In this year’s Urbanisms Across Geographies track, the students of the Critical Urbanisms programme have spent the last semester observing, analysing and tracing the historical and contemporary relationship between Basel’s pharmaceutical industry and its urban development. 

Focusing on three main sites, Klybeck, Novartis and Roche Campuses, the students have identified three themes of investigation that allow them to trace their observation in various forms: from writings to interviews, from drawings to photographs.

The exhibition,Urban Laboratory: Archives, Voices, Fringes, presents a collective inquiry into the socio-spatial textures of Basel’s urban development. It presents an attempt to read the city not just as a site of industrial production, but as a complex landscape of memory and friction.

We welcome you to the opening on Friday 22.05 at the Bau - und Verkehrsdepartment in Musterplatz, 11.

The exhibition will be open until 29.05.2026.