Gabriela Debrunner

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Debrunner

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Gabriela

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0000-0002-3706-7896

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Publications1 - 10 of 16

Öffentliche Akzeptanz und Politik für eine grüne und bezahlbare Innenverdichtung
Wicki, Michael; Wehr, Malte; Debrunner, Gabriela; et al. (2024)
Die Stadt- und Agglomerationsgemeinden der Schweiz sind mit vielfältigen Herausforderungen konfrontiert, wie Innenverdichtung zur Schaffung von neuem Wohnraum beitragen kann. Zu diesen Herausforderungen gehören begrenztes Bauland, hohe Wohnungsnachfrage, steigenden Mieten und ein direktdemokratisches politisches System. In diesem Bericht analysieren wir die Perspektiven und Meinungen der Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner zu dieser Herausforderung im Schweizer Wohnungsbau. Die Daten stammen aus Entscheidungsexperimenten, die wir in einer im Jahr 2023 durchgeführten Panelbefragung generiert haben. Unser methodischer Ansatz misst die Akzeptanz der Innenverdichtung und analysiert die zeitlichen Veränderungen in den Einstellungen nach den intensiven Diskussionen um die Schweizer Wohnentwicklung zwischen Frühjahr und Herbst 2023. Die verstärkte öffentliche und mediale Debatte über den Wohnungsbau in der Schweiz zeigt, dass ein besser informierter und evidenzbasierter Ansatz bezüglich öffentlicher Meinung zur Wohnungsbaupolitik notwendig ist. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen auf, dass die öffentliche Akzeptanz eng damit zusammenhängt, wie und von wem die Verdichtung umgesetzt wird und wie sie mit umfassenderen ökologischen und sozialen Zielen in Einklang gebracht wird. Unsere Forschung unterstreicht, wie wichtig es ist, nicht einfach nur mehr zu bauen, sondern richtig zu bauen – indem Wohn(um)bauvorhaben gefördert werden, die mit den gesellschaftlichen Erwartungen (Bezahlbarkeit) und den ökologischen Erfordernissen (Grünflächen) in Einklang stehen. Innenverdichtung wird akzeptiert, wenn sie direkt zu bezahlbaren und umweltfreundlichen Städten für alle beiträgt. Wir leiten aus diesen Forschungsergebnissen konkrete politische Empfehlungen zur Förderung einer ökologisch-sozial nachhaltigen Verdichtung ab, die auf den Kontext von vier Schweizer Stadttypen ausgerichtet sind.
Explorative Planning: On Field Course by Foot and Bicycle in the German Ruhrgebiet
Debrunner, Gabriela (2023)
GeoAgenda ~ Field Trips as Pedagogical Devices
As part of my PhD at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern, I was engaged in urban planning teaching and field course activities. In spring 2018 (from June 11th to 22nd), we – Prof. Jean-David Gerber, Dr. Andreas Hengster-mann, and I – organized a 10 days international field course to the German Ruhrgebiet with 24 master students. Our journey was no ordinary sightseeing tour – oh no! Exploring the Ruhrgebiet by foot and bicycle provided students with a unique, immersive, and participatory learning experience, and helped them to foster a deeper and immersive understanding of the region's urban planning challenges and opportunities. It also demonstrated the potential of sustainable and active transportation modes in promoting healthy and livable urban environments.
Wer verdichtet unsere Städte, wo, und wie? Beitrag systematischer Grundeigentumsanalysen zur effektiven Umsetzung von Innenentwicklungszielen
Debrunner, Gabriela; Hess, Livia; Rieder, Max (2024)
The lack of housing supply in the context of increasing housing demand has become a key challenge for global urban development. This is particularly true in densifying cities, where land is scarce and highly contested among urban actors. In such conflicting land use situations, the question of who owns, controls, and decides on the land available to meet the housing demand is critical to the effective and sustainable development of our cities. As legal title holders, landowners have significant territorial power to shape the socio-economic geography of cities. While they cannot be legally compelled to meet public land use objectives within a given time frame (e.g., with respect to zoning for densified housing), they have the legal capacity to block, delay, or redirect planned housing (re)development. This makes landowners key decision-makers in implementing housing provision goals. Little is known however about how different categories of landowners (e.g., institutional investors, owner-occupiers, cooperatives, and public owners) influence housing provision in densifying urban contexts. This project’s overarching goal is thus to