City Collaboratory 2025 in Geneva
On Friday, 23 May 2025, the annual meeting of the City Collaboratory (CC) took place, hosted this year in Geneva. The CC is a multidisciplinary network designed to connect researchers in different fields, regions, and institutions.
The programme in Geneva reflected this. It allowed us to discuss pressing conceptual and methodological challenges in urban studies, and to meet and interact with our colleagues from other institutions. The day began with a World Café with discussions of topics such as digital methods and inclusivity in urban research. These sessions were moderated by colleagues from the University of Geneva with expertise in each of the thematic areas.
The keynote lecture by Prof. Dr. Michele Lancione (Politecnico de Torino I University of Sheffield) was a compelling intervention on coloniality, housing, and migration – themes Lancione is well known and lauded for in our field. Drawing on decolonial and queer perspectives, Lancione’s talk urged scholars to reconsider dominant framings of “home” and to work across disciplinary and thematic boundaries. Lancione’s talk was succeeded by a panel discussion of core themes in his work, with comments provided by Prof. Dr. Julie de Dardel (UniGe) and Prof. Dr. Luca Pattaroni (EPFL), who is one of our project partners in the responsible city project many in our group are involved in.
In the afternoon, two site visits in the city were organized. The SURB delegation visited the ecoquartier La Jonction of the Codha housing cooperative, where we reflected on the future-making possibilities of cooperative housing, and the challenges in scaling such approaches in the context of Geneva’s (and the broader Swiss) housing crisis. As researchers from Switzerland’s co-op capital of Zurich, reflecting on the similarities and differences between new, progressive cooperatives in both cities proved inspiring. (We were most happy to see that, like Kalkbreite in Zurich, Codha invested in a slide in their courtyard!) The program concluded with a short input on a heat mitigation “living lab” with various installations in the vicinity of La Jonction. Naturally, the day concluded with an Apéro organized by our hosts at the University of Geneva.
The annual CC meeting continues to be an important moment for dialogue and connection across institutional and linguistic divides. For our team, it reinforced the value of interdisciplinary collaboration and with urban scholars across Switzerland and invites us again and again to reflect on our Zurich-informed biases and assumptions.
Photo: Author’s Right Frances Brill and Ismene Ehrler