Motýl knows Ostrava’s green space from up close and describes it in a much more critical tone: “Many of those green spaces are not parks where one could enjoy the landscape. They are rather overgrown industrial sites, waste heaps, slag heaps, rubble sites and old railway tracks.”
Nevertheless he, too, can find examples of green spaces in Ostrava that have been recently cultivated and now serve their purpose well: primarily Bělský wood on the southern edge of the town and Komenského sady in the centre. The town tries hard for more: from February to June Ostrava cleans its parks, provides treatment to trees in the town, plants new trees and takes care of lawns all at the cost of 10.8 million Czech crowns.
The Ema slag heap, the highest point in Ostrava, is nowadays also used for recreational purposes. During the communist era and in the 1990s, artists met here and held secret exhibitions. After a tourist path had been marked here, tourists started to pour here at weekends. “It is still very dusty there, fumes from the Nová huť steelworks are often carried in that direction. You go out to breathe some fresh air, but at the same time you worry you’re asking for cancer,” says Ivan Motýl.
The town wants to make the air better in the near future by planting 26 thousand trees and bushes of “barrier greenery” which are to capture 38 tonnes of polluting substances every year.
4. Liberec
3.59% park space (4th position in ranking), 48.21% including woods (2nd place)
The citizens of Liberec can travel by tram all the way to Ještěd mountain, the Liberec dam is ten minute’s walk from the town hall, the ski slopes in the Jizerské mountains are accessible by the town’s public transport... The share of park space on the total area makes it the fourth in the list, if we include the woods, it moves up to second rank.
The largest green area in the town is the park formed from the former cemetery between streets Ruprechtická, Budyšínská and Ruská. Four years ago the town spent five million Czech crowns to restore it turning it into the Garden of Memories. The central path made from Liberec granite “flows” through it in curves from the highest to the lowest point as the “river of memory”. The second largest is the park by the Liberec ZOO and next to the open-air cinema. The town has recently invested nine million Czech crowns, mostly from EU funding, into the restoration of Lidové sady park.
“Our position in the ranking made us happy,” says the town’s spokeswoman Zuzana Minstrová. She says the municipal council is not planning any other further changes to the town’s green space. “We do just standard upkeep of the town’s parks and lines of trees.”
5. Pardubice
3.39% park space (5th position in ranking), 16.43% including woods (11th place)
When Pardubice calculated the share of green space in 2012 it arrived at 3.9 per cent of park space owned by the town and 4.51 per cent of total public green space. “We haven’t calculated the total area including woods,” says the mayor’s deputy responsible for the environment Jiří Rozinek (Czech Social Democratic Party).
He thinks that the most important area is the continuous green space alongside the rivers Labe and Chrudimka which reaches all the way to the town centre. The banks of the Labe are overgrown with wild vegetation, often impenetrable. “Apart from the cycle path on the left bank there isn’t a good interlinked network of paths. That’s why the recreational potential of the Labe and surrounding green space is not fully exploited,” says the municipal council. The banks of the Chrudimka are more urban, but there is also a lack of better paths here.
That is why the town is preparing a new project named “Chrudimka’s necklace” which should connect individual parks on the river and add for example benches. Chrudimka’s banks should be walkable from Pardubice to Nemošice or even as far as Hostovice or possibly Chrudim.
The plan to create pathway along the Labe from Hradec Králové is also only on paper still. The reconstruction of Tyršovy sady chateau park has more realistic results; it should be completed by the start of the summer holidays.
6. České Budějovice
3.2% park space (6th position in ranking), 10.33% including woods (13th place)
When calculated per total area, the share of park space in České Budějovice is slightly above the average and the share of water surface is high above the average: Vrbenské ponds on the western edge of the town represent over 6 per cent of its area. In comparison with other regional capitals, České Budějovice does not have such extensive forests. When we include them in the total area of green space, the South Bohemian capital drops to the bottom of the list. If we calculate the parks only, it ranks sixth.
“The inner town has very little green spaces, especially public ones,” admits deputy mayor Ivo Moravec from the Občané pro Budějovice Movement. In his opinion, private green spaces have also thinned, especially after legislation made cutting down trees on private property less difficult. “Although it is usually inaccessible to the public or closed in courtyards between buildings it significantly increases the amount of green space in the town,” says the deputy about private gardens, lawns and trees. The EEA evaluation does not include areas closed to the public, though.
7. Ústí nad Labem
2.35% park space (7th position in ranking), 38.83% including woods (4th place)
Ústí nad Labem has Republiky Park, Mánesovy sady and several other cultivated green spaces in the very centre. Further away are places such as Bertino údolí, Sedlo or Mariánská skála with wild greenery. “The problem of Ústí is not lack of green space, but its quality,” says Romana Macová from the mayor’s office.
The town would like to replace old lime tree lines in the centre with young trees. Limes do not cope well with road salt – the plan to cut them down encountered protests. “We can’t do a total renovation of the tree lines, but only plant individual trees. That way the aesthetic value of the tree lines as a whole is diminished,” says the municipal council’s representative.
The overall position of the town which is in the middle of the ranking is enhanced by woods that reach up to family houses on the edges, or separate housing estates.
8. Hradec Králové
2.15% park space (8th position in ranking), 22.92% including woods (8th place)
The “Architectural Salon of the Republic” on the confluence of the Labe and the Orlice is also probably at a disadvantage because of the method used. “Percentage in the European Environment Agency maps in no way reflects reality. It does not include strip areas around watercourses, paths, groves and areas close to nature,” says Magdaléna Vlčková, the spokeswoman of the experts on green space in the town from the Hradec municipal council.
