The Coordination of Local Policies for Urban Development and Public Transportation in Four Swiss Cities

The present article aims at assessing the possibility for urban areas to coordinate local policies of urban development and public transportation and at explaining the differences in this achievement between urban regions. In order to do so, the study draws support from two empirical sources: a historical analysis of the “mass-production” generated by the public service sectors in the field of transport and urban development in the cities of Basel, Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne since 1950, and a series of six case studies in these four cities. The study identifies factors located both at context level regarding morphological and geographical conditions as well as institutional settings and case-specific idiosyncrasies regarding organizational structure, past policy decisions, as well as vocational cultures that determine the possibility for urban areas to meet the need for policy coordination. In Switzerland as in other countries, the principal stake of land-use planning is first and foremost a problem of rising mobility and growing space needs. The more mobile society has become, past urban microcosms centralizing working, shopping, lodging, and leisure activities have increasingly spread out into the suburbs and functional differentiation has taken place. “The centre attracts the service industry. The more services concentrate in the centre, the more industries can specialize and attract people from far distances. The service industry is able to pay higher rents than residents. Land prices rise. Residents are driven out. They may still work in the city . . . , but they have to find an apartment in the suburbs. . . . Traffic grows faster than anything else. Urban people become commuters. Part of their growing income and leisure time must be spent on longer daily travel between work, shopping, recreation, and home spaces” (Linder, 1994, p. 77). All of these transformations, regarding lifestyles as much as space morphology, constitute the nucleus of the urbanization process. The first observations of this process were described by the American urbanist Melvin Webber beginning in the 1960s. In Europe, the topic has been Direct Correspondence to: Vincent Kaufmann, Urban Sociology and Mobility, Laboratoire de Sociologie Urbaine, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Station 16, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected]. JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Volume 28, Number 4, pages 353–373. Copyright C © 2006 Urban Affairs Association All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0735-2166. juaf ̇300 JUAF2006.cls (1994/07/13 v1.2u Standard LaTeX document class) 7-3-2006 :1092 354 II JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS II Vol. 28/No. 4/2006 extensively documented since the end of the 1980s in various fields, such as sociology (Bassand, Joye, & Schuler, 1988; Gazzola, 2003; Le Galès, 2002; Remy & Voyé, 1992; Urry, 2000), geography and urbanism (Choay, 1994; Lévy, 1999; Lofland, 1998; Thrift, 1996), and political science (Heinelt & Kübler, 2005; Judge, Stoker, & Wolman, 1995; Lefèvre, 1998; Sharpe, 1995; Y, 2005, 2006). The key issue in this development is the question of mobility. The more people move to the suburbs, the more commuter traffic there is in the central city, rendering the centre less attractive for residents. Within the same logic, residents who are able financially will spread out even further, which urbanizes the suburbs. Therefore, the integration of the policies for urban development and transportation constitutes the crucial means for curbing the spread of urbanization and upholding the standards set for fighting pollution (Keeling, 1995; Newman & Thornley, 1996; Offner, 1993; Pharoah & Apel, 1995; Wiel, 2005). On the one hand, housing developments concentrated around areas of high public transport services implement a restrictive parking policy to check the growth of automobile traffic (Banister et al., 2000). On the other hand, an urban planning policy aims to promote “the compact city” (Jenks, Burton, & Williams, 1996), which requires a formative public transport network to absorb the concentration of the flows naturally caused by this type of urban arrangement. This integration is ensured by coordinating the sectoral policies governing urbanization with those governing city transportation. At the core of this need for coordination is the problem of cooperation. “The contemporary practices of administrative conjunction appear to be specifically designed to solve, to ameliorate, or at least to address issues associated with the disarticulation of the state, high jurisdictional and disciplinary fragmentation, and diminished bureaucratic capacity. . . . The key to such cooperation is interdependence, and there are no more interdependent jurisdictions, organizations, and institutions than those that make up metropolitan areas” (Frederickson, 1999, p. 706). In the following, based on Scharpf (1994, p. 27f.) the term “coordination” will be used as a welfare-theoretic conQ1 cept: “[Coordination] is considered desirable whenever the level of aggregate welfare obtained through the unilateral choices of interdependent actors is lower than the level which could be obtained through choices that are jointly considered. In other words, the term is used here to describe forms of accommodation that are more demanding than the adjustment based on mutual anticipation.” This definition implies that the cooperation of the relevant actors for transport policy decisions constitutes a necessary condition for coordination. In Switzerland, a small central European country with dense populations in its urban areas, the