Hotel development through centralized to liberalized planning procedures: Prague lost in transition

Abstract

ABSTRACTScholars argued for the need of better urban planning procedures in post-socialist Prague in the 1990s. But a society liberated from an oppressive political system where five-year plans defined every aspect of life did not believe in the beneficial power of regulations. Prague just started to profit from the large wave of foreign tourists arriving, and did not want to control the liberal market, trusted to upgrade the obsolete hotel infrastructure created by central planning. Literature documents well this era of transition, bringing into focus more and more the conflicts of tourism development in the historic city, often described as a tourist ghetto. This study demonstrates direct links between the extremities in tourism planning procedures and the criticized touristification process. Prague's hotel development patterns are compared with similar tourist-historic destinations: Budapest and Vienna. The building age and typology was included in the geographical analysis of hotels, revealing more of the extreme consequences of both the era of centralized planning procedures, and of the era of uncontrolled liberalization multiplied by the effects of in-kind restitution. Vienna has a totally balanced spatial distribution of hotels showing a linear development through the ages. Budapest faced the same communist period followed by a liberalization process, but the sensibility of the communist regime towards tourism demands and the avoided in-kind type of restitution during privatization in the new era kept the hotel development patterns and the tourist space system more balanced. The results of this study contribute to the general understanding of the needs and tools of tourism planning in urban tourism development.