Prague Hosts Week of UNaLab Workshops for a Resilient Prague in 2050

Last August, Prague hosted a week of inspiring workshops as part of the European funded Urban Nature Labs project (UNaLab). Prague is a “Follower City” under this multi-year project, which aims to employ nature-based solutions to enhance the city’s climate resilience by using a “co-creation process”. Under this approach, multiple stakeholders are brought together to achieve the best possible outcome.

At the beginning of the week, the German Fraunhofer Institution IAO performed an on-site assessment to map the current state of climate and water resilience in Prague. To this end, Fraunhofer held 17 interviews with experts from key Prague-based institutions. The interviewed partners were selected from a wide cross-section of fields to ensure that a broad range of data was gathered. A workshop was held in conjunction with the interviews to identify possible intervention areas for nature-based solutions to increase Prague’s resilience.

Later in the week, representatives from the Eindhoven University of Technology conducted a two-day workshop to develop a more detailed vision for climate and water resilience in Prague. The main elements of the vision were defined on the basis of Prague’s stated ambition for climate resilience: “Prague 2050: A liveable city in harmony with nature”. An interdisciplinary team of local stakeholders, including NGOs, universities, and public entities worked together to develop the vision, and the ideas being discussed were simultaneously drawn and projected on a large screen with the help of a graphic designer. The final result of the discussions was an illustration of Prague’s vision for climate and water resilience.

The vision workshop was the second in a series of three workshops that are being held to create a roadmap of nature-based solutions towards the climate and water resilience of Prague in 2050. The third workshop is expected to be held in the second half of 2019, where the results of the Fraunhofer interviews will be used to identify gaps between the vision for Prague in 2050 and the status quo. A roadmap will then be designed to define the next steps for overcoming gaps and achieving the vision.

We hope to transfer the energy and inspiration generated during the week of workshops into projects already underway, such as the Climate Adaptation Strategy for the City of Prague.