is a geographer, sociologist and urban researcher and has been a lecturer in sociology since 2001 and a professor at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich since 2009. He studied Geography and Sociology at the University of Zurich. He has authored, co-authored and co-edited numerous publications on Zurich’s urban development, on international comparative analysis of urbanisation, and on theories of the city and of space. In 1991, he was a co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). In 1993-94, he was a fellow researcher at the Laboratoire de Géographie Urbaine, Université Paris X Nanterre, and in 1995-96 he worked in the interdisciplinary research project La ville: villes de crise ou crise des villes, Institute d’Architecture, Université de Genève. From 1997-2001 he was an assistant lecturer for economic geography and regional research at the Geography Department of the University of Bern. In 2003, he received his PhD from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. In 1999, he became scientific director of the project Switzerland: An Urban Portrait at the ETH Studio Basel. A book with the same title was published in 2005, authored by Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron and Christian Schmid. Since 2001, he has been a lecturer in Sociology at the D-ARCH, and since 2009 Titular Professor.