David Procházka

19 years oldOstravaOstravak

Running for Ostravak

Main topics

sport

Up to 80% of children in Czechia don't get enough exercise and this number keeps rising. Yes, in Ostrava we do host big tournaments and we have good top-division teams, but there is a lack of support for purely amateur sport. So I want to make the way to doing sport easier through these steps: 1. making all school sports grounds accessible and available to the public (the public uses roughly 66%, yet the demand is there) 2. modernising the fajnovysport website (the map is confusing and a lot of information is missing, including info on availability and booking options) 3. a fair of sports and clubs 4. cooperation with clubs on building low-cost training spaces (a response to the high demand arising from the SMO sports strategy) 5. public training sessions

housing

Ostrava may not be as badly off as Prague or Brno, but we can't hesitate. According to demographers, we're set to have 192,000 inhabitants by 2070, yet according to the same forecast it could be 328,000 if we invest in housing. Only a third of people move to Prague; the rest head to surrounding towns and villages for more affordable housing close to nature. So the city shouldn't just hope that the crisis will be solved by expensive development projects that none of us will be able to afford for at least 10 years. We need cheap municipal housing for people who just need to get back on their feet, and at the same time we have to work with what we have. We don't need new neighbourhoods when there are 1,000 empty municipal flats here and many buildings waiting for renovation.

public space

Increasingly frequent heatwaves show the need for greenery and shade in Ostrava. Concrete surfaces heat up the whole area and it's unbearable outside, yet this can be tackled. The greenery I mentioned will do a lot, but I'd also welcome other elements of public space, such as more bins, benches and maybe drinking fountains, which Ostrava does have in small numbers, but there is still a fear that they'll get broken. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is common – from a place where homeless people go and break things, we gradually remove everything, including bins and benches, until it becomes a place where only homeless people go, because people out for a walk have no reason to stop there. I don't agree with this approach, and I wouldn't want us to turn public space into a wasteland in the fight against inconsiderate behaviour.

A few words about me

I'm a proud Ostrava native and Baník fan. I've always been interested in what's happening around me and why it's happening that way – in short, I've always cared about others and my surroundings. That led me to work at a non-profit focused on young people's participation in public life, to lead the school parliament and to study law (I'm now starting my first year in Brno).

But I'm not running because I want to collect positions like Pokémon. I simply don't like it when someone complains about something and doesn't try to change it, so I'd be going against myself if I turned down the chance to run. What really bothers me is the big outflow of young people from the region, which I want to stop, and without young people involved in decision-making that just won't work. Because Ostrava really isn't the hell some people make it out to be, but on the contrary a place with huge potential that we have to be determined to fulfil. That's why I'm running, and that's why I'm running for the Ostravak movement, which is a purely Ostrava brand not influenced by national politics.

The candidate's texts have been machine-translated from Czech.