The image of the town typically includes the so-called green wedges that have so far not been considered as areas for recreation. This should change in the newly prepared local development plan. “This will mean a much more favourable share of green and grey structure in the town which will then be reflected in the EEA data,” believes the municipal council.
The town’s borders are also quite far out. Especially at the north-western edge of Hradec, the area that is contained within them is of a more countryside character which does not count as urban green space. “If the agricultural land is kept as a meadow, especially extensive meadow with scattered vegetation, it contributes to the landscape green space,” argues the town hall’s spokeswoman.
In Hradec Králové there are also over two thousand hectares of municipal woods used for recreation.
9. Brno
2,10.%% park space (9th position in ranking), 30.63% including woods (5th place)
The hillsides around the Špilberk Castle, Denisovy Sady, Moravské Square and newly renovated Koliště Park serve as areas for recreation in the historical centre of Brno. A little further away, there are the well-known Lužánky, Kraví Mountain or Wilsonův wood with the re-forested former skiing slope. Brno borders also encompass large suburban woods around the dam and in the north parts of the Moravian Karst.
“Judging from the numbers, Brno does not look very green,” says deputy mayor Martin Ander elected for the Green Party about Brno’s ninth position in the ranking. “But it seems to me that your maps do not show green courtyards between blocks of flats – and Brno’s strength lies precisely in them. Another distinctive feature are tree-lined streets, which represent 17 thousand trees now.”
The largest upcoming project for making the town greener is the restoration of the Old Ponávka. “In the past it was artificially drained underground, now we would like to turn it into a surface river again and create new embankments,” explains Ander.
Brno’s speciality is Jižní centrum, the South Centre. It is a place where the main train station was to be moved to – if only the citizens of Brno could agree on it during the hundred years that they have been talking about it. In the meantime, an overgrown jungle has sprung up between the allotment gardens and the adjacent tallest building of the Czech Republic, where hares run around dilapidated railway carriages on a dead end track.
10. Plzeň
1.43% park space (10th position in ranking), 23.8% including woods (7th place)
The zoological and botanical garden in Lochotínský park, Štruncovy sady made famous by football or large Borský park in the southern part of the town – these are the main green oases in the current European Capital of Culture.
“The town’s woods are also easy to access. You can reach them in fifteen minutes if you cycle towards the Bolevec pond system,” says Eva Baborková from the Plzeň municipal council.
She says the attitude of the inhabitants of Plzeň has recently changed; they care more about the comfort and quality of public areas than the actual size of green space: “At the start of the 1990s they opposed any cutting down of trees, now they call for more facilities for active use of green space.”
11. Jihlava
1.39% park space (11th position in ranking), 29.6% including woods (6th place)
The zoological garden and adjacent Heulos forest park – these are the most distinctive green areas in the centre of Jihlava. There are extensive forests on its edges, the largest of them is the protected area of Vysoký kámen, a forested hill in the north-west edge of town.
When calculated per the town’s area, the share of green space puts Jihlava in the 11th position in the list, if we include woods, Jihlava moves up to the sixth place.
“We try to extend green areas, although these are times of development projects which are not very favourable to establishing new parks...,” says Katarína Ruschková, the head of the department of environment from the Jihlava town-hall.
She thinks the town is much greener than its place in the ranking would suggest. But the green space is in courtyards, in school gardens, tree-lined streets or perennial beds in busy places. If these areas are narrower than ten metres, or they do not seem to be open to the public from bird’s eye view, they are not included in the overall area of park space.
12. Olomouc
1.25% park space (12th position in ranking), 13.54% including woods (12th place)
On the schematic map based on data from the European Environment Agency, the mediaeval centre of Moravia looks like an urban agglomeration with relatively small parks in the centre (Smetanovy sady , Bezručovy sady and Čechovy sady, Rozárium botanical garden) and with larger forested areas in the northeast near Svatý Kopeček and the Olomouc ZOO.
According to Radka Štědrá from the Olomouc town hall, this is deceptive: “We can’t agree with our position in this ranking. Olomouc is a town full of parks. This estimate of the size of green space is only approximate, in our opinion.”
The truth is that the satellite images do not show the Holický wood with an area of 33 hectares which was established two years ago on the basis of a petition of the locals.
According to Radka Štědrá the great advantage of Olomouc environment is that there is virtually no industry. “That is why locals consider Olomouc to be a very pleasant place for life. We have the fourth lowest emissions of particulate matter among the regional capitals.”
13. Zlín
1.06% park space (13th position in ranking), 43.7% including woods (3rd place)
Zlín considers itself a green town. “You can see it at first sight. Come and see for yourself,” says the spokesman of the municipal council, Zdeněk Dvořák. Their calculation says that there are 100 thousand trees here, which is more than the number of its citizens. At the time of its fastest development in the 1920s and 1930s Zlín was designed by its prominent functionalist architects – Tomáš Baťa invited even Le Corbusier – as a “town in gardens”.
This might explain the bad outcome in the share of green space from satellite images. The method of the European Environment Agency does not count for examples the gardens of the famous red Baťa houses as green space for they are not open to the public. It does not include individual trees or green areas of less then ten metres in width.
Zlín is the one regional capital that shows the most marked difference between the area of park space and size of woods and forests that do not seem to be recreational in the satellite images. If these areas are included in the calculation, Baťa’s town moves up from the bottom of the chart to the top among the winners.
