Privilege forged in space: Student experiences in transitioning to Zurich’s highly selective public secondary schools

Recent debates within geographies of education and related fields stress the increasing importance of selective public secondary schools for privilege and elite reproduction in urban school landscapes and frame these processes as inherently spatial. This paper aims to contribute to these debates by exploring the social production of privileged school spaces at selective public secondary schools—a school type whose spatiality in elite reproduction remains understudied—and its impact on students’ self-understandings. It draws on ethnographic research with six students aged 11–15 during their transition to selective public secondary schools, called Gymnasia, in the City of Zurich, Switzerland. We analyzed the data using an approach informed by Henri Lefebvre’s theories of social space in The Production of Space. The analysis revealed that the Gymnasia drew on a variety of spatial practices and their material spaces to position themselves as educational spaces of distinction that encourage their students’ spatial independence. Students translated this into subjective lived spaces of privilege and an understanding of themselves as particularly responsible, independent and deservingly privileged students. We argue that that such interpretations may contribute to a social hierarchization of the student body in the region, with the Gymnasium students feeling socially superior. Finally, we argue that our findings underpin the analytical value of a Lefebvrian spatial lens to examine school spaces and how these shape students’ views of themselves and others in broader society.