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Cooperative Conditions
A Primer on Architecture, Finance and Regulation in Zurich Film Book Venues
About

Introduction 1.
An Idea of Sharing 2.
Public Opinion 3.
Nonspeculation 4.
Equity 5.
Debt 6.
Land 7.
Zoning 8.
The Competition
Film Book Venues About
slide 17 to 21 of 9


2.
PUBLIC OPINION

To grow beyond individual initiatives, cooperatives need political support,
which is dependent on public opinion. In Zurich, pro-cooperative policies won
important political victories in the 1920s, 1940s and late 1990s, resulting in a
significant increase in cooperative housing.


AGENCY

In Zurich, surveys have been instrumental in shaping public opinion and public
policy on housing since the late nineteenth century. Housing policy has been
continually debated, contested and revised by citizens and elected officials in
part through referenda. Swiss voters are called to the polls every three months;
ballot measures on land-use policy and housing appear every few years.

Public opinion, public policy and architecture are mediated through design
guidelines and housing regulations issued by public-sector entities. Zurich’s
cooperatives, because they are nonprofit, must adhere to both federal design
guidelines and cantonal housing regulations. As such, they, too, are a product
of societal consensus.

However, public opinion can be swayed by the tangibility of architecture. A
striking example is the highly experimental cluster floor plan designed by
Duplex Architekten für Hunziker Areal in Zurich, which was included in federal
design guidelines (the Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System) only a few years after the
project’s realization. Its inclusion signified an epochal shift: a move beyond
the nuclear family as the normative household model.

Haus A · Hunziker Areal (2009–15)
Plan courtesy of Duplex Architekten


INSTRUMENTS

Referendum
A referendum (Volksabstimmung) asks voters to approve or reject a particular
ballot measure; if approved, the measure becomes law. In Switzerland, a
mandatory (obligatorisches) referendum is required for any constitutional
change, while an optional (fakultatives) referendum can be initiated by citizens
in opposition to any law passed by the Swiss legislature (so long as 50 000
signatures asking for the referendum are collected within 100 days of the law’s
publication).

Popular Initiative
A referendum can also result from a popular initiative (Volksinitiative) on any
matter of common concern. To force a vote at the national level, a petition
requires 100 000 signatures.

Survey
A survey, study or report is an inquiry into the causes of social problems. It
is generally written by experts commissioned by a public entity or philanthropic
organization. Its normative power derives from the presumable objectivity of
science and allows policy makers to argue for or against public-sector
involvement in housing.

Timeline comparing the number of new dwelling units built by cooperative,
municipal and other developers in Zurich, 1893–2020
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Statistik Stadt Zürich


DOCUMENTS

Special issue of the daily Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich, 1907
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (Ar 32.90.5)

In 1896, a civic organization commissioned the first inquiry on the sanitary
conditions of industrial workers’ housing. The study paved the way for the City
of Zurich to define housing as a public-sector responsibility in its 1907
charter revision. An advertisement in the Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich called for
voters in the city to approve the revision in a mandatory referendum. The
revised charter was the first to define housing as a matter of public concern
and as worthy of public-sector support.

Photograph of demonstrators confronting mounted police in central Zurich during
the national strike, 1918
Photo: Wilhelm Gallas/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Even though it was a nonbelligerent, Switzerland experienced hunger, rampant
inflation, a flu epidemic and a severe lack of housing in the aftermath of World
War One. By official count, in 1919 only 20 apartments in Zurich were vacant out
of a total of 47 000. These conditions contributed to a nationwide general
strike. The emergency measures approved in response—federal subsidies for
nonprofit housing in 1918 (loans and grants), the establishment of the Swiss
Housing Federation in 1919 and the 1924 municipal ruling to lower cooperatives’
equity requirements from 10 percent to 6 percent—had lasting impacts at the
municipal and national levels.

Campaign poster of Social Democrat Emil Klöti, Zurich municipal elections, 1933
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F Pe-0910)
Exemplary floor plans for “Flexible Housing Forms” in the design guidelines of
the Federal Office for Housing (BWO), 2015 
Photo: BWO, Wohnbauten planen, beurteilen und vergleichen.
Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System. Grenchen, 2015

The 2015 Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System (Housing Evaluation System, WBS) chose the
“cluster” typology designed by Duplex Architekten for Hunziker Areal in Zurich
as exemplary of flexible living forms. The plan organizes five one- and
two-room-apartments, each with an individual bath and kitchenette, around
generous shared spaces. 

Twitter Profile of the popular initiative More Affordable Housing, held at the
federal level, 2020
Source: twitter.com/Wohninitiative

The initiative asked voters whether all municipalities in Switzerland should be
required to guarantee a certain percentage of nonprofit housing. Slogans for the
initiative included, “Stop Speculators,” and slogans against included, “No to
the Nationalization of the Housing Market.” The initiative was rejected by 57
percent of voters.

Research: Gina Rauschtenberger, Alexia Zeller


3.
NONSPECULATION

Nonstandard, experimental forms of living together are possible in Zurich
precisely because cooperatives reject the notion of exchange value in
architecture. The resulting high use value benefits not just current residents
but future generations.

Photograph of courtyard use at Siedlung Ottostrasse, 2020
Photo: Kristin Sasama


AGENCY

Nonspeculation has immediate implications for design. This is especially true
within a heated real estate market with virtually no risk of vacancies, such as
Zurich. Whereas for-profit developers tend to see a hot market as a reason to
follow existing practices, Zurich’s cooperatives see an opportunity to test new
forms of living together.

The key instrument for nonspeculation is cost-rent, which works best over time.
Upon completion of a new construction project, cost rent is only slightly below
market rent. Over time, however, cost rent declines relative to market rates
because loans are paid off and rising land values are not reflected in its
calculation. Today, rents of cooperative apartments in Zurich are, on average,
25 percent below market rents.

Taken together, the commitment to nonspeculation and cost rent encourages
careful and continuous stewardship of architectural and social structures. Even
in highly coveted central locations, cooperative organizations can renovate
complexes in response to changing standards or regulations but still keep rents
low enough to maintain social and economic diversity.


INSTRUMENTS

Gemeinnützigkeit
Gemeinnützigkeit is a legal term for a nonprofit enterprise with public benefit.
For cooperative housing, it means a permanent commitment to the provision of
housing under the premise of nonspeculation. Land and buildings are removed from
the private market and apartments priced following the cost-rent model.

Cost Rent
Cost rent is a mode of rent calculation that neither requires subsidies nor
generates a profit. It is determined by a formula which incorporates investment
value and building insurance value, multiplied by benchmark factors that are
regularly adjusted by municipal and federal agencies in relation to interest
rates and maintenance costs. 

Diagram showing cost rent's development over time
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Reports 1927–2019) and Statistik Stadt Zürich
How one Swiss Franc of cost rent is spent
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Report 2019)

The maximum cost rent for a property is calculated using a formula based on the
property’s building insurance value and investment value. These values are
multiplied by factors based on the benchmark interest rate and operating quota,
a coefficient defined by the City of Zurich that represents the estimated
oper­ating costs. The sum equals the property’s maximum allowable rental
revenue. These values change over time, as the example of ABZ’s Siedlung
Ottostrasse shows. While cost rent increases over time, it does so more
gradually than market rents because the land value of a cooperative does not
increase and cooperatives are not allowed to generate profit.


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Ottostrasse and surroundings, circa 1928
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Floor plan of typical three-room apartments, Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927
Source: ABZ Archives

Ottostrasse, completed in 1927, demonstrates how a cooperative complex, even in
a central location, can retain its original architectural features while being
continually upgraded and maintaining low rents. The three-room apartments today
rent for around 650 Swiss francs a month (and an initial share purchase of 3 000
Swiss francs), which is more than 50 percent below the market rent for
comparable apartments in the area. 1.An Idea of Sharing / Plan for Festivities
in Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927

 
 

Photograph of the youth protests and squatters’ movement in the 1980s
Photo: Gertrud Vogler/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-11-006-006)

In the 1980s, Zurich youth protested the municipality’s development policies
with a range of actions, including squatting and happenings. The youth opposed
policies that favored the demolition of existing housing to make space for new
construction of office and commercial space.  1. An Idea of
Sharing /  Manifesto bolo’bolo, 1983



Zwicky Süd, completed in 2015, is a former industrial site just beyond Zurich’s
city limits that was codeveloped 50/50 by Kraftwerk1 (a cooperative) and two
for-profit pension funds with a single architectural firm, Schneider Studer
Primas. 

Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Kraftwerk1, the cooperative
developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten
Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Pensimo Management AG, a
for-profit developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten

The floor plans for three-room apartments reveal the design priorities of
nonprofit and for-profit developers. The apartments designed and realized for
Kraftwerk1 are accessed by a shared exterior gallery, reflecting the emphasis on
casual social contacts, and exhibit interior flexibility. The pension funds
requested and realized a more standard layout: access is through a core, and
rooms have doors and defined uses.

At the time of completion, cooperative and market rents differed by
approximately 20 percent. Over time, they will diverge more dramatically because
maximization of revenue drives the pension funds, while decision-making in the
cooperative is focused on keeping rents low in line with the cost-rent model.

Research: Lale Geyer, Rebekka Hirschberg


4.
EQUITY

The limited amount of equity required for cooperatives to take out a mortgage
gives even socially marginalized groups access to financing. This has led to a
great diversity of many small, specialized organizations that offer specific
forms of living together to very different interest groups.


