Swiss Town Research Articles

Making Sustainable Places Through Spaces: Role Identity Expansion and Imagination in a Swiss Urban Planning Committee

The transition toward sustainable cities has garnered significant attention from governments, policymakers, and researchers. Mirroring these developments in the academic world, organizational researchers are investigating sustainable placemaking and identifying the conditions that favor such a vital process. Building on a case study of an urban planning committee in the Swiss town of St. Gallen, this research studies how spaces (temporary social settings that enable the negotiation of new ideas) can initiate sustainable placemaking. The interplay between the expansion of space members’ role identities and their imagination of sustainable places is essential to sustainable placemaking. Generalizing these findings, our process model sheds light on the mutual constitution between imagination and role identity expansion inside spaces. The model makes two contributions to the organizational literature: (i) it highlights the importance of role identity expansion in sustainable placemaking processes through spaces and (ii) it discloses the interplay of imagination and identity expansion in spaces.

Form-Based Regulations to Prevent the Loss of Urbanity of Historic Small Towns: Replicability of the Monte Carasso Case

Small towns are a significant component of the landscape in Europe and a key element of its cultural heritage. Currently, they face socio-economic crisis and spatial disintegration. Against this background, the spatial transformation of the Swiss town of Monte Carasso is of particular interest. It was initiated in the 1970s as a design intervention made by the architect Luigi Snozzi and eventually constituted a local spatial policy with a scope to maintain or even restore town urbanity and identity. This paper describes the case through its decomposition into primal elements such as context, main procedure elements, supplementary action, and obtained results. The results were measured by calculating urban parameters and observations compared with the adjacent town of Sementina, whereby they proved that the policy is effective. In the next step, a synthetic diagram was proposed that describes the interrelation between specific elements of the procedure. It was then modified to serve as a model for other possible contexts. Finally, its main potentials and limitations were described. It was concluded that the construction of the Monte Carasso urban regulatory mechanism has the potential to be replicated elsewhere. However, some of its features need to be rethought—mainly the role of an individual architect, which was highly exposed in the original case.

The birth of the ice age: on narrative and climate history in the nineteenth century

On 15 February 1837, the naturalist Louis Agassiz distributed a poem to the audience of one of his lectures, held in the Swiss town of Neuchâtel. The 21 stanza “scientific document,” composed in Ge...

Place, social capital, and mental health: A mixed-methods case study of a community-based intervention.

This study collaborated with the "Neighbourhoods in Solidarity" (NS) action research intervention to understand place, social capital, and mental health for older adults in one Swiss town. It used a longitudinal mixed-methods design, combing a pre/post survey with ethnographic observations. It found that place was a recurring theme throughout the NS intervention and how the NS were able to build social capital. Older adults who participated in the NS experienced an increase in structural social capital, but many participants already had high levels of structural social capital before the intervention. Participants did not experience a significant change in cognitive social capital, but this may have been due to a general decline in cognitive social capital in the area. Neither changes in cognitive nor structural social capital predicted depressive symptoms after one year.

Water, sanitation and mortality in Swiss towns in the context of urban renewal in the late nineteenth century

ABSTRACTThe modernisation of water supply and sanitation in Swiss towns at the end of the nineteenth century contributed to a reduction in waterborne infectious diseases such as typhoid fever. We analyse the association between mortality rates and these large-scale urban infrastructure projects in 15 major Swiss towns between 1876 and 1901. During this period, Switzerland experienced a rapid economic development and modernisation as well as rising living standards. We used panel data regression models with fixed effects to estimate the effects of the sanitary reforms. In 1876, the average typhoid fever mortality rate was 87 deaths per 100,000 people. In 1901 it had decreased to 10 deaths. We find that the introduction of modern water supply reduced typhoid fever mortality rates by 22 percent. Finally, we show that the modernisation of this central urban infrastructure was a complex, step-by-step process.

A novel approach to increase physical activity in older adults in the community using citizen science: a mixed-methods study.

