Citizenship in the fragmented metropolis: An individual-level analysis from Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Based on a survey of 2010 citizens in four large metropolitan areas in Switzerland, the analysis presented in this article shows that spatial mobility of citizens across municipal borders leads to an upscaling of their territorial identities at the level of the city-region. On the one hand, this results in a favorable attitude towards encompassing institutions at the city-regional scale. On the other hand, given the high degree of institutional fragmentation prevailing in Swiss city-regions, strong city-regional orientations lead to a delegitimization of the local political system. Without adequate reforms of the territorial institutional framework, the ongoing growth and functional integration of city-regional spaces will lead to political alienation and increasingly challenge the democratic legitimacy of the local state in Switzerland. Beyond the Swiss case, the article shows that the long-running debate on metropolitan governance should focus, more thoroughly than in the past, on issues of citizenship and democratic legitimacy.

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation in the framework of the research program Switzerland Towards the Future, as well as the National Center of Competence in Research Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century at the University of Zurich. Previous versions of the article were presented at the conference Comparing Local Citizenship in City-Regions at the University of Umea° in June 2013, as well as at the Urban Affairs Association - European Urban Research Association joint conference City Futures III in Paris in June 2014. I am grateful to the participants of these events for thorough feedback, in particular to Andres Lidström and Linze Schaap. I would also like to thank Rebecca Welge, Michael Strebel, Kushtrim Veseli, and Marco Steenbergen, as well as the anonymous referees for critical comments and helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. The Swiss Statistical Office uses the term agglomeration (Agglomeration in German, agglomération in French, and agglomerato in Italian) to describe functionally integrated urban spaces (Schuler, 1994). Conceptually, this analytical category is very similar to the notion of metropolitan area used by the U.S. Census Bureau (Hoffmann-Martinot & Sellers, 2005), which is why we will use the term metropolitan area as the English synonym in this article. Note that long-distance commuting—while increasingly relevant in Switzerland—has reinforced links between metropolitan areas; nevertheless, a recent analysis shows that each of the main metropolitan areas can still be considered relevant catchment areas for job markets (Dessemontet, Kaufmann, & Jemelin, 2010).

2. Compared to other federations, municipal autonomy is quite high in Switzerland. In their international overview, Sellers and Lidström (2007) qualify Swiss local government as being of medium capacity, and as enjoying rather extensive freedom from supervision by higher government levels.

3. Due to their voluntary nature and widespread skepticism, territorial reforms remained rather limited. Only in the metropolitan area of Lugano, the merger of eighteen suburbs with the core city (eight suburbs merged in 2004, three in 2008, seven more in 2013) contributed to a significant reduction of the institutional fragmentation.

4. A small number of level-three units can result in problems estimating the variance components at that level, when maximum-likelihood estimation with iterative generalized least squares (IGLS; the default option in STATA) is used.When such estimation problems occurred, we used restricted maximum-likelihood estimation as recommended by Steenbergen and Jones (2002, p. 226), implemented with the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) algorithm (see Gould, Pitblado, & Sribney, 2006, p. 19).

5. While our operationalization of leisure time commuting focuses exclusively on the city-region, job-related com- muting is also comprised of commuting to places located outside the city-region, which is the case for 11.8% of working respondents in our sample. Unfortunately, we are unable to distinguish the proportion of long-distance commuters (on this aspect, see Viry, Kaufmann, & Widmer 2008) or persons with polytopic living conditions (see Stock, 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Kübler

Daniel Kübler is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Democracy Studies at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on multilevel governance and democracy, urban politics, and public policy, as well as representative bureaucracy. He has co-edited The Political Ecology of the Metropolis (2013), as well as Urban Mobilizations and New Media in Contemporary China (2015), and has published numerous articles and book chapters.