It’s out! Please download, read, and share!

A pretty massive nationwide effort, all told, and yet we did it!

I can’t quite express how grateful I am to all the contributors for getting this done so quickly and so well. It was practically an impossible project, deadline-wise, and yet we did it.

So what is this? I contacted (almost) every university in Switzerland in order to solicit short articles, loosely referenced where appropriate, to explain what research on the urban looks like at these institutions. I got excellent contributions from the cantonally-funded universities at Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Bern, Basel, Zurich, and Lugano, as well as the federally-funded ETH and EPFL.

Sadly, there are no geography departments at Luzern or St Gallen, so they don’t have chapters here – even though there might be good urban work going on at those institutions! I’d love to include them, and this problem has been keeping me up at night. Moreover, it appears that the fine geographers at Fribourg haven’t done anything with the urban recently, so they’re absent as well. Finally, the Hochschulen also had to be excluded for now, because otherwise the project would balloon to insane proportions.

Regardless of these omissions, the goal was to know – broadly speaking, and regarding the urban – who is working on what, and how? Of course this is going to be a partial effort even so, and will undoubtedly leave out much good work. From the introduction:

Think of them as a collection of snapshots that – while necessarily partial and incomplete – nevertheless provides a convenient view of urban research going on in this country. And like any snapshots, we cannot pretend to be comprehensive. There is much that we have been unable to capture and convey, so we would like to offer apologies if there are individuals or trends that we have overlooked. We will make amendments in a future edition, and intend this issue of GeoAgenda not to be the final word, but rather only a starting point. 

It’s my hope that we can use this starting point to begin to minimize the distance between institutions in Switzerland. And I’m eager to continue the conversation, ideally beginning with those people and departments who were left out of this first attempt.

Thank you, everyone, for kicking butt in order to get this done in such short time. It was wonderful to work with you.