Eastern Europe July 28, 2010, 10:49AM EST

The Rebirth of Prague's Vltava River

After decades of neglect and abuse, the picturesque river flowing through the Czech capital is being developed for residential and recreational use

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When Petr Vojak was deciding where to settle down with his family last year, his aim was clear. He wanted somewhere peaceful yet central. Eventually, they decided on a new flat in a northern district along the Vltava river, which flows through Prague.

"I love that it's so close to the river," he said while walking his dog along the riverside one warm July day. "I can have a coffee on my balcony and stare at the sun glistening on the water for hours, I never get tired of it."

Such sentiments are commonplace in many riverside cities, where people pay a premium for a water view. But in Prague, where the Vltava has long been seen as a flood threat or an industrial dumping ground, they are the first stirrings of a changing attitude toward the river.

A flat on the Vltava is surely a common daydream for visitors to the Czech capital who walk across the Charles Bridge, with its incomparable vista of Prague Castle. Toward the end of the 19th century imposing buildings went up along the embankments to house the city's wealthier citizens, followed shortly by a flowering of art nouveau apartment houses.

But in the early 20th century, residential development along the river gave way to industry. In 1918, about 70 percent of the Austro-Hungarian empire's industry was in the Czech regions, which had become a factory for textiles, glass, shoes, sugar, and porcelain. In the 1920s, Czechoslovakia had the 10th highest industrial output per capita in the world.

In addition, looming war clouds helped gin up arms production and mechanical engineering. "By World War II, numerous industrial buildings had appeared on the banks of the Vltava," said Pavel Benes, an architect in the city's planning office.

After World War II, industrial output skyrocketed. Many factories, with their attendant pollution, were located by rivers, including the Vltava.

"The Holesovice and Liben ports [downstream from central Prague] were especially important. They used the river as the transport path to Germany and other countries," Benes said.

But as the communists gave way to the Velvet Revolution, so, too, did heavy industry give way to light industry and, increasingly, jobs in the service sector.

"The CKD [state engineering company] exported its large, heavy products such as cranes, locomotives, and trams on ships on the Vltava for decades. These days, boats aren't used as much for transportation, and the industry structure has transformed from heavy to lighter branches of industry. Thus, most companies like CKD cut production or went bankrupt," Benes said.

But that past emphasis on heavy industry left a legacy of contaminated rivers.

Jan Valek, laboratory director at the Prague office of Povodi Vltavy, a state river management company that has monitored the quality of the Vltava since the 1960s, said, "Under communism, the water was intensely polluted by heavy industry, which wasn't helped by the city's inefficient water treatment plants."

Meanwhile, the government was pouring money into tall, nondescript apartment complexes on the outskirts of the city and, along with subsequent governments, neglecting to invest in adequate flood protection. There was less and less reason to think of the Vltava as anything other than a channel for effluent or a barrier to be crossed on a bridge.

After 1989, that slowly began to change.

A NEW ERA

In the 1990s, the city made a major investment into a new water treatment system. That and the phase-out of heavy industry led to a dramatic improvement in water quality, although progress has slowed recently. "Lately, the improvement has not been that fast. I think we've hit our technological limit," Valek said. Still, he added, the Vltava is safe for swimming, and fishermen say new species are returning to the river.

But flood protection remained in the background, as was dramatically illustrated during the catastrophic flood of August 2002. Although mobile walls protected parts of the city's Old Town, there was no protection for the ancient Lesser Town, across the river, and for the city's many underground spaces, including the metro system.