ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century Switzerland’s socio-economic and territorial structure was profoundly transformed by urbanisation.1 Very much in contrast to the widely publicised cliché of the home of Heidi, the Matterhorn, cheese and chocolate, Switzerland at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a servicebased economy and a highly urbanised country. According to the 2000 population census, 73.3 per cent of the population nowadays lives in cities or communes within metropolitan areas. However, pressures and problems resulting from this urbanisation process have been ignored for a long time. It was only in the late 1990s that the federal government started to show serious concerns for problems faced by cities and metropolitan areas. In 2001 the Federal Agglomeration Policy was finally launched. Among other objectives, it includes important efforts to increase the governance capacity of urban areas, hampered by extensive institutional fragmentation within Swiss federalism.
