For a century, highways have shaped cities, economies, and national identities. But in November 2024, Swiss voters rejected a CHF 5 billion highway expansion, signaling a shift away from infrastructure-led urbanisation. As nations worldwide double down on highway-driven growth, Switzerland’s moratorium invites us to rethink mobility, territorial organisation, and the ecological future beyond Autobahn urbanism.
In a historic referendum in November 2024, the Swiss public rejected the 2023 Federal Decree for expanding the national highway programme – a CHF 5 billion investment. While domestically this moratorium redirects public funding toward public transport and sustainable transit alternatives, its true significance, which has been underplayed thus far, lies internationally. In a world that has seen the resurgence of strongman populists and its corollary infrastructure politics, this democratic reversal of infrastructure-led extended urbanisation offers hope and a chance to explore socio-environmental alternatives to depletion-driven Autobahn urbanism.
Autobahn Urbanism Fuels Rapid Construction
The model of Autobahn urbanism has evolved over the past century but has gained traction in recent years, particularly across the Global South and East, as a path-dependent strategy for rapid economic growth. The recent highway corridor boom – exemplified by China’s Belt and Road Initiative fueling rapid construction in European peripheries like Montenegro, India’s Bharatmala highway programme replacing fertile farmland with thousands of kilometers of highways, and Turkey’s expanding Marmara network – has reinforced this trend.
While these highway programmes have faced significant social contestation, Switzerland’s binding moratorium – pioneered in the country with the densest highway network and, in some ways, its ideological birthplace – marks a turning point. Few may know that the inventor of the modern Autobahn, Piero Puricelli, trained as an engineer at ETH Zurich in the early 1900s. His Autostrada dei Laghi (now the A8), which connected Milan to Lake Como in 1924, reshaped the relationship between urbanisation, the countryside as a national-romantic landscape, and the nation itself as a unit of spatial experience. This approach would go on to define highway programmes worldwide.
What is at Stake?
Driving along Nationalstrassen – built during the postwar boom of the 1960s – one could traverse romanticised nature reserves, experiencing a form of national belonging unbound by metropolitan and regional divisions. This experience of extended urbanisation is vividly captured in the 1981 Swiss film Reisende Krieger, as Christian Schmid describes it. Thus, what is at stake at the end of Autobahn urbanism is not only its environmental consequences – material and energy consumption – but also the futures of Nature – with a capital «N» and the national territorial organisation it helped shape.
Dr. Nitin Bathla is a Zurich-based scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of urbanisation, the environment, and society, bridging the disciplines of urban studies, ecology, geography, and sociology. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies in Landscape and Urban Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary film Not Just Roads. His transdisciplinary and pluriversal research approaches actively combine academic inquiry with artistic practices such as filmmaking and socially engaged art.
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