AGENCY

A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced from individuals whose desires and needs
are known to the organization’s management. This allows the cooperative to
develop housing models specific to its members’ needs. The Siedlung Lettenhof,
for example, was developed in the 1920s by and for single, women professionals
whose only housing options at the time were subletting or living with relatives.

Photograph of the courtyard of Siedlung Lettenhof during construction, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

In cooperative housing, the return on an individual’s equity investment is paid
out in use value, not cash. This “use value dividend” includes a life-long right
to stay, cost rent and collective self-governance.

A cooperative’s limited equity has outsize financial leverage not only in the
short term but over time. While a cooperative’s land and buildings cannot be
sold at market rates, they can be used to take on more debt for new development
projects, resulting in an even lower equity-to-debt ratio than has been required
since a 1924 municipal resolution. The larger and older a cooperative, the
greater the leverage of its equity.

The preferential access to financing has led to an outstandingly diverse field
of 141 small and large, young and old cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42.000 apartments embodying various forms of
living together.


INSTRUMENTS

Municipal Resolution
Zurich’s housing cooperatives need only 6 percent equity to access a
conventional bank loan, far less than the 20 percent typically required. This
has been the case since a 1924 municipal resolution in which Social Democrats
and conservatives struck a compromise to support cooperatives in the face of a
dire housing shortage. 2. Public Opinion

Share
A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced among its residents through the sale of
shares. A share is a certificate of partial ownership of the cooperative
corporation and entitles residents to participate in the governance of the
organization. 1. An Idea of Sharing

Savings Bank and Solidarity Fund
Zurich cooperatives generate additional financing through two self-managed
instruments. A cooperative’s savings bank allows members to deposit money and
earn a low interest rate in return. A cooperative’s solidarity fund pools
contributions to aid residents in case of financial need.

Diagrams of equity as a proportion of three cooperative organizations’ overall
balance sheet, 2018
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Annual reports of the three cooperatives from 2018

The three cooperative organizations ABZ, BBF (cooperative for working women),
and Kraftwerk1 differ in age, size, philosophy and equity as a share of their
overall balance sheet. A cooperative’s willingness to take on more debt is
shaped by whether it owns or leases the land on which it has built. 5. Debt  6.
Land


DOCUMENTS

Deposit slip for the payment of a share, BBF, no date
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich

Share prices vary depending on the age and location of the complex, as well as
the size and location of the apartment. Today, the cost of a share for a
three-room apartment in a Zurich cooperative ranges from 8 000 to 50 000 Swiss
francs.

Plan of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

Lettenhof provided a range of apartment sizes to accommodate a range of resident
needs and financial capabilities. The majority of the apartments at Lettenhof
were designed to provide maximum privacy to their residents. A private kitchen
and bath, as well as one or two private balconies, were important elements in
this strategy. The studio was the only apartment type to have a shared bath and
only a small kitchenette.

Photograph of the interior of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, no date
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen
Spread of an article on life at Lettenhof in the magazine Blatt für Alle, 1940
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen

In an article titled “Single working women created a homestead for themselves,”
the author focuses on the unusual liberties afforded to the doctors, teachers
and administrators living in Lettenhof.

Research: Hanae Balissat, Kristin Sasama


5.
DEBT

Around 80 percent of the value of Zurich’s cooperatives is debt. Private and
public-sector lenders alike consider cooperatives to be reliable borrowers and
to provide lucrative investment opportunities, a status materialized through
architecture that is built to last.

View across the Glattpark complex at the ground level, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

For Zurich cooperatives and their lenders, debt means security. Debt is not seen
as a short-term, high-risk endeavor but rather is understood as a long-term
commitment. As a result, architecture is built to last for generations. This
plays out in the choice of high-quality building materials, whether in façades,
floors or hardware. Siedlung Friesenberg, for example, has been in use for close
to a century.

For lenders, cooperatives provide lucrative investment opportunities. Zurich’s
minimal vacancy rate of 0.15 percent ensures that cooperative apartments,
offering high use value at low cost, will never go unrented. For cooperatives, a
choice of lenders allows debt to be rescheduled at favorable rates. In turn,
this gives cooperatives the leeway to pursue nonstandard architectural
solutions.

For cooperatives, servicing long-term debt goes hand in hand with a willingness
to take risks on endeavors that may only play out in the long term. This
includes developing large-scale projects in the urban periphery and embracing
urban design to encourage the use of open space by diverse actors, such as the
Glattpark development near Zurich Airport.


INSTRUMENTS

Loans from Conventional Banks
Most of the debt owed by Zurich cooperatives was obtained from banks at
conventional interest rates. These first mortgages typically cover 60–80 percent
of development costs. The Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), a private bank backed by
the Canton of Zurich, has had a legal obligation to lend to cooperatives since
1902. ( 2. Public Opinion.) Given two decades of low interest rates, other banks
are now competing for cooperatives’ business, because of their reputation as
reliable borrowers. 

Loans from Pension Funds and Other Private Entities
Since 1992, most cooperatives have also obtained second mortgages, which fund
14–34 percent of development costs, from the City of Zurich Pension Fund. This
is a private institution whose lending to cooperatives, however, is backed by
the City of Zurich. Additional long- and short-term loans are made by a variety
of private individuals and institutions. ( 4. Equity.) 

Loans from the Public Sector
The public sector, whether at the municipal, cantonal or federal level, provides
few direct loans to cooperatives. The indirect mechanisms for low-interest loans
include the Swiss Bond Issuance Cooperative (Emissionszentrale), which since
1990 has enabled cooperatives to refinance loans upon completion of a project. A
revolving fund (fonds de roulement) has been lending up to 50 000 Swiss francs
per dwelling unit since 2007.

Diagram of the types of financing available to Zurich cooperatives
Source: WBG Zürich

The balance sheet of an average Zurich cooperative organization shows a
surprisingly small amount of equity (red). The rest, even if it is funding that
the cooperative controls, is considered debt (beige/gold). This debt breaks down
as follows: the largest loans are provided by the ZKB and other banks, followed
by loans from private entities including pension funds. When, as now, interest
rates are at historic lows, all types of lenders consider lending to cooperative
organizations to be a safe and low-risk endeavor. The smallest percentage of
loans originate from the public sector. In addition, cooperatives operate their
own savings banks and a renewal fund. ( 4. Equity) The renewal fund, earmarked
for maintenance and repairs, is automatically funded by a fixed percentage of
the cost rent. 3. Nonspeculation


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph of Zurich’s city center with City Hall, Municipal Offices and
Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), 1910
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

From the beginning of its involvement in housing in 1896, the public sector in
Zurich has chosen not to lend directly to cooper­a­tives. Rather, private
entities like the ZKB (since 1902) and the City of Zurich Pension Fund (since
1992) have been obliged to do so, while the public sector insures them against
loss. Because cooperatives, despite receiving preferential access to financing,
are economically and fiscally independent actors in the real estate market,
elected officials have been able to maintain that the city does not directly
subsidize them. It is one reason cooperatives have had public support across the
political spectrum.

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Friesenberg, circa 1929
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Photograph of house entrance, Siedlung Friesenberg, 1925
Source: FGZ archives

The Familienheim-Genossenschaft Zürich (FGZ), a cooperative focused on providing
homes to families with children, was among the first cooperatives to take
advantage of the 1924 municipal resolution permitting cooperatives to access
financing with only 6 percent equity as collateral. During the first two
construction phases at Friesenberg in 1925–26 (of a total of 23 phases as
of 2021), the FGZ built 144 rowhouses and apartments in a garden city layout.
Today, the site’s future is highly contested. The FGZ would like to redevelop
the site as a whole, arguing that renovation is too expensive. Preservationists
counter that the design is unique and of high quality. They seek to prevent the
demolition of at least the 1925–26 phases.

Ground floor and landscape plan, Glattpark, 2017
Plan courtesy of pool Architekten

Through a land deal between the City of Zurich and ABZ in 2011, the cooperative
organization obtained some 24 000 m² of land in a new urban development near
Zurich Airport. In 2015, following an architectural competition, the ABZ general
assembly approved the development cost of 97.5 million Swiss francs to pursue
the winning project. In two phases, 286 apartments, ranging from 1.5 to 8.5
rooms, were realized for a broad mix of 800 residents, bringing the total number
of apartments operated by ABZ to over 5 000. A kindergarten, nursery and
restaurants are located in the ground-floor areas. The open courtyards between
the four buildings are connected by passages.

Photograph of the new urban development, Glattpark, 2020
Photo: Sanna Kattenbeck

The Glattpark neighborhood beyond the city limits of Zurich consists mainly of
private, for-profit development. The project for ABZ, designed by pool
Architekten (first three building blocks in the foreground), is an exception. It
articulates an urban facade toward the public square, and its courtyards are
accessible to residents and the general public alike. In contrast, private
developers tend to privatize the public space in their developments with
individual gardens or glazed balconies.

Research: Nina Baisch, Bianca Matzek


6.
LAND

The high percentage of cooperative land ownership in Zurich contributes to the
city’s socio-spatial balance. Land is removed from speculation, curbing
gentrification and keeping inner-city apartments affordable. Large, contiguous
sites allow for the collective use of urban green spaces.


