/ Studium
PLANNING PHARMACEUTICAL URBANITY: Basel in Transition in the Face of the Novartis Campus Enclave
Rea Grünenfelder | Master Thesis , 2023
In 1996 the Basel based companies Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz merged into what is known today as the pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG. However, this was not only an economic precedent and a new dimension for globalized pharmaceutical trade but also the start of a new era for the city of Basel. With the construction of the Novartis Campus the company intended to reuse and rebuilt Sandoz’s industrial park in the St. Johann to create work spaces that meet the demands of the time. In the course of this large-scale construction which is still ongoing, several changes in the neighborhood were triggered with the involvement of the city council and the urban planning department. This thesis traces this transformation of the St. Johann area and the construction of the Novartis Campus as an attempt to situate the globally imagined project on a local scale. Making use of Vyjayanthi Rao’s concept of the „city-as-archive“, it narrates the process along multi-perspective archival sources such as images, plans, documents and interviews with witnesses of the transformation. Bringing this anthropological method together with theories on the tension between global and local scales by Anna Tsing as well as urban enclave theories, it focuses on specific sites of structural transformation, aesthetic regimes that transgress into the city and historical changes in the fencing of the Novartis plot.