Prague Launches City-Wide Push to Replace Duplicate Street Art Images Cluttering Public Spaces

Prague city hall took its first concrete steps this week to tackle a problem that has quietly worsened for years: the proliferation of duplicate and near-identical images decorating public walls, underpasses, and official civic displays across the capital. Workers from the city's public space management arm, Technická správa komunikací, began removing and replacing copied visual panels at three locations in Žižkov and on Wenceslas Square on Tuesday, marking the operational start of a programme that administrators have been planning since early spring.

The timing matters. Prague's tourist season is now at full pressure, with the city recording a historically dense visitor period through June and July. Repeated, identical imagery — particularly in high-footfall corridors like Na Příkopě and along the Royal Mile route from Hradčany down to the Old Town — has drawn criticism from city councillors and local residents' groups for making Prague's street-level experience feel visually incoherent. The programme, formally called the Vizuální revitalizace veřejného prostoru, was approved by Prague City Council on 18 March and allocated a budget of 4.2 million Czech crowns for its initial phase.

What's Being Removed and Why

The duplicate image problem has two distinct sources, according to documents published by the Prague 1 municipal office. The first is bureaucratic: departments within the city's administrative structure independently commissioned similar graphic panels for public information boards, resulting in near-identical imagery appearing within metres of one another at locations like Náměstí Míru metro station and along the Nusle Bridge walkway approaches. The second source is commercial: licensed vendors operating in tourist zones have, over time, installed promotional display boards that replicate each other with minimal variation, particularly around the Jewish Quarter in Josefov and on the southern edge of Malá Strana.

This week's removals in Žižkov focused on a cluster of six information panels on Seifertova Street, four of which were found to carry substantially identical graphic templates sourced from the same 2021 design contract. Replacement panels with locally commissioned original artwork — sourced from Czech artists through a competitive tender managed by the Magistrát hlavního města Prahy — are due to be installed at those sites by 18 July. The new designs will incorporate QR codes linking to city services, a feature absent from the legacy panels.

Local Reaction and Practical Impact

The Žižkov residents' association, Žižkovské fórum, has publicly welcomed the initiative, pointing to the Seifertova Street cluster as a long-running aesthetic grievance. The association submitted a formal complaint to Prague 3 district hall in October 2024, which eventually fed into the broader city-wide audit completed in February 2026. That audit catalogued more than 340 instances of duplicate or near-duplicate public imagery across Prague's ten central districts.

For local businesses, the change carries practical weight. Shop owners along Korunní Street in Vinohrady told Prague 2 district officials at a June meeting that the existing board clutter was reducing the visibility of privately owned window displays. Under the revitalisation programme, a minimum clearance zone of 15 metres between similarly themed public panels will be enforced in commercial streets, a standard drawn from Berlin's Stadtbild guidelines and adapted for Prague's narrower medieval street grid.

The initial phase covers Prague 1, Prague 2, and Prague 3. Residents in Prague 5 and Prague 7 — including the Holešovice arts district, where the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art is located and where community murals have occasionally been duplicated by adjacent municipal commissions — can expect the audit process to reach their districts in the autumn, with replacements scheduled for early 2027. Anyone who spots duplicate public imagery in the meantime can file a report through the Portál Pražana city services platform, where a dedicated reporting category has been active since 1 July.