A Change of Plan: What Prague’s Urban Planning Reform Reveals about the Post-Socialist City

Why do state-socialist legacies persist in urban governance, and what brings them to an end? Weexamine Prague’s Metropolitan Plan, adopted in 2026 after fourteen years of contestation, toreassess two explanations of governance in the “post-socialist city:” political clientelism andweak civil society. Combining statistical analysis of spatial-plan revisions across Prague’sboroughs with process tracing based on field interviews and documentary sources, we find littlesystematic evidence that dominant-party clientelism sustained the inherited planning regime.Instead, the reform process reveals a transformed civil society. Competing networks of urbanreformers mobilized around planning flexibility and institutional responsiveness, enteredmunicipal politics, and ultimately negotiated a compromise that substantially reshaped the urban-planning system. Prague thus challenges accounts treating post-socialist legacies as durableconstraints producing policy stasis. We argue that their effects depend on evolving state-societyrelations, political competition, and civil-society organization, with implications for comparativetheories of urban governance and post-socialist transformation.