Will urban sprawl in Switzerland ever end?
Mathias Lerch is researcher at EPFL. © A. Herzog/EPFL
Public policies aimed at curbing urban sprawl have limited effects, says Mathias Lerch in this column. The ENAC researcher cites a study conducted by his laboratory on peri-urbanization in Switzerland since the 1960s.
In the second half of the 20th century, internal migration in Switzerland drew people away from congested city centers and towards sparsely populated city outskirts, in a process sometimes referred to as peri-urbanization. It’s widely known that this kind of urban sprawl has negative consequences on the environment and public health since it leads to higher pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the devastation of invertebrate species, the depletion of ground-water reserves and the creation of heat islands.
To bring people back into city centers, Swiss city officials launched large-scale residential construction projects, set zoning moratoriums on buildable land, updated the country’s land use planning act, and put caps on the number of secondary residences. At my research lab, we wanted to find out whether these policy measures have indeed put an end to urban sprawl. Our work involved analyzing changes in Switzerland’s urban geography of internal migration all the way back to the 1960s.
A temporary phenomenon
After four decades of suburban expansion, some Swiss cities did, for the first time, see a reversal in this trend – where the number of university-age adults and young highly skilled workers moving into cities was higher than the number of those moving out – in the early 21st century. But then the old pattern remerged in the 2010s. So what prompted residents to once again abandon city centers and settle in suburbia?
In the 2010s, gentrification and soaring rental prices pushed students and families towards the outskirts.
Our study found that the reason lies with several trends that occurred at the turn of the 21st century but that faded over time. For instance, several universities and other higher-education establishments opened in cities during that period, attracting many students, while industrial brownfield sites were redeveloped to provide new, affordable housing. But in the 2010s, gentrification and soaring rental prices pushed students and families towards the outskirts. What’s more, the population growth seen in city centers in the early 2000s was driven essentially by a record peak in international migration, rather than by internal migration, and other studies have shown that half of immigrants to Switzerland leave after five years and those who stay tend to prefer housing in the suburbs.
Muted effects in practice
We also found that many of the policies introduced by Swiss city officials didn’t have the desired effects. For example, voters in Geneva rejected several large urban housing projects. And some towns near Zurich, in an effort to attract taxpayers from the city, have already used up their zoning permits (granted by the cantonal government) for new buildings for the coming decades. Compounding the problem, housing in gentrified city centers has become very expensive, leaving poor and middle-class families no choice but to move to the suburbs.
Mathias Lerch, director of the Urban Demography Laboratory (URBDEMO), EPFL
- This article was published in March 2023 in three local dailies – La Côte (Vaud Canton), Le Nouvelliste (Valais Canton) and Arcinfo (Neuchâtel Canton) – under a joint initiative between EPFL and ESH Médias to showcase the R&D being carried out at EPFL on advanced construction techniques.