In Quest of the Good Urban Life: Socio-spatial Dynamics and Residential Building Stock Transformation in Zurich

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This paper discusses socio-spatial dynamics and the transformation of the residential building stock in the global city of Zurich. It deals with five questions. Does Zurich exhibit the type of social polarisation outlined by the global city hypothesis? If so, how does social polarisation become visible in the context of a European city? Which actors in the real estate market are catering to the special tastes of the new urban middle class? With whom does the new middle class compete for space in the city? The paper argues that real estate developers customise the residential building stock and produce residential units for a targeted market—the new urban middle class. Furthermore, a new socio-spatial phenomenon—ennoblement—has evolved, as the new urban middle class takes residence in traditional upper-class neighbourhoods. By investing its own economic capital, this new middle class is hoping to profit from upper-class social and cultural capital

Is This Distance Teaching Planning That Bad?

In spring 2020, university courses were moved into the virtual space due to the Covid-19 lockdown. In this paper, we use experience from courses at Gdańsk University of Technology and ETH Zurich to identify core problems in distance teaching planning and to discuss what to do and what not to do in teaching planning after the pandemic. We conclude that we will not return to the state of (teaching) affairs that we had previously. The availability of recordings of lectures and videos, de-localisation of both students and teachers, the experience of spatio-temporal autonomy will lead to new forms of teaching as both students and teachers experienced some aspects of remote teaching even more efficient than real-world teaching. On the other hand, remote teaching of elements of learning that required interaction, e.g. group and studio work, brainstorming, discussion to foster critical thinking, cannot replace the real experience of the classroom.ISSN:0251-3625ISSN:2166-860