{"id":9765,"date":"2025-03-11T13:33:36","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T12:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/2025\/03\/11\/at-the-ends-of-autobahn-urbanism-2\/"},"modified":"2025-04-23T17:59:28","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T15:59:28","slug":"at-the-ends-of-autobahn-urbanism-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/2025\/03\/11\/at-the-ends-of-autobahn-urbanism-2\/","title":{"rendered":"At the Ends of Autobahn Urbanism"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a century, highways have shaped cities, economies, and national identities. But in November 2024, Swiss voters rejected a CHF 5 billion highway expansion, signaling a shift away from infrastructure-led urbanisation. As nations worldwide double down on highway-driven growth, Switzerland\u2019s moratorium invites us to rethink mobility, territorial organisation, and the ecological future beyond Autobahn urbanism.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In a historic referendum in November 2024, the Swiss public rejected the 2023 Federal Decree for expanding the national highway programme \u2013 a CHF 5 billion investment. While domestically this moratorium redirects public funding toward public transport and sustainable transit alternatives, its true significance, which has been underplayed thus far, lies internationally. In a world that has seen the resurgence of strongman populists and its corollary infrastructure politics, this democratic reversal of infrastructure-led extended urbanisation offers hope and a chance to explore socio-environmental alternatives to depletion-driven Autobahn urbanism.<\/p>\n

Autobahn Urbanism Fuels Rapid Construction<\/h3>\n

The model of Autobahn urbanism has evolved over the past century but has gained traction in recent years, particularly across the Global South and East, as a path-dependent strategy for rapid economic growth. The recent highway corridor boom \u2013 exemplified by China\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative fueling rapid construction in European peripheries like Montenegro, India\u2019s Bharatmala highway programme replacing fertile farmland with thousands of kilometers of highways, and Turkey\u2019s expanding Marmara network \u2013 has reinforced this trend.<\/p>\n

While these highway programmes have faced significant social contestation, Switzerland\u2019s binding moratorium \u2013 pioneered in the country with the densest highway network and, in some ways, its ideological birthplace \u2013 marks a turning point. Few may know that the inventor of the modern Autobahn, Piero Puricelli, trained as an engineer at ETH Zurich in the early 1900s. His Autostrada dei Laghi (now the A8), which connected Milan to Lake Como in 1924, reshaped the relationship between urbanisation, the countryside as a national-romantic landscape, and the nation itself as a unit of spatial experience. This approach would go on to define highway programmes worldwide.<\/p>\n

What is at Stake?<\/h3>\n

Driving along Nationalstrassen \u2013 built during the postwar boom of the 1960s \u2013 one could traverse romanticised nature reserves, experiencing a form of national belonging unbound by metropolitan and regional divisions. This experience of extended urbanisation is vividly captured in the 1981 Swiss film Reisende Krieger, as Christian Schmid describes it. Thus, what is at stake at the end of Autobahn urbanism is not only its environmental consequences \u2013 material and energy consumption \u2013 but also the futures of Nature \u2013 with a capital \u00abN\u00bb and the national territorial organisation it helped shape.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Portrait<\/a>Dr. Nitin Bathla<\/a> is a Zurich-based scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of urbanisation, the environment, and society, bridging the disciplines of urban studies, ecology, geography, and sociology. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies in Landscape and Urban Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary film Not Just Roads. His transdisciplinary and pluriversal research approaches actively combine academic inquiry with artistic practices such as filmmaking and socially engaged art.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a century, highways have shaped cities, economies, and national identities. But in November 2024, Swiss voters rejected a CHF 5 billion highway expansion, signaling a shift away from infrastructure-led urbanisation. As nations worldwide double down on highway-driven growth, Switzerland\u2019s moratorium invites us to rethink mobility, territorial organisation, and the ecological future beyond Autobahn urbanism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9753,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"departemente":[155,117,198],"newsletter_ausgabe":[356],"class_list":["post-9765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter-articles","departemente-department-of-architecture-d-arch","departemente-institute-for-landscape-and-urban-studies-lus","departemente-prof-dr-christian-schmid-en","newsletter_ausgabe-nl-65-2"],"acf":[],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":38,"label":"Newsletter-articles"}],"departemente":[{"value":155,"label":"Department of Architecture (D-ARCH)"},{"value":117,"label":"Institute for Landscape and Urban Studies (LUS)"},{"value":198,"label":"Prof. Dr. Christian Schmid"}],"newsletter_ausgabe":[{"value":356,"label":"NL 65"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Stopp-Autobahn-Bauwahn-scaled-1-1024x688.jpg",1024,688,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"Yaxin Hou","author_link":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/author\/houya\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":38,"name":"Newsletter-articles","slug":"newsletter-articles","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":38,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":680,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":38,"category_count":680,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Newsletter-articles","category_nicename":"newsletter-articles","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9766,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9765\/revisions\/9766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9765"},{"taxonomy":"departemente","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/departemente?post=9765"},{"taxonomy":"newsletter_ausgabe","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xoxo.capsule.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newsletter_ausgabe?post=9765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}