Our Urban Portrait was motivated by the wish to examine Switzerland more closely, and from a new perspective, at the beginning of the twenty-first century—especially since all of the participants have been living and working in this country for a long time, and therefore believe they know it blind, so to speak. The object of the investigation lies at our doorstep, but the goal was to describe this known, familiar thing as an urban form and, if possible, understand it in a new way.
We were interested above all in the question of the specific urban character of Switzerland. Although the 1990s saw the publication of urban planning scenarios that described the world’s cities in the age of globalisation as increasingly indistinguishable, as generic, we at the ETH Studio Basel started with the contrary hypothesis: we recognised that globalisation actually reinforces urban differences. Urban patterns are inevitably formed in the physical reality of cities and landscapes, in specific forms of urbanity. We wanted to explore this, with the help of our students, using the nearest object of study: Switzerland.
The result of our research is a new view of Switzerland that calls existing images into question and explores its urban potentials by means of five typologies: the metropolitan regions, the urban networks, the quiet zones, the Alpine fallow lands, and the Alpine resorts.
We developed a project that is radical and new because it calls for and reinforces differences, and because it overcomes borders. However, this project is also simple and almost obvious, because it accepts the existing situation and reinforces present trends. The five typologies of our project are not imposed, invented or enforced by an external power; they are already there. They offer an opportunity to initiate a new perspective and to change ingrained patterns of perception in a country where urban transformations are taboo and therefore can barely be guided.
It is largely unintentional that this Urban Portrait has become a kind of a quiet pamphlet advocating different forms of urbanity in a globalised world—based paradoxically on the analysis of a country in which urbanity has always been suppressed.