AGENCY

Cooperative organizations own around 9 percent of Zurich’s buildable land and 18
percent of the city’s housing stock. Owning entire neighborhoods is key to
cooperatives’ resilient, long-term planning practices. Organizations can
rehabilitate or redevelop their housing stock in phases over several decades.
This sustainable occupancy policy allows lower-income groups to remain in place.

Urban expansions and cooperative land in Zurich, 2020
Visualization: Sanna Kattenbeck & Monobloque
Source: GIS-Browser Kanton Zürich

The majority of Zurich’s cooperative organizations acquired their land from the
1920s to the 1950s. Today’s low rents directly result from the low initial
purchase price of the land, as the rent calculation is based on the initial
price and not on the current market value.

Concurrently, that same land ownership guarantees cooperatives’ AAA credit
rating precisely because the theoretical market value of the land has increased
approximately a hundredfold since purchase. Cooperatives can finance
redevelopment projects by rescheduling debt backed by land, even though the land
is not for sale due to the cooperatives’ commitment to nonspeculation.

The garden city model of urban planning, premised on rejecting the individual
parcel, best exemplifies the promise of collective land ownership. Under
cooperative stewardship, generous collective landscapes and playgrounds are
accessible to the public and enjoyed by residents.


INSTRUMENTS

Outright Ownership
Outright ownership of land is a legal construct for assigning rights and
responsibilities of individual or juridical persons to a piece of property,
defined as a part of the earth’s surface and registered in a deed. The
collective private property of cooperative organizations is a hybrid of
ownership and rental models: residents are both collective shareholders and
individual renters.

Leasehold of Municipal Land
A leasehold (Baurecht) is a legal arrangement by which the land owner grants
rights to use of land against payment of rent. In Zurich, leaseholds of
municipal land are usually granted for 62 years, extendable by 30 years. For the
municipality, this ensures long-term control of urban development. For
cooperative organizations, it ensures access to buildable land that today has
become expensive and virtually impossible to come by, even as money is cheap.  


DOCUMENTS

Map of municipal land in Zurich, 1929
Source: Camille Martin, Hans Bernoulli. Städtebau in der Schweiz.
Grundlagen. Zurich: 
Fretz & Wasmuth, 1929

The land owned by the City of Zurich includes not only land in residential areas
but roads, infrastructure and forest. From the turn of the twentieth century
onward, the City of Zurich has supported cooperatives through a policy of land
reserves, possible because of low land prices. Between the urban expansions of
1893 and 1934, the share of land owned by the municipality (excluding streets
and squares) rose from one-eighth to over one-third of the total urban area.
Cooperative organizations had preferential access to this land, either through
large plots or favorable prices. Cooperatives also benefited from the urban
expansion of 1934 because it turned cheap agricultural land into buildable sites
with amenities and infrastructure. In the 1950s, the City of Zurich halted the
sale of municipal land. From 1965 onward, it systematically granted leaseholds.

Poster used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich
Map used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Aktionskomitee für die Eingemeindung. Für die Eingemeindung der Zürcher
Vororte. Zurich, 1929

Better urban design and bus service were used to make the case for incorporating
neighboring towns and villages into the city of Zurich. A referendum to approve
this was rejected by voters, but a second urban expansion was nonetheless put in
place in 1934.

Neighborhood plan (Quartiersplan), Zürich-Schwamendingen, 1948
Architect: City Architect Albert Heinrich Steiner
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Aerial photograph, Zürich-Schwamendingen, BGZ housing complex, 1954
Photo: Werner Friedli/Bildarchiv der ETH-Bibliothek
Redevelopment plan Schwamendinger-Dreieck, BGZ, 2012
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: BGZ masterplan, 2012

The size and long-standing ownership of land in Schwamendingen allows
Baugenossenschaft Glattal Zürich (BGZ), a cooperative organization founded in
1942, to pursue a phased renewal of its housing stock over 23 years.

Research: Anna Derriks, Sanna Kattenbeck


7.
ZONING

The City of Zurich uses its zoning code to give cooperatives access to buildable
land and to allow forms of urban design that support cooperatives’ collective
use of interior and exterior spaces.


AGENCY

In Zurich, the floor area of collectively used spaces does not count toward the
floor area ratio (FAR). This encourages developers to locate these spaces on the
ground floor or in other attractive places within the building. Cooperative
organizations make particular use of this rule to create inviting, multiuse
shared spaces.

The Planned Development Area promotes forms of urban design that privilege
collective open space over individual gardens since allowable FAR can be
distributed on the site more coherently than in parcel-based planning. Since
cooperatives tend to build more and smaller dwellings than private developers,
shared courtyards or landscaped terraces acquire key importance for design, use
and maintenance.

Since 1995, the Planned Development Area has been the decisive instrument to
promote densification as it allows building to a higher density than on
individual parcels. For cooperatives, however, it is also a tool to preserve the
relatively low-rise neighborhood identity of the garden city. Because of their
commitment to nonspeculation, cooperatives rarely maximize the legally permitted
building volume in redevelopment projects. 

Axonometric drawings of Entlisberg, original development (1929–32) and
redevelopment as a Planned Development Area (2013–17)
Visualizations: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque


INSTRUMENTS

Floor Area Ratio 
Floor area ratio or FAR (Ausnützungsziffer) is a relational measure of building
density, defined as the ratio of a building’s total floor area to the area of
the parcel upon which it is built. A unique aspect of Zurich’s FAR is that
ancillary spaces not used for permanent occupancy are excluded from the
calculation if they enhance overall livability. 

Planned Development Area 
The Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung) applies to properties that are at
least 6 000 m2 in size. It allows, as of right, higher density than on
individual parcels in the same zoning district and flexible placement of the
allowable building volume, but projects must comply with energy-efficiency and
design standards. Holding an architectural competition is one way to demonstrate
this compliance. 8. The Competition.

Appreciation Tax and Special Area Plan
The appreciation tax (Mehrwertabgabe) is a municipal tax of 20–40 percent levied
once on the appreciation of land values resulting from zoning or public
investment. Since 2009, the City of Zurich used the tax in conjunction with the
Special Area Plan (Gestaltungsplan), filed to apply for the rezoning of large
sites, where the tax is paid by allocating land to cooperative housing.

Maps of Zurich showing the zoning code and its revisions in 1946, 1995 and 2014
Visualization: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Gerechter. Die Entwicklung der Bau- und Zonenordnung
der Stadt Zürich. Zurich, 2013


DOCUMENTS

Photograph of Ursula Koch, city councilor and head of the Building Department
from 1986 to 1998, in front of the city model of Zurich, no date
Photo: Verena Eggmann/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5037-Fx-0005)

Ursula Koch played a decisive role in shaping Zurich’s urban development in
favor of cooperatives. The controversial zoning code of 1992, launched by her
office, promoted affordable, high-quality and family-friendly housing despite
the lobbying of investors who sought to strengthen Zurich’s finance and service
industries by creating new office space. 8. The Competition / History

The stand-off between the canton’s conservative government and the city’s
social-democratic administration ended in compromise in 1999, when the zoning
code was revised to limit the rezoning of former industrial areas for commercial
use but continued to allow for higher densities. The 1999 revision also
introduced other aspects important for cooperatives today: it formalized various
participatory processes in planning and created access to land via the Special
Area Plan, in conjunction with the appreciation tax.

Public demonstration in favor of the 1992 zoning code, 1992
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-07-155-008)

In the 1990s, the zoning code became a lightning rod for those questioning who
ought to benefit from higher-density development, especially on former
inner-city industrial sites: for-profit developers of office buildings or
nonprofit developers of housing for families? The centrality of these debates is
reflected in the increasing frequency of zoning code revisions: every fifteen
years after 1946 and every three to four years in the 1990s.

Diagram explaining the higher density permissible in a Planned Development Area
within a W4 residential zoning district, 2014
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Teilrevision der Bau- und Zonenordnung. BZO 2014.
Erläuterungsbericht. Zurich, 2014

Since its first zoning code was approved in 1946, the City of Zurich has used
the Planned Development Area to support cooperative housing. Known as
Comprehensive Development (Gesamtüberbauung) in the 1946 zoning code, the tool
facilitated modern, low-density Siedlungen. With the 1963 revision of the zoning
code, the tool was renamed Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung),
and was adjusted to encourage new development at higher densities. In the 1992
revision, the allowances for densification were further increased with the goal
encouraging redevelopment of existing projects, as shown in the diagram above.

Aerial photograph, Entlisberg original development, no date
Photo: Swissair/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Prior to the promulgation of the 1946 zoning code and the Planned Development
Area, garden city developments like Entlisberg were possible only through
variances to existing regulations.

View of the redevelopment of Entlisberg under construction, 2016
Photo: Juliet Haller/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Parts of the original Siedlung were demolished and redeveloped to make room for
a denser development under the premises of a Planned Development Area. The
flexibility of the Planned Development Area allowed preserving the openness of
the garden city in the Entlisberg redevelopment even as the density increased by
almost 50 percent. Meier Hug Architekten conceived of the new, collectively used
longitudinal courtyard space as a “machine for collective life” to transcend the
modernist machine for living. 

Photo of central courtyard, Entlisberg redevelopment, 2018
Photo: Roman Keller, Zurich

Research: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch


8.
THE COMPETITION

An architectural competition aligns the users, the client, the municipality and
the architect behind a common imaginary of the future living environment
articulated in the architectural project. A transparent and binding process, it
promotes public understanding and trust in what design can achieve.

