Whose Housing Crisis? Transnational Elites' Residential Strategies in Geneva and the Role of Public Policies

The aim of this paper is to analyse the way housing crisis influences the residential mobility of transnational elites in the Geneva metropolitan area. On the one hand, it is based on a quantitative research mandated by local political authorities and on the other, on the ongoing research, fieldwork and questions on which my PhD is based. The first section presents the specificities of the Geneva transborder metropolization process and the dynamics of fragmentation that the housing crisis generates. The second section exposes some preliminary results of the transnational elites’ residential mobility through the method of virtual ethnography. The last section analyses the role of public policies regarding the integration of newcomers. It appears that because of the housing crisis it is required to mobilize social networks in order to find a satisfying accommodation. Transnational elites, who are less rooted locally, don’t neglect their preference for a residence in the city centre of Geneva, according to urban lifestyles and thus develop virtual strategies of socialization in order to get integrated to the city. The public policies support the use of virtual networks and thus reinforce fragmentation between both the “international” and the “local” Geneva.