Settlement image and structure

Switzerland is marked by a structure based on small cities and by a highly decentralized urbanization. Even the largest agglomerations barely exceed a million inhabitants; its cities are still comparatively small.
This type of urbanization reflects two related basic conditions: the distinctively Helvetian autonomy of communes and a long history of decentralized industrialization.

If we examine the current picture of settlements in Switzerland, there is only one territorial unit evident as a structuring influence: the commune. National and cantonal borders recede far into the background by comparison. Helvetian federalism has led to the entire country being covered with a fine-meshed, cellular territorial structure. All of the just under 2300 communes in Switzerland, ranging from small hamlets with a few dozen inhabitants to urban communes with several hundred thousand residents, have essentially the same rights and possess astonishingly far-reaching authority – particularly in the area of planning.
The second basic condition is decentralized industrialization. In Switzerland as in many other areas of Western Europe, industrialization started out as a rural phenomenon, and not as an urban one. On the one hand, waterpower was available there; on the other, the power elites of the cities long prevented industrialization within the city walls. Even as late as the end of the Ancien Régime, cities were still very small and well distributed. In 1798 only Geneva, with about 25,000 residents, achieved any significant size. All the other cities had fewer than 15,000 inhabitants.
This fact in itself is neither astonishing nor unique. Comparable circumstances prevailed in many regions at that time. What is unusual, however, is that this decentralized structure survived the industrial revolution and the founding of the nation state and still characterized Switzerland at the end of the twentieth century.