“A big city with small-town charm”
The Mayor of Winterthur, Michael (Mike) Künzle, explains the city's smart city strategy, why population growth is both an opportunity and a challenge, and how he plans to make Winterthur a sustainable city.
Where do you currently see the biggest challenges for the city?
Winterthur is experiencing strong growth. This brings opportunities, but also challenges. More and more people want to move to Winterthur. This requires a greater number of available jobs, because short commutes mean quality of life. In addition, we have to provide more transport and educational infrastructure. This entails costs – even if we generate more tax revenue due to the growing number of residents. Nevertheless, larger investments are necessary to absorb the growth. With “Winterthur 2040” we have defined where densification is to take place. We expect around 135,000 residents by 2040.
You have already mentioned it: the city of Winterthur currently has over 120,000 inhabitants. Last year you recorded the strongest population growth in decades. Why is that?
Winterthur is simply a great city! We are excellently located. We offer a lot of green spaces, a high quality of life and a wide range of cultural activities. Our educational institutions also attract young people in particular. This brings well-trained professionals to the regional labour market. Of course, we also benefit from our affiliation with the Zurich economic region.
And we are a modern technology city, which is interesting for companies. In short: Winterthur is a big city that offers everything, but still retains its small-town charm.
How is the city’s housing market doing in view of the sharp rise in the number of inhabitants?
Like all cities, we are struggling with a very low vacancy rate. But we still have a few municipal and some private building reserves to fall back on. The current building and zoning regulations still allow for a lot. There is a lot of building going on, as we can see from the number of building permits. Basically, we are striving for a well-mixed city. That’s why we try to offer both affordable housing and housing for higher incomes. In my opinion, however, the housing market should not be regulated by the city, it should function as independently as possible.
You have set up the Smart City office. What does it deal with and how does it work?
We were the first city in Switzerland to have a Smart City strategy at the city council level. The Smart City uses social and technological innovations in a targeted way to ensure quality of life, conserve resources and promote sustainable development. In other words, it is about using modern technologies to simplify everyday life for the population and to make the city well connected. For this purpose, we have founded the Smart City Winterthur office. In addition, the city of Winterthur is positioning itself as a Living Lab (WinLab), a real laboratory or test city, in which social and technological innovations for the benefit of sustainable urban development can be tried out, systematically tested and, if successful, scaled up. Partners from research and development, business and civil society are invited to actively participate.
Sustainability is an important keyword in this context.
True. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines agree that the city of the future must be a sustainable city. This means that the city must be designed in such a way that it can adapt to changing conditions. This concerns not only the “hardware” such as infrastructure, buildings and open spaces, but also the “software”, i.e. the social and economic structures. A sustainable city is therefore economically successful, ecologically compatible, socially stable and thus: resilient. The sustainable Winterthur should therefore also be an ecological city, in the sense of quality of life for its inhabitants. This includes as few emissions as possible, sufficient green spaces, open space and flexible and diverse mobility. With regard to social resilience, it is important for us to strengthen networks and address existing disadvantages.
What has been done specifically in the area of digital transformation of the city administration and what is still planned?
In order to be able to approach the digital transformation in a targeted and holistic manner, the city is currently developing a digitalisation strategy. This is geared to the needs of the various stakeholders and is based on the available means and resources. Our goal is to create a faster and as low-threshold contact to the population as possible. Currently, the city offers over 90 e-services that can be accessed via a central portal. We also want to make our internal work processes even more efficient. The highest priority is not only ease of use, but also data protection and data security. The greatest challenge, however, is and remains the speed at which digitalisation is advancing. It is important to keep pace here. We have not yet reached our goal, but we are well on our way.
In 2017 you initiated the merger of the associations Winterthur Tourism and Location Promotion Winterthur Region. The result is the new organisation House of Winterthur. What is your conclusion some six years later?
With House of Winterthur we have founded an association that allows us to conduct integrated location marketing. At the time, we were the first city to try this. We want to do marketing for the city and the region of Winterthur from a single source, so to speak, and generate a higher added value. We got off to a good start with a very broad sponsorship. The sponsorship is very broad with the canton, municipalities, companies, hotels, restaurants, cultural institutions and the city; meeting the different demands was a very big challenge. We certainly haven’t done everything optimally here. We have had a new director for a year and a half and are in the process of reorganising the board. I am still convinced of the idea, but we still have to optimise and adjust it.