Newsletter «Zurich (Inter)national»

More than one and a half million people have already fled Ukraine. The City of Zurich is supporting Swiss Solidarity and the four Swiss aid organizations Terre des Hommes, HEKS, Caritas and the Swiss Red Cross with 100,000 Swiss francs each. It can be assumed that this war will last longer and that the plight of several million people will become even greater in the coming months. Therefore, the city council will ask the city parliament for an additional budget credit for the current year 2022 for further relief efforts. The amount of this credit has not yet been determined.

During a three days visit to Sarajevo, municipal experts from STEZ were able to gain an in-depth insight into the policy planning and implementation of the urban planning procedures in Sarajevo. This first scoping mission allowed planning concrete activities and interventions within the framework of the city-to-city-partnership with the City of Sarajevo such as upgrading of public spaces and expert exchange on urban planning issues. The city-to-city-cooperation is an integral part of the «Urban Transformation Project Sarajevo» (UTPS), funded by the State Secretary of Economic Affairs (SECO). UTPS aims at contributing to modernizing the system of integral urban planning in the Canton and City of Sarajevo and at creating better conditions for a sustainable development. The project is an international multi-stakeholder initiative, including the following main partners: City of Zurich, SECO, ETH Zurich, Canton and City of Sarajevo, Urban Planning Institute Sarajevo, University of Sarajevo and the diaspora organization Matica BiH. We will keep you posted about further developments.

Since 2020, the «NEXPLORER» survey of «NEXPO», the Expo initiative of the ten largest Swiss cities, has been taking the pulse of Switzerland and showing which themes should shape the next national exhibition. Based on this survey, the Association «NEXPO – the new Expo» presented the NEXPLORER Value Maps 2022, showing Switzerland from eight new perspectives: considering the results of the NEXPLORER survey, as well as a variety of statistical key figures.

The playfully distorted maps show the various peculiarities in the thematic areas of curiosity, technology, equality, loyalty, origin, nature, freedom and power. Hereby they reveal interesting about the City of Zurich in a Switzerland-wide comparison: For example the evaluation on «curiosity», according to which the City of Zurich is the one most interested in knowing whether there is life after death.

Mayor Corine Mauch is a founding member of the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) – a globally oriented organization supported by mayors. The MMC advocates for cities to have an equal seat at the table with policymakers in shaping refugee and migration policies.

Thanks to its membership in the MMC, Zurich has already achieved important milestones. The UN Global Compact on Refugees is a successful example. Through the facilitation of the MMC, Zurich was able to participate in the preparatory process for a UN review conference in December 2021.

The federal government, the City of Zurich and other interested Swiss cities want to build on this and strengthen cooperation. Mayor Corine Mauch will host her colleagues from the MMC at the 2023 Global Refugee Forum in Switzerland in order to jointly bring the city perspective to the forum, with an emphasis on national cooperation.