View of the roof terrace at Kalkbreite, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

From writing the brief to the jury process, competitions build knowledge and
commitment among residents, cooperative organizations and architects alike.
Cooperatives must think carefully about what they want, so that architects can
be given a detailed and challenging competition brief. In the case of the
Kalkbreite complex, the competition process was essential for the new
organization to establish legitimacy and develop a shared vision of its future.

Because of the binding nature of the competition process, the winner receives a
commission, no matter how experimental or new the design is. Competitions are
therefore not only intellectually stimulating for architects but provide
potential financial rewards that justify the risk of investing 1 000-plus hours
of work.

Architectural competitions make innovation in housing economically profitable
and socially acceptable. A cooperative organization might invest 300 000 Swiss
francs or more in the process because residents and management will draw
long-lasting benefits from a proposal that has been vetted by all.


INSTRUMENTS

Competition Brief
To sponsor a competition, cooperative organizations must identify the goals of
the new complex in the form of a competition brief. To develop alternatives to
societal norms, organizations often launch elaborate participatory processes
involving the various stakeholders in the project. Because they know their
residents well, cooperatives can respond more precisely to residents’ current
and future needs than private investors could.

Competition for Land Lease
Since the late 1980s, the City of Zurich has held competitions among cooperative
and private developers for the leasehold of municipal land. Since 1991,
leasehold contracts have required leasehold winners to organize an architectural
competition to ensure the urban and architectural quality of the site’s future
development.

Architectural Competition
The goal of an architectural competition is to find the best proposal and avoid
cronyism in awarding contracts. The principles of competition were developed in
1877 by the Swiss Association of Engineers and Architects (SIA) and are still
valid today: a binding project brief, a jury with a majority of building
professionals, prize money commensurate to the effort, and a public exhibition
of all submitted works.

Axonometric diagram of the hallway and cores of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Source: Müller Sigrist Architekten


HISTORY

A few years after becoming the head of Zurich’s Building Department in 1986, the
Social Democrat Ursula Koch issued new guidelines for the city’s urban policy.
From then on, buildings on city-owned land were to be of outstanding design
quality. The goal was to make Zurich an attractive place for families to live.
From this moment onward, each competition for the leasehold of municipal land
obliged the winning developer to sponsor an architectural competition.

Cooperatives became a key beneficiary of this policy. By the 1980s, many were
managing existing complexes but were no longer building new ones. By expanding
competitions for leaseholds of municipal land and financially supporting
architectural competitions, the city persuaded cooperatives to become active
developers again—and not only of new land but through densification. Together,
leaseholds for municipal land and architectural competitions transformed
cooperatives from stewards to innovators. The public jury procedure triggered
public debate about submitted designs and increased confidence in the
transparency of the process. 

Today, the architectural competition has been voluntarily adopted by the
majority of Zurich housing developers, whether nonprofit or for-profit.


DOCUMENTS

Diagram of the Kalkbreite’s building program for the competition brief, 2006
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

In 2007, the Kalkbreite Association founded a cooperative organization. It won
the competition for the land lease on the basis of its daring but precise
building program: 5 000 m² of small-scale commercial and business space with
workplaces for 200 people, coupled with 7 500 m² of living space for 250
residents.

Housing was also determined by mix, through quotas for old and young, Swiss and
non-Swiss residents, as well as for new apartment types (e.g., cluster
apartments and rooms for short-term living).

Finally, the Kalkbreite program called for a new relationship between private
and collective spaces: only 30 m² instead of the Zurich average of 42 m² per
resident, counterbalanced with 600 m² of shared space in addition to the
courtyard with children’s playground, access zones, communal kitchens, a
library, guest rooms and a central laundry room.

Storytelling as an integral part of the competition program, 2008
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

Alongside a plaster model of the site and urban context, a 57-page document with
technical details and noise pollution studies, the competition brief included
eight postcards with so-called use cases. Members of the cooperative had taken
snapshots of their future living situation on the project site, an inner-city
tram depot. Architects were asked to respond to these stories with their design.

Cross-section of the winning design of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Plan courtesy of Müller Sigrist Architekten

In 2008 the project design by Müller Sigrist Architect won the open,
international, anonymous architectural competition for which 54 projects were
submitted. A polygonal courtyard building vertically separates residential and
commercial zones and places a publicly accessible courtyard on the roof of the
tram depot.

Research: Sébastien El Idrissi, Kana Ueda


INTRODUCTION:
HOUSING AND THE AGENCY OF NONSPECULATION

Anne Kockelkorn & Susanne Schindler

Zurich is a center of global finance and exemplifies the associated pressure of
a financialized real estate market on housing practices. Rents for new
residential leases have risen by more than 60 percent since 2000, property
prices have approximately doubled since 2009 and large-scale inner-city
developments are today run by globalized financial investors and pension
funds. At the same time, Switzerland’s largest and historically most
industrialized city has not been subject to the same processes of social
polarization and gentrification as Berlin or London. In fact, Zurich has a
century-old tradition of nonprofit housing, a sector that has grown continuously
since 1995. Today, 25 percent of the city’s dwelling units are permanently
withdrawn from the for-profit sector, with the largest share, 18 percent,
cooperatively owned and the remainder comprising municipal housing or housing
operated by other nonprofit entities.



What makes the Zurich case so remarkable is not just the sustained commitment to
decommodification. Cooperatives founded one hundred years ago offer city-center
rents at one-third the market rate, demonstrating the “collective possibility”
of architecture and urban design—a powerful conceptual counterpoint to the myth
of the autonomous individual. In the process of maintaining and expanding
Zurich’s noncommodified housing stock, the city’s cooperative
movement—activists, city officials, architects, funders—has supported and
realized experimental forms of living together that are able to accommodate and
incite social change. Emblematic projects of cooperative organizations such as
Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and mehr als wohnen, realized from 1998 to 2015, cater to
a variety of income groups and household formations. They also offer collective
spaces of stunning architectural and material quality and contribute to a public
realm of which multiple user groups, including the general public, can partake.

Photograph of gallery use, Zwicky Süd, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

Zurich proves that architectural innovation and social entrepreneurship in
housing—the simultaneity of social engagement and entrepreneurial action—is
possible at scale, even in the age of real estate financialization. This
striking case prompted us to ask: What enables a long-standing commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market? How can Zurich’s
cooperative model become transferrable to other places? How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition of
architecture?


1. APPRAISAL: HOUSING THE SELF, THE COLLECTIVE AND THE CITY


RESONANCE WITH THE WORLD

To appreciate what Zurich has achieved in one hundred years of nonspeculative
housing, we must take stock of the forces that shape how we live today. This
concerns in particular the continuous acceleration and multiplication of option
imposed by the process of modernization and its antinomy to modernity’s promise
of individual self-determination and autonomy. In most Western, industrialized
countries, these forces are in tension with one another: individuals often feel
torn, driven toward an individualism and entrepreneurial self-responsibility
that precludes the collective, while struggling to maintain a sense of the good
life to which they feel entitled.

In Society of Singularities (2017), sociologist Andreas Reckwitz observes that
the notion of the “collective” is becoming increasingly charged with imaginaries
of nationalism, racism and pejorative demarcations of sociocultural “losers.” At
the same time, Reckwitz describes a broad societal striving (active since the
1970s) among the educated middle classes in the postindustrial societies of
Western Europe to attain singularity; that is, the appreciation of a social
entity in terms of “inherent complexity and inner density.” Today, Reckwitz
argues, the individual’s performance of creativity and authenticity is what
leads to societal attention and approval, and this striving must transcend
anything related to the notion of a standardized mass society. But this
singularization comes at a price. It pressures individuals to perform constant
self-actualization in their professional and private lives, even as society’s
accelerating rate of change increasingly limits any one individual’s chances of
actually achieving singularization.

Chasing singularity and chasing the resources that seem necessary to achieve it
can obscure the very goal that triggered the chase; namely, to live what Hartmut
Rosa calls the “good life” based on the experience of a “positive resonance”
between the self, others and the environment. Western societies increasingly
confound the “good life” with the accumulation of resources—wealth, knowledge,
networks, space—instead of defining and delimiting the conditions of positive
resonance with the world.

Reckwitz’s and Rosa’s diagnoses help to explain why cooperatives are of
interest: they offer an economic model that counters an otherwise unquestioned
drive to maximize resources—including the unlimited appreciation of real estate
values. Zurich’s cooperatives are also relevant because they reconcile the
societal striving toward the singular with a notion of the collective that
defies reactionary imaginaries of “the other.” They answer to the specific
housing needs of an increasingly singularized society while offering the
possibility of collectively sharing spaces, knowledge and resources at multiple
scales of the city. 


NEW HOUSEHOLD FORMATIONS AND SHARED SPACES

At the scale of the household, the young cooperatives Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and
mehr als wohnen have adopted a transitional understanding of “household,” asking
who constitutes a social unit and for how long. Their apartment types embrace a
patchwork of household configurations, from part-time families to solo dwellers,
couples and the traditional “nuclear” family. Dwelling typologies include
cluster housing—groups of micro-units assembled into a larger whole—as well as
apartments for up to 50 people, sometimes with access to a serviced
kitchen. Such exceptional apartment types are then combined with conventional
flats to achieve a deliberately choreographed mix within a single development. 

