Disembodied futures: From population growth to speculative urbanism and right-wing populism in Zurich

Official URL
Abstract
Zurich, Switzerland's largest and one of the wealthiest cities worldwide, has a fraught relationship with growth. In 2018, the municipality issued a masterplan geared towards an anticipated population increase by 25% until 2040. While city government promises good growth through "steered" development and by espousing a future-oriented narrative of world-class urban aspirations, Zurich’s population has been known to have "growing pains": a spatially and culturally conservative attitude to growth. Through disembodied speculative calculations of a yet-to-come future population, a resistance to growth is fuelled that is, in turn, “fleshed out” in locally disseminated imaginaries of a city much too crowded, filled with “unwanted” bodies, prone to the erosion of local identity.

I draw from long-term fieldwork on some of the sites supposed to absorb Zurich's growth, namely the city's land reserves: municipal plots of land currently inhabited by some of Zurich's marginalized communities. Putting the ethnographic data from everyday future-making on these lots in conversation with the futuring techniques used by the municipal statisticians crafting population growth scenarios, this paper will show how the disembodiedness of hegemonic urban futures is a) shaped by global financial logics of speculation, and b) gives way to culturally grounded right-wing populist urba- and xenophobia.
Date Issued
2025-04-10
Publication Type
Conference Item
Subject(s)
Language(s)
en
Author(s)
Additional Credits
Title of Event
Access(Rights)
metadata.only
Show full item