Postcolonial urbanism without colonies? Rethinking critical urban studies in and from Switzerland

Amid an ongoing public reassessment of the historical legacy of Switzerland's colonial entanglements, this article examines the contested production of knowledge in Swiss geography and urban studies, focusing on the policing of the academy and the epistemic ruptures it has provoked. Tracing historical continuities from radical student movements of the 1980s to recent mobilisations with Black Lives Matter and solidarity with Palestine, we show how moments of dissent have opened spaces for challenging Switzerland's colonial amnesia and racial denial. At the same time, we argue that the political–economic orientation of Swiss critical urban studies, despite its powerful critiques of capitalist urbanisation, has often left the colonial and racial conditions of urbanisation insufficiently examined. Drawing upon historical concepts such as “colonialism without colonies” and “raceless racism”, we conceptualise two mutually reinforcing structures of disavowal: the separation of Swiss modernity and prosperity from colonial histories and the denial of race as an operative social relation despite the persistence of racialised inequalities. This conceptual synthesis enables Swiss urbanisation to be understood relationally through its connections to colonial extraction, racialised mobility, labour segmentation, and global regimes of accumulation. We use postcolonial urban studies not to designate a bounded subfield or category of cities but as a critical practice for reworking the histories, concepts, and methods through which urbanisation is understood. We conclude by advancing an agenda for postcolonial urban studies in and from Switzerland organised around three orientations, namely unmasking space, unearthing extractive geohistories, and unsilencing the everyday, which make racialised spatial relations perceptible, reconstruct the extractive geohistories of urbanisation, and recognise everyday struggles as sites of theorisation.