Switzerland as a Single Metropolitan Area?
Main Station Bern (© Foto SBB)
A Study of its Commuting Network.
Out of the many ingredients that together build urban areas, three deserve particular consideration as their relationship is evolving: the functional centrality, the morphology of built-up areas and the way of life. Those three characteristics do not necessarily match along territorial lines anymore. To overcome this limitation, Dr. Pierre-Emmanuel Dessemontet (CEAT - Urban and Regional Planning Community) and Prof. Vincent Kaufmann (LASUR - Urban Sociology Laboratory) suggests approaching urbanity in terms of cohesion. To illustrate this approach under a specific analytical point of view, they describe a cohesion index based on the commuter relationships between the Swiss communes from 1970 to 2000. For 2000, further distinction is made between car-based and public transport-based commuting patterns, which allowed discrimination between two scales of cohesiveness between the Swiss agglomerations.