The aims of this study were to implement a novel, community-based physical activity (PA) intervention in a Swiss town with active participation of elderly participants and to evaluate its effectiveness, feasibility, acceptability and sustainability. The CAPACITY intervention combined important determinants of PA, used smartphone apps to provide feedback/facilitate interaction, and followed a citizen science approach to enable participants to organize walking groups. We targeted persons > 60years from Wetzikon. Assessments took place at baseline and after 6months, during this intervention period, and 11months after step-wise withdrawal of the study team. Twenty-nine persons were included in the study; 25 conducted 6-month follow-up. They had a significant increase in moderate-to-vigorous PA (p = 0.046) but not in daily steps (p = 0.331). After the intervention period, key participants took over organization, independently organized monthly get-togethers, added new walking routes and continuously recruit new participants. Eleven months after withdrawal of the study team, 61 people regularly walk in groups together. The novel CAPACITY intervention was successfully implemented, transferred to participants and is now self-sustainable for almost 1year in the community.

Relative Movement: Investigating the Entanglement of Women's Physical and Political Emancipation

This joint research project stems from our seminar "Contemporary Germany through Media and News". 2018 marks 100 years since women gained the right to vote in Germany and Austria and 47 years post-suffrage in Switzerland. To celebrate and assess this milestone, our course is focusing on women's suffrage now and then.
 What does universal suffrage mean now, in a Germany with a female Chancellor and a Parliament containing a right-wing party; in a Europe that is regionalizing; in a world in which governments are in deficit while the richest avoid taxation and finance their chosen interests?
 What did the vote mean then, during the heat of the struggles; when activists risked lives for more self-determination; when societies were organized around working-class women's double burdens and bourgeois women's matrimonial hearths?
 Our materials of study include the following: two feature films that frame the period, Asta Nielsen's die Suffragette (1913), a perhaps ironic love story about the voting struggle in Germany, and Petra Volpe's die göttliche Ordnung (2017), a tale of a small Swiss town's decision for universal suffrage. These films are augmented by contemporary essays by women active in today's public landscape in Europe and texts that thematize women and movement.
 We are each writing on aspects of women's physical and political mobility and aim to publish in the Anthology on Social Justice and Intersectional Feminism. By presenting at Inquiry@Queen's we hope both to share results and improve our work ahead of submission to this peer-reviewed e-journal in early April 2018.

Exploring multivariate representations of indices along linear geographic features

Abstract. A study of the walkability of a Swiss town required finding suitable representations of multivariate geographical da-ta. The goal was to represent multiple indices of walkability concurrently and visualizing the data along the street network it relates to. Different indices of pedestrian friendliness were assessed for short street sections and then mapped to an overlaid grid. Basic and composite glyphs were designed using square- or triangle-areas to display one to four index values concurrently within the grid structure. Color was used to indicate different indices. Implement-ing visualizations for different combinations of index sets, we find that single values can be emphasized or de-emphasized by selecting the color scheme accordingly and that different color selections either allow perceiving sin-gle values or overall trends over the evaluated area. Values for up to four indices can be displayed in combination within the resulting geovisualizations and the underlying gridded road network references the data to its real world locations.

Analyzing Participatory Cultural Practices in a Medium-Scale Swiss Town: How Multiple Belongings are Constructed and Consolidated Through an Interactive Filmmaking Process

Abstract THIS PAPER DEALS WITH A PARTICIPATORY FILMMAKING PROJECT INVOLVING YOUNG RESIDENTS OF A NEIGHBORHOOD IN A SWISS TOWN, LOCAL SOCIOCULTURAL AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE LOCAL POLICE, AND AN INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER. SEEKING TO QUERY WHAT PARTICIPATION MEANS IN SUCH A SETTING, WE PROPOSE AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK THAT CONSIDERS THREE SCALES OF PARTICIPATION: THE PARTICIPATORY NODE, THE PARTICIPATIVE COLLABORATION, AND PARTICIPATION AS AN ARGUMENT IN THE TOP-DOWN SETTING OF A MUNICIPAL POLICY. AS RESEARCHERS, WE ACTIVELY PARTICIPATED IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE ENTIRE RAW UNEDITED FILM MATERIAL THAT DOCUMENTS THE WHOLE PRODUCTION PROCESS. FOCUSING ON THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE FILMMAKER AND THE YOUTHS, THE PAPER EXPLORES HOW MULTIPLE BELONGINGS ARE MOBILIZED IN ORDER TO NEGOTIATE THE FRONTIER BETWEEN PARTICIPATION AND AUTHORITY, NAMELY THROUGH JOKING RELATIONSHIPS. WE DIFFERENTIATE THIS FORM OF AUTHORITY FROM THE SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE EXERTED BY INSTITUTIONAL REPRESENTATIVES IN ORDER TO HIGHLIGHT THE CONDITIONS BY WHICH ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP IS MADE POSSIBLE.