Cooperatives also offer a broad range of collectively shared spaces that allow
these different household formations to live together. The ability to plan,
build and maintain community facilities and shared urban spaces is a key
characteristic of both new and old cooperative housing developments in Zurich:
this ability evolved over the course of 100 years to compensate for strict
occupancy rules (often allowing no more than one extra room per resident per
dwelling) and reduced allocations of private space to each resident (one of the
means by which cooperatives are able to offer cheaper rents than the for-profit
market). “Our dwellings don’t stop at the front door,” says Philipp Klaus, a
member of Kraftwerk1’s executive board. Shared spaces are therefore central to a
cooperative’s mode of functioning, but the new generation of cooperatives has
reframed their dimension and role. Kalkbreite, Zwicky Süd and House A at
Hunziker Areal impress with light-flooded atrium stairwells, inviting laundry
rooms, collective libraries, shared roof terraces and generous entry halls
offering sheltered arrival for those pushing prams and carrying shopping bags.

Atrium and laundry room of Haus A, Hunziker Areal (2007–15), 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

At the scale of the neighborhood, cooperatives are expanding the use of shared
space to include not only residents but neighbors and the wider public. This is
of paramount importance when attempting to confer urban qualities on new
developments in the urban periphery, and this is where the potential political
and architectural economy of the cooperative is most relevant for the
territorial equilibrium of cities today. Zwicky Süd and Hunziker Areal, both
situated in underserved locations, have succeeded in creating urban
micro-centralities by bringing small shops and other commercial enterprises to
the ground floors of their development. Whereas private developers often refrain
from implementing mixed-use in peripheral locations, cooperatives tend to be
more successful because they are under less pressure to generate immediate
revenue. As Anne Kaestle, principal of Duplex Architekten, master planners of
Hunziker Areal, explains, this allows cooperatives to “curate” users and “take
more time” to find suitable tenants.

Other large parcels on Zurich’s outskirts, cooperatives demonstrate a quieter
but possibly more important variation of urbanity—one that offers shared
experiences of urban spaces beyond those typically provided by commercial
developments. In ABZ’s Entlisberg project, for example, balconies filter the
private interiors toward landscaped areas that serve both as extensions of the
surrounding apartments and as public walkways. These projects are, as
Entlisberg’s architect Marius Hug, principal of Meier Hug Architekten, puts it,
“machines for collective life” rather than Corbusian machines-for-living geared
toward maximizing functional efficiency. This architecture offers public access
to a shared experience of the urban on sites where such possibilities are
anything but a given. 

At the scale of the city, cooperative developments keep rents affordable for the
lower and middle classes and protect residents’ right to remain for life—if not
in a given apartment itself, then at least in the neighborhood. In contrast,
residents of private developments generally pay higher rents, and this
difference increases over time as the market value of land is figured into the
for-profit rents, but not in the cost-rent of the cooperative developments. The
projects of for-profit developers in Zurich also typically do not offer the
broad scope of collective facilities and publicly accessible porous urban green
spaces that cooperative developments do. Instead, their primary goal is to
maximize financial revenue from privatized, marketable space. Urban space is
first and foremost considered as a factor that increases the value of apartments
and hence is preferably allocated to individual residents or the collective of
residents—but not to the city. 

These differing priorities become most obvious where cooperatives and for-profit
developers have realized different sections of a larger development. At
Glattpark, the space between the continuous building blocks of the for-profit
developments consists of mowed lawns enclosed by hedges and produced for the
gaze from the interior, while glazed balconies project the interior functions of
dwelling toward the outside space. In contrast, the project by ABZ and pool
Architekten offers publicly accessible walkways across a sequence of porous
courtyards, with children’s playgrounds, bike racks and a landscaped public
garden, while the receding loggias shelter residents on the upper floors from
public view. But the absence of shared spaces in for-profit developments also
indicates a knowledge gap: their developers know little about future users’
desires. Maintaining and managing shared facilities exceeds what they are
willing and able to do.

The provision of outstanding material and socio-spatial qualities combined with
the guarantee that they will remain exempt from commodification in perpetuity is
possible because the Zurich model of cooperative housing privileges the use
value of housing over its exchange value, or the commodity aspect of real
estate. This notion of use value has been institutionalized in the municipal
governance of urban space in Zurich for more than hundred years, and that is
precisely what is so remarkable and forward-thinking about this case. Among the
many regulatory instruments that allow for the positive resonance of Zurich’s
cooperative housing today are privileged access to mortgages and the definition
of Gemeinnützigkeit, which roughly translates as “nonprofit notion of the public
interest.” These regulatory tools create what is called, in
German, Handlungsspielraum, which best translates as “agency” but literally
describes the space in which action becomes possible. The German term, by
including Spiel, also implies a technical and theatrical notion of play and
movement—notions that we think with when we refer to architecture’s agency in
enabling a resonance with the world.


2. A TAXONOMY OF CONDITIONS: INSTRUMENTS, ORIGINS, AGENCY

As part of our project, we offer a primer comprising eight dossiers—An Idea of
Sharing, Public Opinion, Nonspeculation, Equity, Debt, Land, Zoning and The
Competition—that systematically relate the regulatory conditions of cooperative
housing to its concrete, socio-spatial materialization at the multiple scales of
the city. By doing so, we are taking aim at the Handlungsspielraum, or agency of
cooperative housing. This endeavor is based on two convictions. First, as
architects and historians, we must expand the temporal framework of what
constitutes the present and its possibilities for action by looking one hundred
years into the past and future. Second, we must expand the understanding of
architecture to include the socio-spatial relations that take place within the
set of possibilities created by a regulatory framework.

This exercise in transversality and co-temporality builds on a substantial (and
continuously increasing) body of scholarship both on cooperative housing in
general and on Zurich’s housing cooperatives in particular. Exhaustive
documentation by the Zurich city government has allowed researchers easy access
to relevant data. Seminal histories of Zurich’s housing cooperatives allowed us
to align with or contest existing interpretations of the past. Finally, we also
build on a growing body of comparative studies of alternate development models
as well as recent studies in the field of housing governmentality. In addition
to this scholarship, Zurich’s cooperatives have become well known through
exhibitions, magazines, journals and trade publications, as well as the
cooperative organizations themselves, which actively encourage tours of their
projects.

We expand this immense body of literature and the cooperatives’ own
marketization efforts by situating cooperatives within financial systems, by
showing how histories transform the future and by expanding understandings of
architecture as built form. The goal of this approach is to counter an
assumption, widely held in schools of architecture, that matters of
architecture, finance and regulation are not, and should not be, part of the
same field. Often, such arguments emerge from a fear of diminished disciplinary
standing, as if economic literacy would undermine one’s credibility as a
designer. Our approach also counters the separation between design courses and
history and theory—not because history and theory should serve design in terms
of the what or how but because they should empower designers to ask why.


CONDITIONS AND INSTRUMENTS

To answer our project’s first question—What enables a commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market?—we identified eight
conditions that are essential to the emergence of cooperative housing in
Zurich and its socio-spatial qualities. Each is elaborated in a website dossier
that sets architectural form, social space, territorial regulation and the
political economy of nonspeculation in relation to one another. For example, the
first condition, An Idea of Sharing, not only impacts joint ownership and
collective decision-making but also the disposition and use of shared spaces.
The second condition, Public Opinion, is essential both for political support
and the normalization of architectural typologies. The fourth and fifth
conditions—Equity and Debt—relate cooperatives’ financial constructs to their
organizational and architectural diversity. The conditions Land, Zoning and The
Competition analyze how regulations pertaining to land-use and process, under
the premise of nonspeculation, foster architectural and urban-design innovation.
The key condition of our investigation—Nonspeculation—thus sits squarely between
the regulatory, financial and spatial repercussions of the political economy of
cooperative housing.

To get at the regulatory mechanics of these conditions, each dossier
investigates two or three instruments of “territorial regulation” that describe
the legal and societal framework of urban development through norms, rules,
laws, conventions and other institutional relationships. The instruments answer
fundamental questions at both the abstract and the concrete levels of
government, such as the concept of Gemeinnützigkeit and “cost rent”. Instruments
in other dossiers refer to concepts and practices that have become so
naturalized that many practitioners rarely pause to question them; for instance,
owning land or owing money. Some tools, such as “municipal rulings” or “the
share” of a cooperative’s property are familiar to housing professionals but
rarely investigated as triggers of urban design and architectural form. In turn,
instruments well-known to architects and planners, such as zoning laws or
competitions for land leases, explain how the abstract idea of sharing can be
translated into concrete form.


HISTORIC ORIGINS AND AN EXPANDED TIME FRAME

To answer our second question—How can Zurich’s cooperative model become
transferrable to other places?—we investigated the historic origins of
conditions and instruments and considered them within an expanded time frame.

By focusing on the moment of emergence of a particular law or practice­­­—how
much equity is required to take out a loan or the way in which an architectural
competition is organized—we can understand why a law or practice gained enough
political support to become a reality. To whom and toward what end did it seem
desirable? The social, economic and legal aspects of regulation are societal
constructs: both negotiable and specific to a particular time and place. Thus,
in seeking to make instruments transferable, one ought to focus not on
transferring a law or practice from one place to another as is but on
understanding the perceived promise of that law or practice at a particular
moment in time.