address this housing challenge from a landownership and property perspective. The starting point is that, while conditioned by the state and the market, landownership and property represent an understudied key mechanism influencing effective and sustainable housing provision outcomes (i.e., number of dwellings, housing space consumption per capita, rental prices; Adisson & Artioli, 2020). The specific aim is to conduct an in-depth empirical investigation of how different landowners influence city housing provision. To address this aim, this research puts forward a quantitative case study design for 'Opfikon' (Switzerland). The Swiss agglomeration city represents a highly urbanized densifying environment and faces growing housing supply challenges. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach that combines geospatial analysis (GIS) of provided land and property market data with statistical and R-analysis approaches, the housing and densification outcomes in this city are analyzed. This project’s results contribute significantly to the “property-oriented turn” (Jacobs & Paulsen, 2009) in land use policy, which calls for urban planning to reopen the contested land issue and its diverse political-economic implications. These issues are not only evident in global urbanization and the struggle for natural resources (e.g., land, energy, climate adaptation), but also in the analysis and understanding of the socio-economic and political power imbalances attached to it. In addition, the data analysis approach allows policymakers to raise important and evidence-based questions for debates about income, wealth distribution, socio-economic inequality, and the role of property therein.
Land Valuation in Densifying Cities: The Negotiation Process between Institutional Landowners and Municipal Planning Authorities
Debrunner, Gabriela; Kaufmann, David (2023)
Land Use Policy
Land valuation—the normative and socio-political process through which land is assigned a value—is a highly contested procedure, as the value of land strongly affects how land is used and distributed and ultimately affects who can live where, how, and why. We argue that it is thus important to gain a better understanding of land valuation processes through examining (1) how the process of land valuation functions in a context of urban land scarcity and densification; (2) how involved actors’ strategies of land valuation vary in such a context. To answer these research questions, we introduce an actor-centered new institutionalism approach for the qualitative case study analysis of the Rohr/Platten densification area in the city of Opfikon within the Zurich metropolitan area. We find that the diverse goals of the involved stakeholders (i.e., the profit-orientation of private actors versus the socio-environmentally sustainable spatial development of public planning authorities), in combination with the existing rules, can explain actors’ land valuation strategies. The current planning paradigm of densification and the strong legal protection of land titleholders support the strategies applied by for-profit developers and landowners. Local planning authorities must find ways to deal with the power and the profit-oriented logic of titleholders by means of active land policy to create more ecological and socially inclusive outcomes.
Towards flexible planning in the Swiss urban densification context – Just, or just compact?
Honegger, Lidija; Debrunner, Gabriela (2023)
Abstract Volume 21st Swiss Geoscience Meeting
For many years, residential temporary use – herein referring to an interim form of housing, deviating from their legally-binding permanent use, taking place in buildings or on land prior to demolition, reconstruction, or change of land use – has been utilised by municipal planners as an informal planning instrument to reactivate urban brownfields (Castells 1983; Bishop & Williams 2012). Temporary use has, however, recently changed its strategic function from being a catalyst for revitalization to testing new uses (Galdini, 2019), particularly in cities with high population growth, density dynamics, and housing shortages. Residential temporary use approaches (e.g., container or DIY-living, tiny houses) are increasingly applied by city councils and municipal planning authorities to transform industrial areas into mixed-use housing zones (Honeck 2017), providing a flexible planning solution to cope with affordable housing and land scarcity (Debrunner & Gerber 2021). In this paper, we investigate the following questions: (1) How do municipal planning authorities apply temporary use as an approach to deal with scarcity of land