The armour of the common soldier in the late middle ages. Harnischrödel as sources for the history of urban martial culture

Abstract The designation Harnischrödel (rolls of armour) lumps together different kinds of urban inventories. They list the names of citizens and inhabitants together with the armour they owned, were compelled to acquire within their civic obligations, or were obliged to lend to able-bodied men. This contribution systematically introduces Harnischrödel of the 14th and 15th c. as important sources for the history of urban martial culture. On the basis of lists preserved in the archives of Swiss towns, it concentrates on information pertaining to the type and quality of an average urban soldier’s gear. Although the results of this analysis are only preliminary – at this point, it is not possible to produce methodologically sound statistics –, the value of the lists as sources is readily evident, as only a smattering of the once massive quantity of actual objects has survived down to the present time.

Switzerland’s hidden hub

The last hour of a train ride from Zurich to Lugano, Switzerland, is the best. As the train moves from the German- to the Italian-speaking region of the country, it ducks every few minutes into a tunnel through a mountain in the foothills of the Alps, emerging into a new Swiss vignette—a succession of quaint villages in valleys, each more enchanting than the previous. Curved around the banks of Lake Lugano, the destination city is the largest in Ticino, the only wholly Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. To the visitor, it seems to maintain a balance between a relaxed Italian culture and the watchlike precision and order of Switzerland as a whole. That balance has helped nurture the region’s drug industry. Among the small businesses with factories nestled between Alpine foothills is a concentration of pharmaceutical activity mostly unknown to anyone outside Switzerland. Basel, the northern Swiss town that is home

Is Fear to Intervene with Problem Gamblers Related to Interveners' Gender and Status? A Study with VLT Operators.

We assess how video lottery terminal (VLT) operators' self-perceive their ability to recognize a problem gambler, to what extent they are approached by problem gamblers seeking for assistance, how many detections and interventions they report, and the reasons they give for not intervening with clients who show signs of problem gambling. We also examine how these variables are related to the operators' gender and status in the establishment. 177 VLT operators anonymously completed a structured questionnaire at the beginning of a responsible gambling training class held in different French-speaking Swiss towns. The operators felt confident in their ability to detect problem gambling behaviors, were rarely approached by problem gamblers seeking assistance, and reported fewer interventions compared to the number of detections. This reluctance to intervene was mainly attributed to the fear of potential negative reactions from the client. Female staff were the most reluctant to intervene and the most fearful of potential negative reactions from the client. Responsible gambling training programs should include coping strategies for dealing with potential negative reactions from clients. Our findings suggest that staff gender and status are two individual characteristics that should be taken into account when planning responsible gambling trainings.

Dwelling-in-motion: Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in the Swiss Alps

ABSTRACTUntil recently, tourist routes typically led from ‘the West’ to the so-called ‘rest’ of the world, and travel guides and travel novels were the essential media for planning a journey. In recent years, however, the intensified circulation of place images through global communication media has connected more and more places with more and more imaginations, while the price reductions in and the expansion of travel offers as well as the economic upswing in parts of the global ‘East’, ‘Middle East’, and ‘South’ have set a rising number of these places within potential reach for ever more people. This paper investigates the places and performances of Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in and beyond a small town hotel in the Swiss mountains. The Swiss Alps are quite a ‘traditional’ destination of Indian tourism, as they were discovered by the Indian Bollywood film industry as a filming set as early as in the 1980s. Today, many Swiss towns display a comprehensive tourist infrastructure that specifically cares for the services needs of Indian tourists. Building on ethnographic field research and based on recent tourism mobilities studies, this paper explores the practices of Indian tourists in a transitory mode of dwelling and in a place familiar to them through the images produced by the film industry. Moreover, it retraces the way in which the Indian tourists’ practices of dwelling-in-motion have been co-produced and received by service and sales personnel as well as the local population, and how rather immobile imaginations rooted in colonial times structure both the discourses and interactions in the local tourist space.

