"URBAN REGIMES COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS IN THE METROPOLITAN AREAS OF GENEVA, ZURICH AND BERN"

This PhD project leaves out the classic institutional view based on the three levels of federalism and addresses the issue of urban power in Switzerland which has been overlooked for decades. It studies the evolution of three metropolitan areas (Geneva, Zurich and Bern) by applying the urban regime theory. An urban regime is defined as "the informal arrangements by which public bodies and private interests function together to make and to carry out governing decisions" (Clarence Stone, 1989:179). It represents a way to implement coherent urban policies designed to effect social change in a city.

An urban regime entails four core elements: a) a governing coalition including public and private actors; b) a common agenda targeting the interests of this coalition; c) the capacity to mobilize resources to sustain this agenda; and finally, d) a scheme of long-term cooperation leading to self-confidence among involved actors (Stone, 1989, 2005:329; Mossberger, 2009:49).

There are diverse types of urban regimes which differ mainly on the goals they pursue. The most important types are the development regime and the progressive regime. Development regimes promote urban as well as economic growth. Business elites provide money and expertise. Public-officials provide popular support as the control of voters is low in development regimes. On the contrary, progressive regimes prioritize environmental protection, heritage preservation and quality of housing over economic development. In progressive regimes, middle-class voters are powerful and give strong legitimacy to elected officials who are then able to constrain private actors (see Stone, 1993).

Distinguishing center and periphery within an agglomeration, this PhD project retraces urban renewal in the six Swiss cities of Geneva, Nyon, Zurich, Winterthur, Bern and Biel. Its first goal is to know whether these cities are governed by an urban regime and which type of regime is it.

Its second goal is to fill a theoretical gap in the urban regime theory. Indeed, urban regime theorists insist on the importance of the exchange of resources between public and private actors but never clearly explain which resources have to be exchanged to form an urban regime. Using resources typologies coming from the literature on public policies, this research will be able to answer this question.

Finally, the emergence of urban regimes remains uncertain in the Swiss political context. On the one hand, setting-up an urban regime should be eased by the narrow links existing between state and non-state actors ensuing from the neo-corporatist model (Katzenstein, 1985; Lijphart, 1999), and by the large political autonomy Swiss municipalities benefit from (Horber-Papazian, 2006). On the other hand, direct democracy can reduce informal cooperation, oppose private interests and delay important urban projects (Borner, 1997). Moreover, Swiss cities and agglomerations face a high-level of institutional fragmentation (Kübler, 2006:265ff.). Together, these factors should restrain the emergence of urban regimes.

The third goal of this research is to tackle the puzzle coming from these diverging institutional pressures and to identify which institutional features influence the most the formation of urban regimes.

This PhD project combines two methods which are complementary: causal process-tracing (CPT) and social network-analysis (SNA). By selecting major urban projects in each city, it conducts full documental analysis on them. Doing so, it will reconstruct the chain of causality and the network of actors for each project. These data will be complemented with 10 to 15 semi-structured interviews for each city under study.

Cited references and indicative literature