DEVELOPMENT: Global Tourism Swallowing Prague

By Zoltán Dujisin Reprint | | Print |

Zoltan Dujisin

PRAGUE, Jan 15 2007 (IPS) - Czechoslovakia’s four decades of communism relegated Prague to a secondary role on the great tourist circuits. But the “return to Europe”, as many Czechs call the advent of liberal democracy, globalisation, and with it tourism, has ended Prague’s days of quiet.

Tourism plays an essential role in the economy of the Czech Republic, born in 1993 out of a negotiated split with the Slovak Republic. Capital Prague monopolises the business.

About a third of Prague’s economy revolves around tourism, Miroslav Sklenar, deputy CEO for external relations at Prague’s municipality told IPS. “Prague’s future depends on tourism.”

Lack of funds during the socialist regime that lasted from 1945 to 1989 meant there was little investment in Prague’s inner city. After 1989 the capital saw radical change.

Most of the neglected historical buildings were renovated within five years, a pace unparalleled in the region. This is the most celebrated feature of Prague’s change over the last decades.

Since 1995 the number of tourists in Prague has doubled, turning the city into the leading budget airline destination in the region. Much of the tourism is drawn by beer and sex.

With 3.7 million tourist arrivals a year, Prague constitutes Europe’s seventh most visited city, an enormous number for a city with a 1.2 million population.

While bringing money into the city and helping restoration of Prague’s invaluable monuments, tourism has also meant a radical social transformation of the city’s historical districts, now catering almost exclusively to foreign visitors.

Central Prague has been quickly commercialised. Global capital has entered the city and converted old houses into luxurious apartments and offices.

World tourism has been on the rise in the last decades, and the phenomenon, increasingly attracting people from all social classes and backgrounds, is celebrated by most international organisations and the tourism sector as promoting tolerance and multiculturalism.

But clashes between visitors and locals in Prague have grown, with some negative perceptions becoming common on both sides. While tourists complain of local rudeness, locals feel distressed over a perceived loss of their city.

“Tourists think Prague is just a big amusement park,” Jirka, a Prague resident employed by a foreign company, told IPS. “And indeed it looks like one.” Jirka claims the sight of tourists in odd costumes under the influence of alcohol, or behaving violently, is becoming more and more common.

Daniel, a student, considers tourism important in promoting economic growth and multiculturalism, but says it has also given rise to dodgy establishments. “There is a big sex industry, and souvenir shops sell things that have nothing to do with our culture,” he told IPS.

Some older locals doubt the supposed economic benefits of tourism. “They’ve made the prices go up,” said an elderly woman.

Prague’s municipal and tourism authorities acknowledge the locals’ grievances but claim there is little they can do. The capital’s municipality, uninterruptedly led by the neo-liberal Civic Democrats since 1990, began by favouring minimal municipal interference and maximal free market policies.

Prague was at the centre of a wave of neo-liberal ideology that hit the country in the 1990s, showing consistently the biggest support for right-wing parties favouring radical pro-market policies.

Vaclav Novotny, director of the Prague Information Service, the main public body dealing with tourism in the capital, claims the changes brought in by tourism were “inevitable”, and insists Prague’s economy “needs the masses”.

But with a highly privatised tourist sector, the effects of tourism are difficult to control. “The attitude in Prague is very liberal, or laws are insufficient, which is the same said in different ways. We don’t have the same power as our colleagues in different cities to organise tourism,” Novotny told IPS.

Novotny sees tourism as having deeply affected the Czech capital, though “more sociologically than aesthetically: tourism brings an extra up to 100,000 people in the city per day, and buildings have converted to shops, hotels and restaurants.”

The result is that “many people have moved to the outskirts, while quite different people have moved in,” says Novotny.

Since 1990, central Prague has lost a fifth of its population, and among its current inhabitants several are relative newcomers, mostly businessmen and foreigners.

Martin Krise, an architect for the Club for Old Prague, a grassroots organisation dedicated to preserving the city, accuses authorities of facilitating functional changes in old houses and not protecting residents in the centre.

“There is a lack of planning, regulation, and a narrow and aesthetic concept of protection,” Krise told IPS.

The price of aesthetic protection has been a deep social shift. “We start to feel it has become another Prague,” Czech sociologist Jiri Musil told IPS. “You don’t hear Czech any more.”

In a city were “business is winning”, rents become very high “and the local people have moved out,” Musil says. “There are no shops for them, no normal restaurants, you almost cannot buy bread. Everything is against the locals there.”

Yet even at the top level officials have recognised the excesses of liberalisation. “We are a nation of extremisms,” Novotny told IPS. “When we had the revolution in 1989 we abolished almost all rules as communist relics. Sometimes this is positive, sometimes it’s negative.”