Reputation, volunteering, and trust: Minimizing reliance on taste-based explanations

We develop a model of public good contributions as signals of the contributor's trustworthiness, and test the predictions of this model using data on volunteering in small Swiss towns. Unlike most previous work, we avoid assuming that agents simply have a taste for prestige, and instead model the material value of a prosocial reputation. The model predicts that, specifically in small communities with low population turnover where reputation is important, volunteering will decline with age (as the end of the agent's reputational game approaches). In communities with higher turnover, this effect will not be observed. Our results support this hypothesis. The model also implies that the presence of a public good which must be provided voluntarily enhances trust in bilateral market and non-market interactions.

Max Horkheimer: The struggle against Total Bureaucratization

In July 1973, at the age of 78, Max Horkheimer passed away In the Swiss town of Montagnola. If not the founder, he has at least the most important director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, from which the famous name “Frankfurt School” is derived. Actually, if we can believe Habermas, who began his academic career as Adorno’s assistant, there was never a Frankfurt ‘’school’’ in the strict sense of the word, except of course in its first year in exile from Germany after the escape from Nazism. At any rate, Horkheimer, more than Adorno and with grater incisiveness than Marcuse and Fromm, represents a basic point of reference for an intellectual climate that has had, despite obvious limitation, a crucial influence on both Marxist and non-Marxist thought. More rigorous than Adorno, and more open to economic and practical reality than Marcuse, the cautious Horkheimer was throughout the secure point of reference, especially after his return in Frankfurt.

Excess weight among children and adolescents in Switzerland--prevalence and correlates for the early 2010s.

To determine the prevalence of overweight and obesity, and some of their social correlates among children in Switzerland. Data from population and sample studies of school children of different grades from eleven Swiss towns and cantons, gathered in the framework of medical examinations at state schools in the school years 2010/11, 2011/12 or 2012/13, were used. Body mass index (BMI) was used to classify children as normal weight, overweight or obese. The term "excess weight" refers to children who are either obese or overweight. A total of 17.0% of the children and adolescents were affected by excess weight (including obesity), of which 3.9% were obese. Excess weight was more prevalent at higher school levels (highest level: 20.5%; middle level: 18.2%; basic level: 12.3%), among foreign nationals (basic level: 19.0%; middle level: 26.1%; highest level: 29.3%) as opposed to Swiss nationals (basic level: 11.4%; middle level: 15.2%; highest level: 19.8%) and among children whose parents had only attended compulsory school (basic level: 24.5%; middle level: 37.6%; highest level: 28.3%) as opposed to children whose parents had tertiary schooling (basic level: 8.4%; middle level: 10.6%; highest level: 14.3%). Differences with respect to sex and area of residence were rather small and disappeared in multivariate statistical analyses controlling for the effect of nationality and social background. Excess weight is widespread but not equally distributed among children in Switzerland. Strategies aimed at reducing the number of overweight children need to take into account social differences between different groups.

Appartenances en fête : entre l’ordinaire et le spectaculaire

While regular religious practice is decreasing and the major religious groups are losing formally registered members, a ‘spectacularization’ of religious belonging can be observed over the last two decades. The author presents two examples to support this argument. In the first, the transnational network of the Murids, a Sufi brotherhood, has tried to reinforce the relations between its members, which become fragile during migration. The brotherhood occupies a public space in Harlem, and, to a lesser extent, in Paris, in a spectacularization of religious belonging, in order to remain attractive to migrants. The second example deals with the pilgrimage dedicated to African Saints in the Swiss town of Saint Maurice. This event was invented by the missionary service of the Swiss Catholic Church in order to attract African migrants, but also in order to make ordinary religious practice more appealing. The event takes place at the same time as the Ugandan pilgrimage of Namugongo, which assembles more than half a million people. However, are these ‘event communities’ sustainable or ephemeral?

