Three quarters of the population live in cities
The urban exodus of the 80s and 90s has been reversed: today three quarters of the people in Switzerland live in urban areas again, most of them in three-room apartments. This emerges from the yearbook “Statistics of Swiss Cities 2021: Living in the City”.
Swiss cities have experienced a “real renaissance” in recent years, according to a press release by the Swiss Association of Cities and the Federal Statistical Office on the occasion of the publication of their yearbook “ Statistics of Swiss Cities 2021 ” with the focus on “Living in the City”. In the 80s and 90s of the last century, many people moved from the city to the countryside, today three quarters of the Swiss population live in the cities again.
Most of them are at home in three-room apartments. In contrast, the vast majority of owners in Swiss cities, at 86.5 percent, have an apartment with four or more rooms. The smaller the community, the higher the proportion of single-family homes. In the case of multi-family houses, the opposite is true: in the largest cities, they make up an average of more than 43 percent. For the remaining cities, this is less than 33 percent.
The bigger the city, the more tenants there are. The age structure within a municipality or city is roughly the same everywhere in Switzerland. Also, only 5 percent more people are single in cities than in rural areas. A total of 31 percent of city dwellers are foreign nationals. Outside it is only 20 percent.
In Switzerland as a whole, non-profit housing construction only accounts for 1.3 percent. In large cities, on the other hand, the average is 11.4 percent, and in the city of Zurich even 22.4 percent.
In urban politics, the FDP (27.2 percent) and SP (20.6 percent) set the tone, followed by the CVP (15.1 percent, minus 0.2 percent compared to the previous year) and the SVP (11.4 Percent, minus 0.2 percent). The Greens gained 0.8 percent over the previous year and are now 7.7 percent.