From Mosaic to Network: Social and Cultural Geography in Switzerland

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by RERO DOC Digital Library Published in Social & Cultural Geography 8, issue 4, 635-648, 2007 1 which should be used for any reference to this work From mosaic to network: social and cultural geography in Switzerland Ola Söderström Institut de géographie, Université de Neuchâtel, Espace Louis-Agassiz 1, CH-2001 Neuchâtel, Switzerland, [email protected] Introduction: does Swiss geography exist? system. Universities are mainly funded by the cantons and receive only part (around 25 per It is already a tradition: most country reports ent) of their financial support from the State. in this journal start with questions and doubts There is therefore very little national steering concerning the relevance of thinking about the of education and research.1 The appointment production of geographical knowledge in of professors and researchers in geography national terms. I cannot avoid feeding this departments, for instance, is, unlike France, tradition as Switzerland is a particularly made with no connection to national insti- uncertain and fragmented nation. It is often tutions. Unlike Italy, the national association maintained that it certainly is a State but much of geographers is not a strong and important more dubious whether it really is a nation, forum of decision making and unlike the UK because it has no single language, but four or the USA this association does not organize national ones, no single religion and more an important annual conference and come- than twenty different educational systems. In together of the discipline. other words, Switzerland lacks some of the The consequence of these national specifi- crucial elements of the nation-building tool- cities has for long been a situation with rather box. It is moreover territorially very fragmen- autonomous, non-specialized departments ted: it continues to have a huge number of working like small cantonal baronies, gov- communes (2,900) and the Swiss remain erned by a feudal logic and maintaining extremely keen on maintaining local identity connections mostly with foreign colleagues and cantonal autonomy. and departments. There has been a series of Geography as an academic discipline and negative outcomes to such a situation (which the daily work of geographers are embedded are rather obvious and need not be commented within this political culture and territorial upon here), but also some positive ones. 2 Autonomy and self-containment gave the Geography is to be found in eight out of the possibility for a series of figures to become ten universities in the country. Recently it has original voices in continental European been established also as a laboratory at the geography. The French part of Switzerland, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in in particular, was in the 1970s and 1980s Lausanne.3 Though there has been some rightly considered by our French colleagues as recent changes, geography departments are an area where one could escape from the poor located within natural science faculties in the alternative between Vidalian orthodoxy, on German part and in the Humanities (or the the one hand, and spatial analysis, on the faculties of social and economic sciences) in other. Secondly, linguistic fragmentation, the French part of the country, reflecting which can be seen as a handicap, is also an German and French traditions within the important asset and resource for Swiss discipline. geography. Swiss libraries are not ‘mono- Geography holds a reasonably strong traditional’: they contain remarkable collec- institutional position in Switzerland, due to tions of monographs and journals in German, four main factors. The first is that the French, English, Italian and other languages. discipline has always attracted large numbers As a consequence there is a truly cosmopolitan of students. The second, that geographers have intellectual culture and tradition in Switzer- often held important institutional positions land which manifests itself in its social and within universities and on the boards of the cultural geography. Swiss National Fund of Research, the main Recently things have been changing though. research-funding organization in the country. First, the so-called Bologna agreement signed The third reason is a significant media presence by Switzerland in 1999, leading to the creation (national media are relatively open to the social of standardized curricula for the sake of intra- sciences). And the fourth, the perception within and inter-national mobility, and, second, the the population that geography is an empirically federal politics of education asking for oriented and socially useful discipline.4 increased co-ordination between universities, The situation described above—absence of have triggered the replacement of the old co-ordination, non-specialized departments, (feudal) governance model by a managerial etc.—means that only recently have depart- one. The Swiss being disciplined and serious, the ments and geographers in Switzerland begun pace of change has been spectacular in recent to identify with subfields such as social and years. Most geography departments have now cultural geography and to label their research developed clear profiles and are increasingly and teaching activities accordingly. The sub- co-ordinating their teaching and research field is today clearly identified as such in four activities.2 The department of geography in departments: Basel, Bern, Geneva and Neu- Neuchaˆtel launched, for instance, in 2005 the chaˆtel. Zurich is also productive in the field, first Swiss doctoral school in geography with but practises it under the banner of economic the collaboration of four other universities from or gender geography, as is Lausanne, under the the French part of the country—an initiative banner of sustainable urban development. which would have been close to impossible ten The research activities in these departments years ago. So, if ‘Swiss geography’ was for a long can be distributed across five major themes: time a rather elusive entity, something like it is social and cultural theory, society/culture quickly emerging. and environment, gender/labour and space, 3 migrations/interculturality, urban cultures and within Swiss geography: since 2004, a group of societies. young researchers in Geneva is, for instance, working on Raffestin’s legacy in order to make it more easily accessible.5 Social and cultural theory His territoriality theory has certainly been an important means through which human Switzerland has been a rather fertile soil for geography came to consider itself as part of the theoretical musings and it continues to be one. social sciences, which is historically, in I would like to mention here, in what is Switzerland, quite a recent event. There is inevitably a partial vision, four theoretical however something paradoxical—and Raffestin ‘incubators’: two are related to the work of is himself well aware of it—in the present individual geographers, two others to research interest for a theory which tries to subsume all networks. human spatiality under the concepts of Claude Raffestin’s theory of territoriality is territoriality and territory, while the rise of one of the major contributions of Swiss the network society continuously shows that geography to the rethinking of human this is no longer possible (if it ever was). geography in the twentieth century and, In German-speaking Switzerland, the same more specifically, to the development of a move of geography from a discipline often still theoretically informed social and cultural conceived as having its root in the natural geography (Philo and So¨ derstro¨ m 2005). For sciences to a discipline connected to contem- a long time a professor in Geneva, and now porary social and cultural theory was facili- recently retired, his work is an original tated by Benno Werlen’s work on an action attempt to build a general framework for the theory-oriented human geography (Werlen comprehension of human beings’ geographic 1993, 2000, 2004). Building on the phenom- condition (Raffestin 1980, 1984, 1986). This enological tradition, especially in its Schutzian theory builds creatively on references that very version, but also on the work of the German few geographers were using at the time it was geographer Wolfgang Hartke (Hartke 1959), elaborated (in the 1970s and 1980s): from Werlen has developed a critique of ‘spatialism’ French philosophy and social theory to human (the idea that spatial entities are as such the ecology, Russian semiotics or German political objects of geographic enquiry). The focus, he philosophy. It exerted however for years a maintains, should instead be on processes of weaker influence than it deserved (and was regionalization and geography-making probably more influential in Italy than in throughwhichhumanactionconstructs Switzerland or France), partly because more or less stabilized forms of places, Raffestin’s work is scattered in a great number territories or landscapes. Though Werlen is of often short papers, which are sometimes now working in Jena, Germany, his coherent difficult to access. Though general in its scope, theoretical work continues to exert a signifi- his theory, insisting on logics of appropriation, cant influence on Swiss-German geographers. spatial demarcation and symbolic mediation Among them, Joris van Wezemael, who has (in one word: territoriality), gave predominant been working recently on the conceptualization weight to the social and cultural dimensions

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