Paint a Bench. Change a City

A bench and a city How a wooden plank is rebuilding civic identity in Ústí nad Labem

What if the smartest thing a city could do was hand its residents a paintbrush?

That's essentially the premise behind the Agile Pilot running in Ústí nad Labem — a city in the Czech Republic — and it offers one of the sharpest reflections yet on how the Smart City concept has evolved over the past decade.

The idea

Startup ExoTech Solutions, led by Tomáš Kuchynka, developed a digital community platform that gives citizens tasks and challenges tied to the daily life of their city. Paint a bench. Build a birdhouse. Organise a local event. Each completed task earns credits in a local digital currency called Účka. Those credits unlock access to city-owned facilities — the zoo, the swimming pool, the gym — or offer discounts at neighbourhood cafés and restaurants.

Simple. Tangible. Deeply local.

Smart benches, then and now

Ten years ago, solar-powered benches with USB charging ports were the symbol of urban innovation. They generated excitement, attracted investment, and then quietly disappointed — because technology alone, disconnected from real community needs, rarely improves quality of life. That disappointment did lasting damage to the credibility of Smart City thinking.

In 2026, the benches are back. Wooden. No sensors, no chargers. But arguably smarter than anything that came before — because this time they are a tool for ownership, belonging, and local economic participation rather than a gadget looking for a problem to solve.

Why this matters here

The Ústecký kraj region around the city is one of the most economically challenged in the Czech Republic. It ranks second worst in GDP per capita, has the second lowest share of private entrepreneurs, the lowest net household income, and the highest unemployment rate in the country — including the highest share of long-term unemployed. The city itself has been losing population for three decades, shrinking from 105,000 to roughly 90,000 residents, with deaths now consistently outnumbering births.

Účka alone cannot reverse that trajectory. But as a context-sensitive, community-rooted response to deep structural challenges, it represents exactly the kind of thinking that moves the needle — quietly, meaningfully, and with the potential to scale. It builds a sense of agency in a place where that sense has been eroding for years. It connects residents to their city and to each other. And it puts local entrepreneurs — not just public facilities — at the centre of the reward loop.

This is where "Smart" becomes far more than a label.

The ecosystem

The pilot is the result of collaboration across city and regional institutions: Statutární město Ústí nad Labem (Marek Koníř), Ústecký kraj, CESMOD, the Inovační centrum Ústeckého kraje, and Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. At the national level, the project is supported by the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, CzechInvest, and Gatum Group.

We wish the best of luck to all involved — and to a region that deserves solutions as resilient as the people who live there.

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