Ittigen near Bern belongs to the ’Prospering Residential Economy Towns’. @ Federal Office of Topography swisstopo
Small and medium-sized towns are increasingly appearing on the radar of policy makers all over Europe. Findings from a project on the role and significance of these towns in Switzerland show that national policy and planning overlook their potential. For a long time, policy and research on urban development have primarily focused on large cities. Now, an interdisciplinary team of researcher have analysed small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs) in Switzerland. In the first step of their investigation, the researchers grouped 152 towns with up to 50,000 residents into seven types of SMSTs based on existing data sets (*). In the process, they discovered that SMSTs have very different economic characteristics. "That's a surprising finding, even in international comparison", says Mayer.
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