problems previously illustrated are greatly enhanced, due to the lack of available space. Preserving territories from urban development requires a very ambitious land-use policy. The present article aims at assessing the possibility for urban areas to meet this need for coordination and to explain the differences between Swiss conurbations in this achievement. The following will argue that planning processes are shaped by institutional constructs, historic traditions, and community perceptions. Concretely, based on a historical analysis of the “massproduction” generated by the public service sectors in the field of transport and urban development in the four urban areas of Basle, Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne, we will argue that an interrelation between the compactness of the cities, the evolution of integration between development and transport, the scope of coordination, and the type of institutions involved in this coordination can be detected. From these observations, a set of hypotheses will be derived and discussed comparing six case studies of these four cities. The findings from the qualitative comparative analysis of the cases will then be integrated in a temporal perspective on the process of coordination by seizing both the analogies and the differences between the test cases. In the first section, the empirical and analytical approach of the present study will be presented, consisting of a two-step comparative case study design, the choice of the respective cases, and the methodology employed. In the section that follows, the four Swiss agglomerations of Basle, Bern, juaf ̇300 JUAF2006.cls (1994/07/13 v1.2u Standard LaTeX document class) 7-3-2006 :1092 II Coordination of Local Policies II 355 Geneva, and Lausanne are presented in terms of spatial structure and mobility, the conceptualization of the link between urban development and transport, and the measures implemented in the four cities to coordinate this link will be examined subsequently. The article will then discuss the hypotheses for the explanation of coordination performance extracted from this comparison using six case studies focused on actual planning decisions and three lines formative to the process of coordination. The conclusion consists of a final analysis summarizing both the theoretical arguments and the empirical findings. RESEARCH DESIGN, CASE SELECTION, AND METHODOLOGY The empirical approach of the present study consists of a two-step comparative case study design. In the first step, the four agglomerations of Basle, Bern, Lausanne, and Geneva will be compared with respect to their achievements in terms of coordinating transport and land use. Explanations of the observed differences will be derived based on the historical analysis of the respective master plans. As for the test of these hypotheses, a second comparative case study design will be employed, this time focusing on actual decision cases in the form of six infrastructure projects marked by a need for policy coordination in the four urban areas. A comparative case study design has been employed as the actual data collection embraced “how” and “why” questions, and as little control over the events and processes that form the units of analysis could be exerted (cf. Yin, 1990, p. 1). Following a “most similar cases” design, the four urban areas, as well as the actual decision cases, have been selected to “maximize the variance of the independent variable and to minimize the variance of the control variables” (Lijphart, 1975, p. 165). The chosen four agglomerations of Basle, Bern, Lausanne, and Geneva (cf. map 1) have the same institutional superior framework in Q2 the form of the Swiss planning, as well as political system. All are about the same size, but differ in their planning tradition. They were nevertheless selected for their contrasting features, that is, cultural make-up (German speaking as against French speaking, cf. map 2), location (cross-border or strictly national), institutional structure (degree of independence at the municipal level), urban density, and use of modes of transport. The language variable is an important factor to be taken into account in analyzing social processes in Switzerland. A standard finding in Swiss political science indicates that differences with regard to both direct democracy and administrative culture more or less coincide with the language regions. Here, the generally more participatory political institutions in the German-speaking cantons provide incentives for a more intense associational life than the French-speaking ones (Kriesi, 1996; Kriesi & Baglioni, 2003).1 Q3 The six decision cases then regard both land-use and transport issues, varying to a great extent within their institutional and organizational characteristics. The cases were selected employing three criteria: 1. The rapidity with which decisions taken were integrated into the project; 2. The institutional levels involved in the project; 3. The instance, or lack thereof, of a cross-border dimension to the case. Three of the cases retained are located in German-speaking Switzerland and the other three in the French-speaking region of the country. These six case studies can be grouped in pairs according to the nature of the project and the location (Table 1). In these case studies, we focus as much on the constitution of the project, its context, and its objectives, as how various actors involved in implementing the project position themselves and interact with one another. In other words, the construction of the coordination process is explored as a system of social action. juaf ̇300 JUAF2006.cls (1994/07/13 v1.2u Standard LaTeX document class) 7-3-2006 :1092 356 II JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS II Vol. 28/No. 4/2006