1. Gentrification and Super-Gentrification in the Global City
Tour Guides: Corinna Heye and Christoph Craviolini

In the 1970s, the Seefeld neighbourhood, close to the lake, had a bad reputation because of drugs and “baby” prostitutes. Today, the Seefeld is one of the prime examples of gentrification and super-gentrification. In another part of town, districts 4 and 5 are in an earlier stage of gentrification. Prostitutes and drug dealers, migrants, lower working class and the poor are under pressure. Are the districts 4 and 5 the Seefeld of the future?

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2. From Squat to New Cooperative Housing: A New Wave of Cooperative Housing in the City Centre
Tour Guide: Res Keller

The housing cooperative “Dreieck” – like the cooperatives “Carthago”, “Kraftwerk” or “Hohlraum” – are offsprings of a thriving squatter scene in Zurich of the 80ies and 90ies. The tour will visit the sites of early squats, a number of successful new cooperatives, it will tell a story of a lost battle against neoliberalism at the “Viereck”, and one of a victorious struggle at the neighbouring “Kalkbreite”, where a new housing cooperative will be built next year.

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3. Fights for the City and the Commodification of the Urban: From Paranoia City to Ego City
Tour Guides: Dani Weiss and Christian Schmid

The tour leads to some of the historic scenes and places of the urban revolt of 1980 and its aftermaths in the districts 4 and 5. It follows its traces to the present, visits places of resistance, of hope, and of despair, discusses how drug policies, upgrading strategies and commodification processes changed everyday life in the neighbourhoods and looks for the visible and the hidden signs of the rise of the new metropolitan mainstream in Zurich.

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4. Opera, Dada, Perla: Zurichs Cultural Production
Tour Guide: Philipp Klaus

This tour leads through different neighbourhoods and will tell their history and role in cultural production and consumption. We will see the specific development from a old-fashioned global city with a poor cultural development to a vibrant and creative party metropolis. We will hear about the specific role of the urban revolt of the 1980s and its positive and negative implications.

5. From Industrial to Post-Industrial Zurich: Restructuring of Former Industrial Areas
Tour Guide: Christoph Lanthemann

The tour shows four different conversions of old industrial sites: The “Binz”-area, still partly used for production, with retail, services and even culture entering the area; the “Giesshübel”-area is converted into upscale housing, whereas the “Hürlimann”-area has become a luxury mixed-use development, home e.g. to Google Switzerland. And the old paper factory “Sihlpapier” is now one of the biggest shopping centers in Switzerland.

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6. Mega Projects and New Urbanity in Zurich West: Upgrading the Industrial West
Tour Guide: Monika Spring

Zurich West was once the industrial centre of Zurich. Today, office and hotel highrises, a new university campus in an old dairy and other large scale projects have replaced the interim users of the 1990s, the creative artists and small businesses in the old factories. The tour includes the development area Europa-Allee (the former HB-Südwest and Eurogate) by the railway station as well early projects of social, urban and cooperative housing.

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7. Zurich Nord: Suburbia on Testosterone
Tour Guide: Andreas Hofer

Zurich North is one of the most dynamic regions of Switzerland and it is showing typical aspects of an Edge City: A heterogenous space without political coherence, with brown fields, back offices, traditional garden-city-like working class settlements, agricultural leftovers, shopping centers and newly developed upper class housing, motorways, railways and the nearby airport. Will this place grow into a metropolitan region with an own identity or will it remain a mishmash of all these functions? This is a biketour.

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8. Marginalisation and Upgrading in the Global City or: Where are the Ghettos of Zurich?
Tour Guide: Vesna Tomse

In the last two decades Zurich changed from an „A-city“ of alcoholics, single mothers, old people, migrants, students or simply poor people (all of these words beginning with an “a” in German) into a glamorous global city for the rich and beautiful. The poor were squeezed out of the city. The tour will lead through one of the exodus channels of the poor, from the upgraded developments of Altstetten to the new developments of Schlieren, once deemed the “rubbish bin of Zurich”.

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