by Flurin Bastian Tippmann Lea Stoffl Elias Sebastian Nikolaus Bertel Michelle Kay Schaffer Xaver Haider
This blog post explores FOGO – Leben am Vulkanplatz in Zürich as an alternative approach to inclusion and belonging in urban Switzerland. Cities in Switzerland are key arrival spaces for people with migration backgrounds, yet many face barriers such as limited access to affordable housing, administrative obstacles, and everyday experiences of exclusion. These conditions strongly influence whether newcomers can develop a sense of belonging in the city.
FOGO was envisioned by the Asyl-Organisation Zürich (AOZ) as a “village within the city,” bringing refugees, students, and young professionals together in a shared housing project. The site combines living spaces with cultural and work environments and offers communal infrastructure such as shared kitchens, a backyard with seating and garden beds, walkways, a playground, and event spaces. These features are intended to foster everyday encounters and informal social interaction.
Drawing on academic literature and three qualitative interviews—with an AOZ representative, a long-term resident, and a studio tenant—the analysis approaches FOGO through the lens of urban citizenship. It highlights how belonging is created less through formal integration programs and more through everyday interactions such as shared meals, informal conversations, and mutual support, including childcare.
Altogether, FOGO reveals how inclusion and belonging emerge through everyday life, while also exposing tensions between concepts of integration and reality. What does it really mean to create a “village within the city,” and where does this idea succeed—or fall short—in practice?
To learn more, 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.
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.
Beitragsbild: Map of Zurich’s FOGO Project at the Vulkanplatz. Drawing: Lea Stoffl