Spatial Planning and Development

Land in densely populated cities and metropolitan regions is scarce. This scarcity requires the efficient and sustainable use of land. There is a broad public and scholarly consensus that higher densities and sustainable mobility strategies in metropolitan regions are desirable because they can lead to multiple positive effects such as containment of urban sprawl and reduction of CO2 emissions. However, such transformations can also produce negative effects such as loss of green spaces, more traffic and noise as well as higher housing costs through new buildings and concomitant displacement effects. In this research field, we analyze densification, its public acceptance and its impacts on the housing market, the affordability of housing and the socio-economic population composition in dense urban areas. At the same time, we investigate sustainable mobility policies, their acceptance and impacts on the mobility behavior and the surrounding areas in general.

Projects in this field range from investigating the possible transformation of railway stations into mobility hubs to examining the housing situation in global metropolises, researching the acceptance and support for densification in Switzerland and analyzing urban-rural relations in spatial planning in intermediate cities in Europe.

Our main research questions in this research field are:

• What planning and governance processes can facilitate sustainable and fair urban densification projects?
• What drives the acceptance and public support for densification projects and densification policies?
• What are the socio-economic effects of urban densification policies?