Paper Short Abstract:

This paper investigates how affective sensations related to future density are politicized and circulated in Zurich. Departing from research done on the city's land reserves, I argue that imaginaries of densification as crampedness consolidate what are considered wanted and unwanted urban bodies.

Paper Abstract:

Predictions of population growth or decline have become ubiquitous techniques of future-making in cities worldwide. In Zurich, Switzerland’s largest and wealthiest city, the municipality has been designing scenarios of growth ever since the beginning of its current wave of urban prosperity in the early 2000s. In 2018, the city released the 166-page master plan "Zürich 2040", based on a vision of 25% population increase by 2040, and planning the city’s transformation to accommodate it. Such future predictions, vague in their disembodiedness and yet seemingly imperturbable, have considerable impact on the affective world of local communities, and are further articulated as urban promises or threats in political initiatives of varying alignments. In this paper, I investigate how bodily sensations related to future density are politicized in Zurich through the circulation of affects such as crampedness and density stress. Departing from articulations of density as promise or threat, I argue that the future imaginaries thereby created and contested consolidate what are considered wanted and unwanted urban bodies. To illustrate this, I will rely on ethnographic data from my long-term fieldwork on Zurich’s "Brachen": vacant lots repurposed as urban commons by local groups, yet turned into strategic land reserves devoted to the future densification envisioned by the municipality. Departing from utopian visions of shrinkage as an urban phenomenon in Zurich, I show how fear of density lodges itself into the future imaginaries of seemingly ideologically opposed actors, such as activists and referendum campaigners on the commons and the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP).