Christian Schmid was born in Zurich in 1958 and studied geography and sociology at the University of Zurich. Since 1984, he has been active in the media as an organizer of cultural events and urban researcher. He has authored, coauthored, and coedited numerous publications on Zurich’s urban development, on urban and regional planning in international comparison, and on theories of the city and of space. In 1991, he was cofounder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). In 1993–94, he did research work at the Laboratoire de Géographie Urbaine, Université Paris X Nanterre, and from 1997–2001 he was an assistant lecturer at the Geographical Department of the University of Bern. In 1999, he became the scholarly director of the project Switzerland: An Urban Portrait at ETH Studio Basel. Since 2001, has been a lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic (ETH Zurich). In 2003, he received his Ph.D. from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. His dissertation, “Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie der Produktion des Raumes”, was published by Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart. Since 2007, Christian Schmid has also been a lecturer at ETH Studio Basel. Since 2009 professor at the ETH
Zurich.