Tartu City Architect Jiri Tintera is originally from the Czech Republic and moved to Estonia in 2007. Before taking on the Tartu role, Tintera spent ten years as the city architect in the South Estonian border town Valga. Tintera sees himself as a spatial ombudsman who stands up for good, high-quality public space.

Like many other cities, Tartu is constantly changing. In an interview with the culture show "OP," Tintera said that, just like in Tallinn, there are concerns in Tartu about the old town, as more business are disappearing from the area.

"This is one of the challenges that Tartu definitely needs to address. If you go through the old town in the dark, at night and look at what buildings are there, you can actually often see that the first floor is used, where there are some sorts of services, cafes or restaurants, but the other floors are usually dark. The focus is shifting more and more toward having shopping malls in the suburbs. We already have a situation whereby some services you can only at Lõunakeskus (shopping mall – ed.) for instance," he said.

Construction work on Tartu's new cultural center "Siuru" is due to start in 2026. According to Tintera, Siuru will be a very important building for Tartu. "Siuru should be a place where the people of Tartu can go. Ideally, Siuru will be a building that locals can really be proud of. Something like Helsinki's Oodi (Central Library building – ed.)  is what we would like to achieve. Only time will tell if it succeeds," he said.

Tintera recalled that when he first came to Tartu in 2004, the city center resembled something of a wasteland. "At that time, only Plasku was standing. There was no Kaubamaja, no Kvartal and no Taschen. I still remember being amazed at the emptiness of the city center in what is Estonia's second largest city. This emptiness was not natural. It was unfortunately a consequence of the Second World War. I am convinced that in order for the center of Tartu to function as a city center, it needs to be denser."

In 2021, a light traffic bridge was opened at the intersection of Riia maantee and Vaksali tänav, close to the city's train station. According to Tintera, that bridge is something of a landmark for the city, as it is an infrastructure object aimed at pedestrians and cyclists rather than cars.

"Major infrastructure investments tend to be in large traffic nodes, designed for cars. This shows how we could think through the infrastructure we are building. The architect's perspective is often missing, but here we have managed to make a test case," he said.

However, during heavy downpours, Vaksali tänav has been highly susceptible to flooding.

"We're trying to solve this issue by installing an even thicker pipeline there, which will carry the water to the Emajõgi River," Tintera said. However, he acknowledged that there is a bigger problem in this regard. "We need to make changes to cities so that they can function well in a changing climate without having to install ever thicker pipes. We need to create places in urban spaces that could be submerged for a period, and then at some point the water runs off," he said.

One of Tartu's major concerns is the increase in car traffic, Tintera said. "We need wider and wider roads, but wider driveways cause more congestion. And not only that. When we are driving around the city, we need a lot of parking spaces," he pointed out.

In 2023, a comprehensive parking survey was carried out in Tartu, listing all the public parking spaces in the city. "If you add together all the parking space in the city, then that area is bigger than the whole of the Old Town and the city center put together. In other words, we are using a significant proportion of valuable urban space for parking," Tintera said.

However, he also said that car congestion brings other problems. "Riia tänav in particular has essentially become a transit street, where we could not imagine having a café with an outdoor terrace to sit on. Worst of all, there are a lot of apartment blocks on Riga tänav. Most of them were built after the Second World War and people have lived in them for a very long time. The living conditions of these people were better 30 years ago than they are now. We have become a very wealthy society, and the fact that some people's living conditions have been getting worse every year does not fit the picture of a successful city."

The Jaamamõisa district, known locally as "Chinatown," is being developed by the city, as the wasteland it is situated on belongs to Tartu City Government.

"This gives us the opportunity to plan the district a bit differently. This new district could become a model district in which we try to solve the big problems of new developments in a different way. A good environment is one where as many people from different backgrounds as possible, all live together. Another thing we want is for the new district is for it to be better prepared for climate change," said Tintera.

However, there are no plans to demolish the Soviet-era prefabricated buildings that are already in Jaamamõisa. "There are a lot of people living in each apartment building. A large number of them live in their own apartments. There is no system that would allow those buildings  to be demolished and replaced with something better. We can renovate these buildings to meet the better living conditions we expect from apartment buildings. Eventually, they will also be nicer on the outside too," Tintera explained.

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