‘Reversed’ municipalities: Allocation of residents based on inhabitable area

The topic of this map gives rise to the following scenario: What would Switzerland look like if the municipalities were correlated based on the number of residents and their area and were divided up in a different way? What if, for example, the municipality with the most residents also had the largest – inhabitable – municipality area?

Are the municipalities with most residents then situated in the mountainous areas? Or are there patterns that can be attributed to either the numbers of residents or municipality types? To answer this question, the resident figures for 2017 were correlated with the inhabitable municipality areas.

At the beginning of 2017, Switzerland had 2,255 municipalities whose population density was between 12,200 res/km² (Geneva) and just 1.18 res/km² (Campo Vallemaggia). The average value for all municipalities is around 400 res/km², with the median density, i.e. the medium municipality being around 203 res/km² (Saint-George VD).The median means that half the municipalities have a higher and half a lower density than Saint-George VD. Residents are therefore distributed across Switzerland very unevenly; in the Canton of Jura, almost half of all municipalities had less than 400 residents in 2017 and in the Canton of Vaud, almost a third of the municipalities are not even as densely populated as that. With more than 2,200 municipalities, Switzerland is also structured on a very small scale. That is why the issue of municipality size is an important topic for a number of cantons. Studies show that the size of the municipality, in terms of the number of residents, has a significant influence on administrative costs, political operations and also on different attractiveness indicators to some extent.