City Case Description: Prague & Infrastructures for CCIs

How does “prototyping” work?

This City Case Description is the outcome of a policy prototyping exercise within a city ecosystem.
Once the ekip research team has explored a policy area and its connection to cultural and creative
industries (CCIs) and innovation, we ask: what would this mean in a local city context?

Together with local stakeholders, we test how a draft policy recommendation might stimulate innovation. Using Portfolio Sensemaking, stakeholders simulate an innovation portfolio, analyse the strengths and gaps of the local support system, and identify what resources are needed to realise the portfolio.

Prague Context & Area of Focus

Prague has no shortage of one-off cultural venues, mostly concentrated in the centre and Old Town. What it lacks is coordination: the city looks at its property but cannot reach information about what its CCIS actors actually need, and long-term spatial planning is disconnected from the short-term needs of those actors. No one currently looks after the relationships between players, internal competition leads actors to guard ideas rather than share them, and Prague has no dedicated CCIS financing or agreed framework for funding infrastructure. Peripheral districts lack cultural infrastructure altogether and risk becoming a “social desert, ” while culture remains a “black box” in negotiations with developers. 

Innovating the relationships and connections between Prague’s CCIS actors and treating relationships, not just buildings, as infrastructure. The vehicle is a coordinating working group with a “key account” function that maps, connects, and informs the players, supported by a written relationship-management strategy. The focus is the creative industry at the intersection of culture and business (B2B — incubation, studios, offices) rather than more one-off venues, and the use of infrastructure as a policy tool to bring culture and activity to new, peripheral districts in cooperation with developers.