Starting from current debates on 'global suburbanism' and 'postsuburbia', this art icle explores the changes that the former 'urban periphery' of Zurich North has experienced in the last three decades. It mobilizes Henri Lefebvre's triadic concept of conceived, perceived and lived space in aid of an analysis of the profound urban transformations that can be observed. The construction of a new tramline serves as a guideline for an anal ysis of the implementation of new governance arrangements strengthening crossborder cooperation between individual municipalities and new strategies of cooptation and expertise. This resulted in the production of new urban structures which led to a more densely woven and connected urban fabric primarily providing spaces for the headquarter economy and middleclass housing. Concomitantly, great efforts have been made to create new public spaces, an urban image and even an urban atmosphere. These have proved at least partially successful, thus promoting a symbolic redefinition of the former urban periphery as a distinctively 'urban' space. Conventional definitions and concepts no longer suffice to adequately understand such novel urban forms, leading to the conclusion that division into an 'urban' and a 'suburban' world is no longer a useful tool for urban analysis.
Abstract. The Metropolitan Region of Zurich is fragmented into eight cantons and marked by ideological cleavages. Nevertheless, the "Association Metropolitan Region Zurich" has established since 2007. The paper asks, how the metropolitan restructuring is possible. Tracing the question, first the scale-debate is opposed to the spatial governance-debate and it shall be argued that the scale-debate serves as a more precise tool of analysis. Building on this theoretical foundation the institutionalising of the association is analysed on the basis of 13 expert interviews. Three points are of particular relevance: First, precisely the fragmentation of the metropolitan region forms a crucial reason for the rapid introduction of the association. Second, the institutionalisation brings a subtle power to the association because it does not openly question the federalist system. Third, its agency manifests in territorial implications such as the revision of a national infrastructure plan or a metropolitan spatial plan, which both are made possible by simultaneous processes of informalisation and formalisation on a new scale. At the end it shall be demonstrated that the association's neoliberal agenda is hardly contested, raising the question of the scale of possible opposition.
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