and housing? (2) What actors are involved, and what strategies and objectives do they follow? (3) What challenges and recommendations result for sustainable land use and housing policy? To answer these research questions, we follow a qualitative case study approach of the City of Kloten, Steinacker – a 50ha transformation area owned by approximately 35 landowners. This example stands representative for 122 industrial zones in Switzerland, aiming to be transformed into mixed-use housing. Results help us to reflect on effective land use planning approaches through the adaptation of flexible planning instruments, notably temporary use. We discuss the results in comparison with international case studies (e.g., London, Amsterdam, Helsinki), to elucidate prerequisites encompassing legal, planning, procedural, and other dimensions that must be satisfied to enable a sustainable transformation from an industrial area to a mixed-use zone.
«Who Densifies Our Cities, Where, and How? Contribution of Systematic Landownership and Property Data Analyses to Effective Settlement Densification»
Debrunner, Gabriela; Gairing, Mona (2024)
Dense and Green Cities: Case Study of Altstetten-Albisrieden, Zurich
Menz, Sacha; Kaufmann, David; Persyn, Freek; et al. (2025)
The Business of Densification
Debrunner, Gabriela (2024)
Affordable housing shortage and social exclusion have become severe societal problems across the globe. Increasing numbers of people are suffering from social eviction and displacement due to urban densification, modernization, rising rents, and intense housing commodification. Vulnerable resident groups – such as old-aged or households with children – who often live in old housing stocks planned to be densified, renovated, or upgraded with higher rents, are forced to leave the urban core centers because they can no longer afford to live in central locations, or because they experience unstable or insecure housing conditions. A scenario that is highly unsustainable. So far, studies on densification have mainly considered the process as technological, architectural, or design-based problem (e.g., Kyttä et al., 2013; Broitman & Koomen, 2015; Bibby et al., 2018). However, systematic knowledge on how to implement densification objectives sustainably – regarding economic, environmental, and social aspects – is still lacking. This book tackles this gap by analyzing densification from a governance perspective. Its point of departure is that densification per se does not necessarily lead to sustainable outcomes in terms of social inclusion, cohesion, or community stability. Rather, it politicizes densification by neglecting how the process is planned, implemented, and governed by the actors involved. The book applies an actors-centered neoinstitutionalist political ecology approach to reveal the specific objectives and strategies of actors involved, as well as the socio-political structures (i.e. rules. laws, and policies) that govern densification. Four Swiss in-depth empirical qualitative case studies (Zürich, Basel, Köniz, and Kloten) illustrate the political and legal conditions for success or failure for (un)sustainable implementations of densification. Ultimately, this book advises stakeholders, governments, urban practitioners, and academics on more effective, community-oriented, collective, and decommodified forms of governance to respond to the needs of the public at large rather than simply catering to private individuals and firms. Such governance initiatives entail active municipal land policy approaches outside a purely market-based investment logic that not only limit, but also work with property rights. This is an open access book.
Rise of Flexibility and Complexity Research in Planning Literature: With What Consequences, for Whom, and Why?
Debrunner, Gabriela (2026)
Planning Theory
Nur noch mehr Wachstum? Vier Thesen zur Auswirkung des Mehrwertausgleichs auf lokale Wachstumskoalitionen am Beispiel der Schweiz
Hengstermann, Andreas Heinrich; Debrunner, Gabriela (2023)
RaumPlanung
Anhand der Schweiz zeigt der vorliegende Beitrag, welche Auswirkungen der Mehrwertausgleich auf die Wachstumsorientierung der Raumplanung und speziell auf die Bildung lokaler Wachstumskoalitionen hat. Dabei zeigt sich, dass das Schweizer Instrument in ein kontrollierendes direktdemokratisches System, eine ausgleichende politische Kultur und in eine Vielzahl von planungsrechtlichen Bestimmungen eingebettet ist, die die Ausweitung der Bauzone reguliert und die Wachstumsambitionen begrenzen.

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Gabriela Debrunner

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