Integrated Plan for Urban Development of the Czech Republic

A complex approach, content and time interconnectedness, levelled combination of hard and soft projects, and active cooperation of public and private sectors – all these are key parameters of any integrated plan for urban development. Its principles are grounded in the Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities, and the company MEPCO informed about it as early as in 2006. The integrated plan for urban development was not given sharper outlines until the year 2007, when its methodology was finished. Also the company MEPCO actively participated in the preparation of the methodology, together with its mother organization, the Union of Towns and Municipalities of the Czech Republic.

Within the context of the Czech Republic, the cities/towns with more than fifty thousand inhabitants, the so-called “growth poles”, are obligated to prepare an integrated plan for urban development, applying it in order to introduce the measures to be taken in problem solving of their developing areas. An integrated plan for urban development is a consistent and coherent summary of particular projects that are realized either in a selected problem town zone or else in an integrated manner, in the town as a whole, within a certain topic (like public transport, town vegetation, etc.).

It may be assumed that the application of the integrated plans for urban development be spreading across Czech local administrations. Their applicability is conditioned, among other things, by the willingness of top representatives of towns to invest in the formation of strategies and plans, without which the town will develop onwards yet the pace of the development, including the improvement of the quality of lives of local citizens, may be limited by unsystematic decision making and non-effective management of projects. Integrated plans for urban development should not only stand for an obligatory, formal supplement of a project application for a specific category of towns/cities; instead, they should become a standard tool of urban development, regardless the actual size of the town/city concerned.

The company MEPCO took part in the elaboration of integrated plans of the cities of Ústí nad Labem, České Budějovice, and Klášterec nad Ohří.