Switzerland – Deep Urbanism for an Age of Disruption

“Switzerland – Deep Urbanism for an Age of Disruption”  has been published by Strelka Press, with a foreword by Anastassia Smirnova. The book builds on a course taught in the Advanced Urban Design program at the National Research University & Strelka Institute in Moscow. It describes the role of urbanism in Switzerland, following our National Exposition project. It uses this starting point to sketch a theory of “Deep Urbanism”, a complex systems approach to what cities are and how they interact with a territory, illustrated with the very specific case of Switzerland.

“We perceive urbanity as space, but we live it as interaction. Cities are catalysts for such interactions, stabilizing our relationships through infrastructures and institutions, spaces and stories. Technological progress increases the network depth and speed of interactions, which in turn fuels innovation and progress. The result is self-reinforcing growth and, globally, the ever more-rapid transformation of nature into culture with all the risks this entails. Cities are not static and autonomous. Cities have depth.

This essay, therefore, does not frame the discipline of urbanism as just a design profession that deals with urban spaces and building typologies, and sometimes with history, laws, regulations or land economy. Rather, it proposes a complex system science which I call “Deep Urbanism” and which I define as the discipline of the relationships – the connections and connectedness – that generate a complex system of people and their material, technological and symbolic culture acting on a territory with its specific emergent dynamics and externalities.”