Description
The City Council of Zürich has rejected a proposed ban on outdoor advertising. Rather, it wants to review the practice of digital outdoor advertising systems and stop their expansion until 2030. The ban, proposed by the Alternative Liste (AL) Zürich, would ban most advertising visible from public land, but leave space in the city's landscape for the displays of local shops, advertising for local cultural events, political opinion-forming, and non-commercial offers or information from the public sector. However, the city council has rejected the proposal based on economic reasons and the idea that outdoor advertising "has been a tradition in the city of Zurich for over 120 years."
Zürich's city government earns roughly 28 million in annual revenue from outdoor advertising - a large sum at face value, but minuscule in the context of a city budget of of well over 10 billion, and even more so compared to future damages from the climate crisis.
Despite AL's proposal not being accepted, the initiators have already achieved a small victory: the city council decided that it will stop the expansion of new digital outdoor advertising systems for 2030, at which point it will be re-evaluated whether further expansion of Zürich's 3,377 outdoor advertising spaces is necessary.