This study departs from the insight that urban and spatial planning in formerly rural areas cannot import design imaginaries from “the city”. What we find architecturally exciting about “the city” will never happen in Mettmenstetten; insisting on this would be to completely misunderstand the character of urbanisation processes currently taking place in agricultural territories. 

The investigation is based on the characteristics which once determined both the geomorphological and the biophysical realities of these territories: the surface of the earth. Thus, we ask, to what extent could a designed manipulation of the ground serve as an approach to steer spatial development? In other words, could the ground represent the organising principle for the future urban topography?

To answer this question, we have identified five study areas— the five places—corresponding to the five territorial typologies developed in Switzerland: An Urban Portrait. Urbanisation has already transformed the agricultural foundations in all study areas, which are closely linked to metropolitan centres. However, since they have been transformed by different urbanisation processes, the current dynamics of development are distinct in all five areas. In these and many other areas, this has not resulted in a specific spatial order. Rather, it has produced a type of area management, which is loosely related to the instrument of the zoning plan. The study describes this specific process and explores the urban design potentials it has opened up.