Hugo Ball—Kurt Schwitters. Studien zur literarischen Moderne Von Gerhard Schaub

Reviewed by: Hugo Ball—Kurt Schwitters. Studien zur literarischen Moderne Von Gerhard Schaub Arndt Niebisch Hugo Ball—Kurt Schwitters. Studien zur literarischen Moderne. Von Gerhard Schaub. Würzburg: Ergon, 2012. 422 Seiten. €55,00. This volume of collected essays by the literary scholar Gerhard Schaub concentrates on the modernist authors Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters. Both authors have in common [End Page 328] that they are central for our understanding of modern literature and avant-garde art, or more precisely of Dada, but these two figures are also outsiders within modernism. Ball, one of the founders of Dada Zurich, was also the first to distance himself from the movement, and Schwitters was rejected by Richard Huelsenbeck as a petit bourgeois and would not become part of Dada Berlin. However, he embarked on his own journey towards his specific version of Dada, namely Merz. Schaub takes this ambivalence that places Ball and Schwitters simultaneously at the center and periphery of modernism as a main focus. Accordingly, his essays do not highlight the activities of the authors at the pivotal moments of the Dada movement, but discuss them from the topographical and biographical sidelines. For example, Schaub zooms in on three weeks in 1916 when Ball stayed in the small Swiss town of Ermatingen, a period that is largely neglected in Dada scholarship. Similarly, the Schwitters part focuses on the author’s exile and pays particular attention to the fairly brief periods of time that Schwitters spent in Switzerland. Schaub discusses in detail how these relatively brief visits are of importance for an understanding of Schwitters’ artistic project and for grasping the gravity of his increasingly desperate situation after 1930. Schaub increases his attention to detail yet further by concentrating on a soiree in 1935 in Basel at the home of the art collectors Annie and Oskar Müller-Widmann, where Schwitters read his poetry. It is in line with this peripheral optic that Schaub approaches the œuvre of both authors by discussing rather neglected texts. For example, the first analysis of the book focuses on Ball’s poem Totentanz 1916. Schaub demonstrates how this poem parodies war propaganda, echoes the tradition of the danse macabre, adapts the popular tune of the Dessauer marching song for a subversive effect, and outlines how this text was even used by the French as anti-war propaganda. Schaub acknowledges that this text received hardly any attention, that it was never canonized, and that it can rarely be found in anthologies. However, he points out that it was also an integral and popular element of the performances in the Cabaret Voltaire. The other essays also engage with the periphery of Ball’s œuvre and concentrate on Ball’s prefaces, the early play Der Henker von Brescia, and his correspondence. The first essay on Schwitters focuses on the difficult task of exploring Schwitters as a performer, and Schaub excavates with great precision the traces of Merz performances, reconstructing a vivid picture of Schwitters as an orator. The main focus of the Schwitters part, however, lies on Schwitters’ time in exile. Schaub’s text “Wer will Flüchtlinge nehmen?” reconstructs impressively how Germany became an increasingly hostile environment for Schwitters to which he could not return. The following essays take up this discussion and highlight the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland as the most important countries of Schwitters’ exile. Schaub discusses in particular that while Schwitters had the strongest professional connections in the Netherlands, Norway became the place of greatest economic success for him. Schaub details how Schwitters turned to naturalistic landscaping painting in Norway and was able to make a living by selling these pictures to tourists. Although Schwitters loved the Norwegian landscape and had a decent income, he recognized that this was not the place for developing his abstract and modern approaches to art. As Schaub carefully lays out, Switzerland and in particular Basel was the place where Schwitters hoped to continue his Merz project. Schaub focuses especially on the Müller-Widmanns, [End Page 329] who, as close friends of Hans Arp, had a great interest in Schwitters’ work. The Schwitters part concludes with the Merz reception after 1945. Schaub discusses the initial problems and lack...

Jeunes filles scoliotiques et orthopédie à la Belle Epoque: l’essor urbain de la mécanothérapie à Lausanne et Genève

In Belle Epoque towns marked by the industrial and medical surge, a new technical therapy, called mechanotherapy, emerged, stemming from Swedish medical gymnastics and auxiliary to orthopaedics. Aiming mostly at treating scoliosis, this therapy by movement attracted a sizeable female clientele to these towns, because of the hygienic and social conceptions feeding col lective imagination linked to the bodies of scoliotic young girls. Taking the Frenchspeaking Swiss towns of Lausanne and Geneva as examples, the article first seeks to describe the emergence of mechanotherapy as a medical and urban phenomenon. It then addresses the role played by scoliosis in this ortho - paedic practice, and examines the clientele attracted to the towns, among which well-born young girls seem to be predominant.

Characterizing Giant Landslides

Analysis of global seismic data helps to catalog rock avalanches and understand how they form. [Also see Report by Ekström and Stark ]