To understand the relevance of such instruments today requires that they be
considered within a longer-term historic continuity­­. Extending the time frame
of analysis is particularly important for nonspeculative housing since its
benefits, like low rent, accrue across time. And expanding the time frame is
important not only for scholars who wish to study these effects. Crucially,
practitioners must also consider the impact of their work not only in the five-
to ten-year horizon that extends from idea to implementation but in a time frame
that extends one hundred years into the past and one hundred into the future. An
awareness of preceding generations’ struggles with similar challenges and how
they responded can open new perspectives onto the how and why of one’s work.
Similarly, reflecting on what present-day actions might mean one hundred years
from now can productively reframe a design project. The point is to ask, with
anthropologist Amanda Huron, how the benefits of the present extend beyond
current beneficiaries toward “as yet unknown” future generations.

Such an expanded conceptualization of the present also allows us to resituate
Zurich’s achievements in the context of Switzerland’s atypically high standard
of living and political stability. This small, landlocked countryhas enjoyed
remarkable longevity and thus trust in its institutions, disrupted neither by
wars nor major social upheavals. Several circumstances have favored the
emergence of cooperative practices: the political system is organized from the
local to the national, and the sharing of limited natural resources has long
been habitual. These aspects are hardly replicable. What can be transferred to
other places, however, are the ways in which activists, citizens, elected
officials, cooperative organizations and architects use legal, financial and
regulatory instruments, as well as the architectural imagination, to advance a
nonspeculative form of housing development and new forms of living together. The
instruments we describe can be negotiated within the specific political
struggles of other locales and will play out in a similar manner when deployed
over time.


AGENCY AND HANDLUNGSSPIELRAUM

A response to the third guiding question of this project—How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition
of architecture?—becomes possible only through consideration of regulatory
constructs, their historic origins and their long-standing impact on the built
environment. The process of relating instruments and historic origins within a
layered, condensed, yet expanded notion of time opens up architectural agency in
a twofold way. The first is the agency of architects, planners and citizens to
shape the built environment, to mediate social relations of living together and
to bring about change through a range of strategies: it is the space in which
action becomes possible, the Handlungsspielraum. The second notion of
architectural agency refers to the effect of form itself, its Wirksamkeit. We
argue that the use value of housing and the accessibility of desirable forms of
living is not a matter of form alone, but a process that is directly tied to a
regulatory framework and its ensuing urbanization processes. Hence, the agency
of form is something that takes place in resonance with situated variations of
use, the processes by which users’ selves are socially conditioned (i.e.,
subjectivation) and the ways territories and subjects are governed.

The floor plans for Zwicky Süd (2015), developed by a cooperative and two
for-profit developers, exemplify how architectural agency involves such
processes of subjectivation within a regulatory framework. Kraftwerk1, the
cooperative developer, emphasized gallery access to its apartments and flexible,
dividable floor plans, allowing residents to adapt their living environment as
needed and encouraging spontaneous encounters among residents. The private
developers, in contrast, prioritized point access and apartments with fixed,
separate rooms, thus minimizing opportunities for encounters with neighbors and
emphasizing privacy even within the apartment. However, it is not only the
architectural disposition of dwelling unit and the distribution of a building
that mediate different types of subjectivity, but also their mode of operation
and their situatedness within the city. Over time, rents in the cooperative
development will decrease while rents in the for-profit development will
increase; and paradoxically enough, it is the mixed-use offer in the cooperative
development that guarantees the attractivity of this otherwise peripheral site.
The architecture of Zwicky-Süd, as form, partakes in this partly territorial,
managerial and regulatory process—and this partaking expands our definition of
architecture as form.

If the stunning shared spaces and experimental floor plans of cooperative
housing in Zurich reveal how material form can positively resonate with the
lived spaces of its inhabitants, the Zurich case also shows that material form
can even give rise to a feedback loop that impacts the regulatory framework.
In the 1920s, for example, a push to adopt the garden city as an urban model led
to a revision of building laws and would shape Zurich’s first zoning code,
adopted in 1946. Nearly one hundred years later, the Federal Office of Housing
WBO chose the “cluster” typology created by Duplex Architekten for mehr als
wohnen’s House A in Hunziker Areal of 2015, for its design guidelines as
exemplary of flexible living forms. However, we argue that architecture can
sustain a positive resonance for the practice of dwelling only if society agrees
about the purpose and public benefit of the use value of dwelling. If public
opinion does not support a commitment to nonspeculation and use value in
housing, architectural form alone will have little chance to mediate the social
relations of living together and confer a positive resonance with the self, the
collective and the city. In this situation, architects, planners and citizens
will have to exclusively recur to the first modality of architectural agency and
redesign the regulatory framework itself. 


3. INSIGHTS: BOTH-AND

Our effort to understand how social entrepreneurialism and architectural
innovation come together in Zurich in an era of financialized real estate led to
three key insights about how cooperatives have bridged seemingly contradictory
realms in redefining certain widely held assumptions about the politics of
housing.


AFFORDABILITY REDEFINED: THE ARCHITECTURAL LEVERAGE OF NONSPECULATION

The first insight distilled from our investigation is that Zurich’s cooperatives
have been able to produce experimental architecture precisely because of, not
despite their commitment to, nonspeculation and affordability.

Low-rent housing is often conflated with housing of low quality; that is, built
with lower-grade materials and featuring standardized apartment layouts. In
Zurich’s cooperatives, the opposite is true. Precisely by renting their
apartments at below-market rates, cooperatives minimize the risk of vacancy.
Precisely because they are not forced to generate returns on investments, they
have the leeway to test new forms of living together. For example, conceiving
of, realizing and finding residents for the thirteen-room penthouse apartment at
Zwicky Süd was possible because Kraftwerk1 was not under pressure to immediately
generate revenue for a form of dwelling that the cooperative wanted to launch
and test.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for design innovation thus
challenges the widely held assumption that the best way to achieve low rents is
through design. Architectural strategies that have been tested for over a
century with this belief in mind include the repetition of standardized
elements, prefabrication, and limited floor area. While these strategies can
contribute to lowering construction costs and decreasing a building’s carbon
footprint, passing on the savings from such architectural decisions to the user
happens only if there is a commitment to doing so. Cooperatives, too, reduce
apartment sizes and experiment with construction methods, and these strategies
do effect rents; in this case, however, rents tend to fall over time because of
the cost-rent model, which is tied to investment costs and removes the main
contributor to housing prices—rising land values.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for high-quality architecture also
inverts the neoliberal paradigm which posits that housing built for lower-income
groups, assumed to be subsidized, should be of lower architectural quality lest
it become desirable for higher-income groups. This neoliberal critique has never
quite applied to Zurich’s cooperatives since they are not technically subsidized
and have never served only low-income households. At the same time, cooperatives
have proven these neoliberal critics right: they have pioneered forms of living
together that the private market has copied for higher-income clienteles. For
example, “cluster apartments” combining several minimal, single-person dwellings
around a large, shared kitchen were first tested by cooperatives but have become
mainstream among for-profit residential developers.

The criticism waged at cooperatives most often both from the political left and
the political right is that cooperatives are primarily a middle-class
proposition and are thus exclusive: residents must have some savings to afford a
share in the cooperative, and rents are not pegged to income but result from the
cost-rent model and thus often exceed low-income residents’ financial abilities,
especially in the case of new construction. Over the life of a property,
however, rents tend to decrease, sometimes in absolute terms and always in
relation to market rates. Access to cooperative housing thus widens over time.

Zurich’s cooperatives have thus redefined “affordability” by demonstrating that
it is a precondition for design exploration while at the same time showing that
residents’ incomes are not a precondition for enjoying its advantages. Zurich’s
cooperatives illuminate a way out of a bind often faced by potential residents:
the choice between “social housing,” where access is restricted by income and
availability, and “market-rate housing,” where access is restricted by
ever-rising costs. In contrast to both, Zurich’s cooperatives leverage
nonspeculation and architecture in equal parts to achieve the goal of at-cost
housing open to all.


THE COMMONS RESITUATED; OR, COOPERATIVES OPERATE AT ONCE BEYOND AND WITHIN
THE MARKET

A second key insight to emerge from our study of Zurich’s cooperatives is that
these entities, exemplars of the practice of urban commoning, have become actors
not only in opposition to but in concert with capitalism.

In the context of today’s low, even negative interest rates, high land values,
and de minimis vacancy rates, cooperatives have become more than reliable
borrowers; they have become highly coveted. Private banks, institutions and even
individual investors today compete with the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to sell
mortgages. What determines the creditworthiness of a nonprofit entity is the
value of its cooperative land. Even if that land technically cannot be sold at
market rates, it serves as collateral for various types of long- and short-term
loans. This has led to an astonishing situation: the balance sheet of Zurich’s
largest cooperative, ABZ, shows 30 million Swiss francs in equity and 1.05
billion Swiss francs in debt. In mid-2020, ABZ was rated by an accredited
institution as being on par if not higher-performing and more secure than
Switzerland’s largest publicly traded real estate companies. Zurich’s
cooperatives thus prove that low-rent housing can be produced and operated in
financially lucrative ways, requiring neither extensive state subsidies nor
later bailouts.

