Extended Urbanisation
ETH Studio Basel and the urbanisation of Switzerland
The starting point of this strand of urban research was the project “Switzerland: An Urban Portrait” by ETH Studio Basel, an experimental research and teaching unit of the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, led by Architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron, and sociologist Christian Schmid. Strongly inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s thesis of the complete urbanisation of Society, ETH Studio Basel studied not individual cities or urban regions, but the entire territory of Switzerland. In this way, it became possible to identify different ways of how urbanisation affects and transforms the territory. This resulted in an urban typology of Switzerland, consisting of Metropolitan Regions, Networks of Cities, Quiet Zones, Alpine Resorts and Alpine Fellowlands.
The project accordingly no longer tried to represent urban areas as bounded units, each one clearly delimited from the other, but sought instead to find ways of mapping that are capable of portraying the multidimensional nature and plural determination of urban territories. ETH Studio Basel generated a cartography that operates through superimpositions and consciously deployed imprecision, in order to show the complex structure of urban configurations, and to emphasize their temporary and ephemeral nature.
Switzerland: An Urban Portrait (2006)
Project Territory
In a following project, ETH Studio Basel analysed six huge segments of the globe that stretch across several hundred kilometres each and that are characterised by very different urban conditions. The challenge was that each study area contains a great variation of urban situations: urban centres, peripheral and sparsely populated areas as well as areas characterised by agriculture. The quality of this analysis lies in particular in the systematic layout of the investigation, which allows for comparability of the case studies.
In this project, settlement areas are no longer treated as bounded entities, but as open zones. Urbanisation designates, to a certain extent, the condition of the Earth’s surface. Thus, the entire area must be systematically scrutinized and all sorts of traces of urbanisation must be carefully sought in the terrain. This search includes not only physical traces, but also the social modalities of everyday life. Concomitantly, the scale of the analysis changes as well, because it has to grasp areas that are unusually large for urbanistic analyses.
ETH Studio Basel: Project Territory – research reports (2010 – 2015)
Territories of Extended Urbanisation
Inspired by the results of this research, Milica Topalović, Chair Architecture of Territory and Christian Schmid, Chair of Sociology at ETH Zurich, embarked on a new research project in the framework of the second stage of the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore, applying the concept of “extended urbanisation” as conceived by Brenner’s and Schmid’s conceptualisation of planetary urbanisation.
Schmid, Christian (2019): Analysing Extended Urbanisation. In: Stephen Cairns and Devisari Tunas, Future Cities Laboratory: Indicia 02. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 157–180.
The research team consisted of Nitin Bathla, Elisa Bertuzzo, Rodrigo Castriota, Nancy Couling, Alice Hertzog, Nikos Katsikis, Metaxia Markaki, and Tammy Kit Ping Wong, all experienced researchers already familiar with their study areas. They explored eight territories and analysed how processes of extended urbanisation unfold on the ground. These territories are located across North-South and East-West divides to bring different geographies and urban constellations into comparison and dialogue. The diversity of study areas allowed the team to identify and conceptualise different processes of extended urbanisation. By initiating a transdisciplinary conversation, the team analysed how these territories develop, learning from the different experiences, and building a common understanding of urbanisation processes.
