Praha 5 will pay 1.2 million to clear waste and rubble from the Buďánka settlement

Prague, March 4 (ČTK) - The leadership of Prague 5 will have waste and debris cleared from the former workers' colony of Buďánka. The work is expected to begin in March and will cost the municipality around 1.2 million crowns. Šárka Mlátilíková from the office of the mayor of Prague 5 informed ČTK about this. The Buďánka settlement is a former workers' colony, currently devastated and falling into disrepair.
    "The gradual clearing can be considered an initial and necessary part of the revitalization of the Buďánka settlement," said Mlátilíková.
    After the cleanup, the city will ensure and preserve the individual houses before their future reconstruction. The costs for the clearance are approximately 1.181 million crowns, and the councilors of Prague 5 have already approved the selection of the company that will carry out the work.
    It is not yet clear when exactly the municipality will begin to clear the five houses. They first need to approve the budget for this year - the budget proposal will be discussed by the councilors at their meeting on March 19. Currently, Prague 5 is operating under a provisional budget, which does not allow them to finance the work and only permits payment for the functions of the municipal district.
    Prague 5 wants to turn Buďánka, according to a previously approved plan, into a cultural center. The dilapidated houses are to be repaired, and new structures, matching the footprint and volume of the original, will be built on the sites of those that have already collapsed or been demolished - but they will not be replicas of the originals. Before that, all the houses will be inspected by a structural engineer, followed by a geodetic and construction-technical and construction-historical survey. The first house to be repaired will be the former dairy.
    There have been several attempts to revitalize the settlement in the past, none of which were implemented. On the contrary, in 2004, under the then mayor Milan Jančík (then ODS), Prague 5 had half of the houses demolished. Buďánka is an original workers' colony, a remnant of how workers lived in Smíchov in the 19th century. Since 1991, it has been declared a protected heritage zone.