But the architectural and urban qualities of cooperative developments are
precisely where the tension and contradictions between a commitment to
nonspeculation and the logic of entrepreneurship become tangible. The current
rush by many cooperatives to demolish and replace functional, well-maintained
buildings has to do with a lack of buildable land and the political mandate to
densify within city limits. Fueling this rush is less residents’ dissatisfaction
with their living environments and more the ready availability of capital.
Increasingly, such projects have involved centrally located developments noted
as historically significant, such as the FGZ’s Friesenberg row houses from the
1920s or ABZ’s Kanzlei perimeter block from the 1930s. In the process,
cooperatives often seem to undermine their own goals, since the newly built,
larger apartments have higher rents than the ones they replaced, and increased
apartment size has led to the actual number of apartments increasing only
minimally.

The name of this practice is Ersatzneubau, literally “replacement through new
construction.” Cooperatives are under increasing pressure to contribute to the
municipal and federal mandates to increase density within built-up areas as part
of an effort to combat sprawl and climate change. Arguments made by cooperatives
in favor of Ersatzneubau are that the practice is necessary to meet current
lifestyle standards relating to the size and configuration of apartments and to
comply with new regulations, in particular those related to accessibility and
energy efficiency. Redevelopment has been incentivized by revisions to the
city’s zoning code allowing for higher density on large, contiguous sites
through the tool of the Arealüberbauung, or Planned Development Area. In this
way, in areas otherwise zoned for three-story buildings on individual parcels,
seven-story structures are permissible on large sites. While citizens and
preservationists are increasingly contesting the practice of Ersatzneubau, it
has also enabled sensitive, phased renewal intended to keep residents in place,
as in BGZ’s work in Schwamendingen.

Cooperatives’ current redevelopment practices, while controversial, bespeak a
commitment to and investment in a nonspeculative future. Across their more than
one-hundred-year history, not a single cooperative complex has ever “opted out”
of its commitment to nonspeculation. In theory, a two-thirds majority of members
could, once all public funding has been paid back and pending approval of the
municipality, vote to recommodify the housing. But as ABZ CEO Hans Rupp
observes, the nonprofit nature is deeply “written into the DNA” of Zurich’s
cooperatives. Nevertheless, debates continue. Cooperative leaders are well aware
that upgrading neighborhoods or spearheading the development of new ones, as
Kraftwerk1 did at Zwicky Süd, can increase the valuation of real estate and lead
to gentrification even if the new cooperative apartments are rented at cost.


AUTONOMY RE-EMBEDDED: PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT BACKED BY THE STATE

The third key insight from our research is a recognition that the sustained
growth of cooperatives across the last century in Zurich was possible only
because of their  embeddedness with Zurich’s municipal government.

Cooperatives have crafted an image (and self-image) of themselves as autonomous
actors creating alternatives to those offered by the market and as doing so
independently of the state. Various aspects of their functioning support this
image, including self-determination (they select their own members and draft
their own bylaws); self-governance (including all aspects of managing, planning
and organizing the life of the cooperative); and economic self-sufficiency (as
required by cost rent). A sense of being separate and independent has also been
a distinct feature of cooperative architecture and urbanism. That is, for much
of their history cooperatives have chosen to materialize as distinct entities in
the city, both at the scale of the Siedlung and in terms of a uniform
architectural expression across individual buildings.

Autonomy is also what has made this model of nonprofit housing politically
acceptable from left to right and across shifting political trends, as housing
scholar Julie Lawson notes. Geographers Ivo Balmer and Jean-David Gerber explain
the continued growth of the model this way: “Housing cooperatives owe their
success to the fact that, despite decommodification, they do not lead to an
expansion of state control. To a large extent, housing cooperatives are a
private, self-organized solution to a public problem.” Nonetheless, even Lawson
and Balmer and Gerber go into great detail to explain that continued political
and financial support for at-cost housing has been possible only because of the
close connections of cooperatives to the workings of municipal governments, as
well as initiatives and pressure from organized citizens. Zurich’s cooperatives
thus strike an unusual balance: Their claim to autonomy from the state ensures
them state support.

Across the last century, this embedded autonomy has led to various forms of
state support, the two most significant of which are preferential access to
municipal land and preferential access to financing. In 1902, the Canton of
Zurich obliged the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to lend to cooperatives. In 1910
the required equity was lowered to 10 percent of development costs; in 1924 it
was further lowered to 6 percent, where it has remained to this day, enabling
cooperatives to obtain mortgages at conventional interest rates but with less
than one-third of the equity required of other borrowers. This, in turn, has
allowed cooperatives and policymakers to argue that cooperatives are
self-sufficient entities that, despite enjoying preferential access to land and
financing, should not be considered subsidized. Not technically being subsidized
means, in turn, that residents are not subject to income restrictions, which in
turn reinforces the sense of cooperatives as autonomous, self-governed
communities. All in all, the preferential access to financing has led to an
outstandingly diverse field of 141 cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42 000 apartments—a remarkable realization of
collective self-determination and social entrepreneurship that reconciles the
strive for individual singularization with the collective.

This embedded autonomy is the result of a continual push and pull between
activists and citizens on the one hand and city officials on the other. The
Kalkbreite cooperative, a mixed-use development realized on centrally located,
municipal land, is a primary example of the effectiveness of a citizen-led
campaign to convince the City of Zurich to rededicate a municipal site formerly
considered unsuitable for residential use and grant it to a cooperative through
a leasehold. The open architectural competition for this project, however, was
the result of a municipal policy crafted within city government. In the early
1990s, the city prioritized new residential construction for families and
coupled this with requirements for higher-quality designs and transparent
selection processes. 

Together, these three key insights challenge some of the most persistent
assumptions held by architects, planners, scholars, the general public and
policymakers about housing—assumptions often framed as mutually exclusive
dichotomies rather than as examples of “both-and.” The affordability of housing
is the result of nonspeculation and can never be achieved by design alone. The
interplay of a nonprofit mission in housing and a profit-driven financial market
is real. And even independent, private actors depend on the regulatory powers of
the state to flourish. Together, these three insights help to explain what makes
social entrepreneurship and architectural experimentation possible in Zurich
even during an age when striving for singularities may be limiting our idea of
the good life.


4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: A COOPERATIVE PROJECT

Cooperative Conditions was developed with seventeen students in the Master of
Advanced Studies Program in the History and Theory of Architecture (MAS gta) at
ETH Zurich in the spring of 2020. A joint research project is an integral part
of the curriculum of this part-time, post-professional, two-year course;
students contribute to a given topic with the goal of producing a publication,
exhibition or other public format. 

When we began, we had already defined the eight conditions we would explore. We
had also determined that students would conduct interviews, engage in archival
research and synthesize the findings using an analytical framework organized
around Instruments, Historic Origin and Agency. The interviews were most
revealing with respect to the relationship of architecture, finance and
regulation. We spoke not just with architects and city officials, typically
eager to share their views on design and policy, but with the chief executives
of cooperative organizations, pension fund managers and bankers. The latter
conversations provided insight into the financial dimensions of architectural
decisions that even these decision-makers themselves had rarely considered.

The direction and outcome of the research, however, evolved through a continual
back and forth among students and instructors. This included the choice of
Instruments and the selection of projects to best highlight Agency. Students
often took the initiative. They expanded the range of projects to consider and
people to interview, and Rebekka Hirschberg proposed film as the best medium to
capture the projects’ atmospheres. 

In translating the research into graphic form, the feedback and art directorship
of Berlin-based graphic studio Monobloque were critical. First Dorothée Billard,
then also Clara Neumann, gave shape to aspects of cooperatives that are often
discussed but rarely made tangible. Key visualizations include how cost rent
develops over time and the relation of equity to various forms of debt.

For the exhibition and this web page, we developed a combined framework to bring
together short texts, original graphics and contemporary and historical
images. The inextricability of courtyard configurations, interest rates and
municipal rulings becomes apparent through the juxtaposition of different
artifacts. Visitors will thus find, side by side, a Twitter feed charting the
results of a 2020 referendum on housing, an album page commemorating the 1931
World Cooperative Day and contemporary photographs (taken by students) of
cooperative spaces.

The website captures a work in progress, at a half-way point between exhibition
and book.

Cooperative Conditions, then, is a product of minds working in cooperation to
create a primer on architecture, finance and regulation. It was made possible by
the many individuals and organizations who contributed knowledge, time, humor
and, not least, money. They did so out of a sense that the potential and
possibilities of this project would be worth the effort. Thank you.


1.
AN IDEA OF SHARING

Sharing is the foundation of any cooperative enterprise. Sharing occurs in three
overlapping realms: labor and resources; property; governance. Sharing means
access to more not less—not only for the cooperative community but for society
at large.

View of the laundry room of Haus A · Hunziker Areal, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

Shared governance plays out directly in planning decisions. In a cooperative,
members elect the board; approve expenditures, investments and future expansion;
and are encouraged to serve on committees that discuss everything from community
building to entrepreneurial strategy. This creates an ongoing feedback loop
allowing management to respond to members’ changing needs.  

Shared governance and shared ownership directly shape the configuration of
cooperative architecture. This might result in large, landscaped courtyards
rather than small private patios; hallways used not only to access dwelling
units but for interaction; and laundry rooms designed to accommodate washing
machines and to encourage children’s play. Because residents are at once
co-owners, co-governors and co-users, they trust one another in the use of these
shared spaces.

