Communication between town halls and the public is an important prerequisite for the successful implementation of measures
to improve stormwater management. Members of the Architecture and Environment research team of the CTU UCEEB and representatives
of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of the UJEP are working together on a set of rules and recommendations for
its effective management in the framework of the project Municipalities Talk About Water. The results will be presented together
on 19 October 2023 in Prague at the conference Blue-Green Cities Day 2023: Effective Communication and Food Self-Sufficiency.
The project focuses on the needs of town halls, especially of smaller towns (roughly up to 30,000 inhabitants), in the field
of communication measures related to stormwater management (SWM), such as planting and friendly maintenance of green areas,
implementation of permeable surfaces, building green roofs and walls, etc. At present, the public is not sufficiently informed
about and therefore does not identify with these measures, which often leads to the preservation of existing stormwater management.
We therefore identify the needs of cities for better communication of SWM measures and test the effectiveness of communication
options in relation to specific measures and target publics. During June and July, we will conduct several case studies during
public meetings to test our assumptions. These events will take place in Písek, Roudnice nad Labem, Plzeň, Žďár nad Sázavou,
Svitavy and Lovosice. On the basis of them, we will create a publication summarizing the rules and recommendations for effective
communication with the public, which we will present at the conference Blue-Green Cities Day 2023: Effective Communication and Food Sovereignty, which will take place on 19 October 2023 at the Old
Town Hall in Prague.
The research team includes experts from different disciplines (sociology, economics, marketing, public administration and
urban planning) who build on their previous outputs on better stormwater management in urban environments, such as the Water in the City methodology.