Paper short abstract:

What happens when disembodied growth scenarios are “fleshed out” in urban politics and everyday life? Centering Zurich’s sites of anticipated growth and the communities that inhabit them, I examine the exclusionary logics of the urban growth machine.

Paper long abstract:

Zurich, Switzerland's largest and one of the wealthiest cities worldwide, has a fraught relationship with growth. In 2018, the municipality issued a masterplan geared towards an anticipated population increase by 25% until 2040. While city government promises good growth through "steered" development and by espousing a future-oriented narrative of world-class urban aspirations, Zurich’s population has been known to have "growing pains": a spatially and culturally conservative attitude to growth. Through disembodied speculative calculations of a yet-to-come future population, a resistance to growth is fuelled that is, in turn, “fleshed out” in locally disseminated imaginaries of a city much too crowded, filled with “unwanted” bodies, prone to the erosion of local identity.

I draw from long-term fieldwork on some of the sites supposed to absorb Zurich's growth, namely the city's land reserves: municipal plots of land currently inhabited by some of Zurich's marginalized communities. Putting the ethnographic data from everyday future-making on these lots in conversation with the futuring techniques used by the municipal statisticians crafting population growth scenarios, this paper will show how the disembodiedness of hegemonic urban futures is a) shaped by global financial logics of speculation, and b) gives way to culturally grounded right-wing populist urba- and xenophobia.