Zurich as sponge city
Due to the high proportion of sealed surfaces in cities, urban areas heat up significantly and retain that heat. Additionally, sealed surfaces reduce the infiltration of rainwater and increased risks of flooding. One approach to deal with these challenges is the sponge city concept aiming to minimise surface water runoff. Students from the GEO410 Geography. Matters. course explored the implementation of the sponge city concept in Zürich.
A sponge city is an urban planning concept that aims to minimise surface water runoff. This concept envisions cities reacting similarly to a sponge by enabling local infiltration, storage, and evaporation of water. This not only reduces flooding but also keeps water available during dry periods. Furthermore, it decreases air temperature through evaporation from plants and soil, which in turn can reduce urban heat islands. A sponge city can be achieved through the expansion of green spaces and planting of trees in urban areas, vegetated roofs and building facades, the unsealing of paved surfaces, and the integration of more urban and open waterbodies.
Which steps has Zurich already taken to implement this concept? Where are areas in Zurich that are subject to low infiltration and retention capacity and heat islands? What are potential measures that could be taken on a local level?
For answers to these questions, take a look at the in-depth blog post that we produced in the context of the Geography. Matters. module at the Department of Geography in the fall semester of 2025.
Rethinking Urban Waterscapes: Sponge City Solutions for Zurich
| About GEO410 This blog post is part of the outcome of an interdisciplinary Master’s-level course in Geography: GEO410 Geography. Matters. The course aims to bring together diverse geographic research perspectives to engage with some of the most pressing societal and environmental challenges of our time. As the only compulsory module of the Geography MSc program, the course encourages students to think across sub-disciplines of geography and to explore how geographic research can meaningfully contribute to debates around sustainability, justice, and environmental change. Beyond conducting interdisciplinary research as a team, a central aim of the course was to experiment with creative and accessible forms of science communication. Rather than producing a purely academic output, students translated their research insights into blogposts, intended for a wider, non-specialist audience. The contributions thus showcase not only rigorous scientific work by highly motivated students, but also the importance of communicating research beyond the university and engaging broader publics in conversations about geography, sustainability and the future of our shared environments. The students in the course GEO410 were supervised by Andreas Vieli, Christian Berndt and Sofia van Moorsel as lecturers and by Nikolas Klaudy as teaching assistant. |