This study bases its question on the realisation that spatial and urban development in the formerly rural zones cannot export the urban images and preferences from the city. What we find exciting about "city" will never emerge in Mettmenstetten, and to fret about it misunderstands the processes taking place there. Our study instead takes as its basis a morphological property that was once a dominant physical and natural reality in all these places: the surface of the soil. We raise the question of how the design seizure of the soil might be an approach to the spatial development of these places - simply because, more than "space", it has always been the ordering variable of these places. So the question is whether there will be urbanisation of the surface, even more, whether the surface will be the organising principle of the future city. For this purpose, we have identified five places in the five different zones as study areas. In all the places, urbanisation has already overhauled the agrarian foundations. According to their belonging to different types of urbanisation, however, they are confronted with completely different levels of development and dynamics. As everywhere, the process has not produced a spatial order, but only land management that is distantly related to the zoning plan. The study describes this specific process in the following and asks the question of whether there are urban planning and design potential in it.