He was a Moderator of the Workshop “Planetary Scale” at the 5th Holcim Forum 2016 on “Infrastructure Space” held in Detroit, USA.

Christian Schmid is Researcher at the Contemporary City Institute, ETH Studio Basel.

He is a geographer, sociologist, and urban researcher. He has written and edited numerous publications on Zurich’s urban development, on urban and regional planning in international comparison, and on theories of the city and of space.

He co-founded the International Network for Urban Research and Action – INURA (1991), was a researcher at the Laboratoire de Géographie Urbaine, Université Paris X Nanterre (1993-94), and worked in the interdisciplinary research project La ville: villes de crise ou crise des villes at the Institute of Architecture, University of Geneva (1995-96). He was then an assistant lecturer at the Geographical Department of the University of Bern (1997-2001).

In 1999, he became the scholarly director of projectSwitzerland: An Urban Portrait at 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. He became a lecturer in Sociology at the ETH Zurich Department of Architecture in 2001 and also a lecturer at ETH Studio Basel from 2007.

He studied geography and sociology at the University of Zurich, and received his PhD from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (2003). His dissertation Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie der Produktion des Raumes (City, space and society: Henri Lefebvre and the theory of the production of space), was published by Steiner Verlag.