How does reSITE work?
Osamu Okamura
That is very interesting mixture of people who care about cities and who are interested in cities and who by chance in some way are living now in Prague. And we feel like being at home in Central Europe. In the same time we have also experience of living in some other cities. So that is why we have this chance to compare what are the pluses and minuses of living and being in Central Europe.
And this is a very good starting point because we have a little bit different perspective on seeing conditions of I would say the public space for example, how it has been discussed, how it has been designed, how it has been constructed and in comparison with other cities in the world.
And I think that there is very unique situation now in Prague because Prague has a quite progressive mayor Tomas Hudecek with quite progressive institution of planning of the city. It was somehow able to attract the most interesting urban planner nowadays practicing in Czech republic or Prague who are for example graduates from ETH Zurich or from academic world. And they have very good practical experiences from urban planning. So this is something that makes a very good connection for us with the reality. We are neither academic conference or scientific conference or professional conference. We are conference that is oriented on practice. We are practice-oriented conference. So we are inviting not professors or students only. Of course we want to have them because education is very important part of this agenda in long-term vision.
But in a short term we want to influence directly what is happening now. We are interested in attracting stakeholder and actors that are at this position of decision-making today. So we are attracting politicians. We are attracting municipal officers who are at the city hall today, people from the planning departments and who just now control these planning processes. They have the major say what will be realized or not.
So the first year we had very few of these municipal representatives. The second year we had 20 of them. And this year we had for example 80 of them already. So this is really I would say a very good exponential growth. And we hope that our audience in the future will be more and more of these decision makers as well because we want to achieve these changes as fast as possible. Of course it is still good to think on next generations, but we still want to enjoy this today ourselves.
And the things that are not working very well are here in our cities what I think is important as a starting point. We think the municipal administration is not very effective. Sometimes it is very corrupted. So the transparency problem, the management of building maintain in city is not very efficient. A coordination between different departments of cities and different actors at these cities. So these are not very effective. So we are losing a lot of energy just only in these translations and on the space between that is just somehow making a distance between people who maybe have very similar aims and similar goals. But because there are no bridges and no platforms where these people could meet this is not working well. So this is also the community is not very much developed in here or the community life I would say. So this is what we are promoting. We want to create discussion space and space to meet and space to cooperate, coordinate and develop.
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