New Publication on property in the context of densification
In June 2023, Dr. Gabriela Debrunner, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at IRL/SPUR, received the “Prix-ROREP” 2023 of the Swiss Study Association for Spatial Planning and Regional Policy (ROREP). Her funded project entitled «Who decides on our cities – how, and why? Actors, players, and net-works in the planning of our life spaces» aimed to find out more about the topic of landownership and property in Swiss cities.
A better understanding, basic knowledge, and information on the topic of landownership and property, therefore, could help Swiss communities to take more targeted and strategic measures to effectively manage their densifying housing development. That is particularly the case in the context of implementing the Swiss policy goal of “internal settlement development” (RPG, Art. 1), which obliges Swiss municipalities to develop their settlements within existing city bound-aries.
Methodology & procedure
In the project, a unique «Property Assessment Database” (PAD) analy-sis» tool was developed for the case study example of the “Rohr/Platten-area” in the city of Opfikon (based on St-Hilaire et al., 2023). The PAD is a data-supported analysis tool that collects information relevant to property (e.g. property type, land use, building characteristics, rents, etc.), clusteres, and ultimately visualizes it in a georeferenced manner (GIS analysis). The PAD tool thus enables the system-atic preparation and presentation of property data in Swiss cities - and should then be applied to other cities and, if applicable, to other states.
Interim results & further research
First preliminary results of the project are available via the following ETHZ Research Collection link (see below). The project will be continued in the period from January to July 2024 and supported by the city of Opfikon, Department of Construction + Infrastructure. We would like to thank ROREP and the city of Opfikon for this implementation and application-oriented project collaboration with ETH Zurich, Institute for Spatial and Landscape Development IRL.
Contact & Questions
Questions about the project or initial research results? Contact project manager, Dr. Gabriela Debrunner, at or project employee MAS Mona Gairing at
Citation
Debrunner, Gabriela; Gairing, Mona (2024): Who is densifying our cities, where and how? Contribution of systematic landownership and property data analyzes to the effective settlement densifica-tion, ETH Zurich. external pagehttps://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000661636