The conviction that resources are limited and must be shared has encouraged
cooperatives to respond with new spatial strategies. These include lowering the
size of dwelling units while increasing amenities that are available to all;
locating intermittently used spaces such as guest rooms outside of the
apartment; and offering a range of apartment configurations to accommodate
changing household needs. 


INSTRUMENTS

Shared Labor and Resources
A cooperative is a community whose members advance common interests by sharing
labor and resources. Any surplus value is shared equally among members. This
practice is referred to as “mutual self-help” and is often possible only through
uncompensated, volunteer labor.

Shared Property
A cooperative is a corporation co-owned by its members. Members become co-owners
of a housing complex when they become residents and buy a share.  4. Equity 

Shared Governance
A cooperative is a legal entity co-governed by its members. Its bylaws define
the rules of governance. These generally adhere to the democratic principle of
one member, one vote. The commitment to nonspeculation is an integral part of
any Zurich cooperative’s bylaws.  3. Nonspeculation

Diagram of the cooperative system of shared governance
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Cooperative organizations (ABZ, Kraftwerk1 and Kalkbreite) 

Zurich cooperatives can vary in structure depending on size and mission, but
some features are common to all. Members elect the (volunteer) board and various
(volunteer) committees, and the board makes strategic decisions and appoints the
(professional) management. The purchase of a share makes a member a resident and
co-owner of the cooperative.


DOCUMENTS

Album Page of the ABZ’s celebrations on the occasion of World Cooperative Day,
1931
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ F.03.2.30)

This event, staged to draw in the wider public, sought to spread the main idea
animating cooperatives: collective action for shared benefit rather than
competition for individual gain. That idea, itself older than capitalism, was
transposed to housing production in industrializing Europe during the
mid-nineteenth century. It was a response to the inability of both the state and
private enterprise to respond to the housing and other needs of the working
class and small entrepreneurs. 

Plan for Festivities in the Siedlung Ottostrasse, ABZ, 1927
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ A.32.15)

The markups in colored pencil show the temporary installations made for the
festivities on the occasion of the complex’s opening in 1927. The drawing
reveals the close attention paid to collective activities in shared spaces: a
music stage in the center of the courtyard, seating and buffets, and even a
lucky wheel. In one ground-floor apartment the cooperative exhibited
architectural plans for the complex. It also furnished two apartments as
showrooms for interested visitors. 3. Nonspeculation / Siedlung Ottostrasse

Manifesto “bolo’bolo,” 1983
Source: P.M., bolo'bolo, Paranoia City Verlag, Zurich 2015 (1983)

Writing during the youth protests, a period when squatting was common in
Zurich’s inner-city, the activist Hans Widmer proposed a self-sufficient
alternative to capitalist housing production: the “bolo.” Capable of
accommodating several hundred people, “bolos don’t have to be built in empty
spaces. They’re much more a utilization of existing structures. In larger
cities, a bolo can consist of one or two blocks, of a smaller neighborhood, of a
complex of adjacent buildings. You just have to build connecting arcades,
overpasses, using first floors as communal spaces, making openings in certain
walls, etc. So, a typical older neighborhood could be transformed into a bolo
like this.”

Photographs of the Sofa Uni, 1995
Photo: Gerda Tobler/Kraftwerk1

The Sofa Uni was a one-month installation in an industrial building conceived as
a laboratory for new forms of large households. The event was initiated by a
group of squatters, activists and architects dissatisfied with the type and cost
of new housing in Zurich. It led to the creation of a new cooperative
organization, Kraftwerk1. In their first publication, Kraftwerk1’s founders
wrote, “What may be lacking in terms of individual comfort will be provided—just
as in a high-end hotel—through shared luxury.” Other new cooperatives were
founded in the 2000s following Kraftwerk1’s example.

Research: Kadir Asani, Armin Fuchs, Abbas Mansouri


2.
PUBLIC OPINION

To grow beyond individual initiatives, cooperatives need political support,
which is dependent on public opinion. In Zurich, pro-cooperative policies won
important political victories in the 1920s, 1940s and late 1990s, resulting in a
significant increase in cooperative housing.


AGENCY

In Zurich, surveys have been instrumental in shaping public opinion and public
policy on housing since the late nineteenth century. Housing policy has been
continually debated, contested and revised by citizens and elected officials in
part through referenda. Swiss voters are called to the polls every three months;
ballot measures on land-use policy and housing appear every few years.

Public opinion, public policy and architecture are mediated through design
guidelines and housing regulations issued by public-sector entities. Zurich’s
cooperatives, because they are nonprofit, must adhere to both federal design
guidelines and cantonal housing regulations. As such, they, too, are a product
of societal consensus.

However, public opinion can be swayed by the tangibility of architecture. A
striking example is the highly experimental cluster floor plan designed by
Duplex Architekten für Hunziker Areal in Zurich, which was included in federal
design guidelines (the Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System) only a few years after the
project’s realization. Its inclusion signified an epochal shift: a move beyond
the nuclear family as the normative household model.

Haus A · Hunziker Areal (2009–15)
Plan courtesy of Duplex Architekten


INSTRUMENTS

Referendum
A referendum (Volksabstimmung) asks voters to approve or reject a particular
ballot measure; if approved, the measure becomes law. In Switzerland, a
mandatory (obligatorisches) referendum is required for any constitutional
change, while an optional (fakultatives) referendum can be initiated by citizens
in opposition to any law passed by the Swiss legislature (so long as 50 000
signatures asking for the referendum are collected within 100 days of the law’s
publication).

Popular Initiative
A referendum can also result from a popular initiative (Volksinitiative) on any
matter of common concern. To force a vote at the national level, a petition
requires 100 000 signatures.

Survey
A survey, study or report is an inquiry into the causes of social problems. It
is generally written by experts commissioned by a public entity or philanthropic
organization. Its normative power derives from the presumable objectivity of
science and allows policy makers to argue for or against public-sector
involvement in housing.

Timeline comparing the number of new dwelling units built by cooperative,
municipal and other developers in Zurich, 1893–2020
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Statistik Stadt Zürich


DOCUMENTS

Special issue of the daily Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich, 1907
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (Ar 32.90.5)

In 1896, a civic organization commissioned the first inquiry on the sanitary
conditions of industrial workers’ housing. The study paved the way for the City
of Zurich to define housing as a public-sector responsibility in its 1907
charter revision. An advertisement in the Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich called for
voters in the city to approve the revision in a mandatory referendum. The
revised charter was the first to define housing as a matter of public concern
and as worthy of public-sector support.

Photograph of demonstrators confronting mounted police in central Zurich during
the national strike, 1918
Photo: Wilhelm Gallas/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Even though it was a nonbelligerent, Switzerland experienced hunger, rampant
inflation, a flu epidemic and a severe lack of housing in the aftermath of World
War One. By official count, in 1919 only 20 apartments in Zurich were vacant out
of a total of 47 000. These conditions contributed to a nationwide general
strike. The emergency measures approved in response—federal subsidies for
nonprofit housing in 1918 (loans and grants), the establishment of the Swiss
Housing Federation in 1919 and the 1924 municipal ruling to lower cooperatives’
equity requirements from 10 percent to 6 percent—had lasting impacts at the
municipal and national levels.

Campaign poster of Social Democrat Emil Klöti, Zurich municipal elections, 1933
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F Pe-0910)
Exemplary floor plans for “Flexible Housing Forms” in the design guidelines of
the Federal Office for Housing (BWO), 2015 
Photo: BWO, Wohnbauten planen, beurteilen und vergleichen.
Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System. Grenchen, 2015

The 2015 Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System (Housing Evaluation System, WBS) chose the
“cluster” typology designed by Duplex Architekten for Hunziker Areal in Zurich
as exemplary of flexible living forms. The plan organizes five one- and
two-room-apartments, each with an individual bath and kitchenette, around
generous shared spaces. 

Twitter Profile of the popular initiative More Affordable Housing, held at the
federal level, 2020
Source: twitter.com/Wohninitiative

The initiative asked voters whether all municipalities in Switzerland should be
required to guarantee a certain percentage of nonprofit housing. Slogans for the
initiative included, “Stop Speculators,” and slogans against included, “No to
the Nationalization of the Housing Market.” The initiative was rejected by 57
percent of voters.

Research: Gina Rauschtenberger, Alexia Zeller


3.
NONSPECULATION

Nonstandard, experimental forms of living together are possible in Zurich
precisely because cooperatives reject the notion of exchange value in
architecture. The resulting high use value benefits not just current residents
but future generations.

Photograph of courtyard use at Siedlung Ottostrasse, 2020
Photo: Kristin Sasama


AGENCY

Nonspeculation has immediate implications for design. This is especially true
within a heated real estate market with virtually no risk of vacancies, such as
Zurich. Whereas for-profit developers tend to see a hot market as a reason to
follow existing practices, Zurich’s cooperatives see an opportunity to test new
forms of living together.

The key instrument for nonspeculation is cost-rent, which works best over time.
Upon completion of a new construction project, cost rent is only slightly below
market rent. Over time, however, cost rent declines relative to market rates
because loans are paid off and rising land values are not reflected in its
calculation. Today, rents of cooperative apartments in Zurich are, on average,
25 percent below market rents.

Taken together, the commitment to nonspeculation and cost rent encourages
careful and continuous stewardship of architectural and social structures. Even
in highly coveted central locations, cooperative organizations can renovate
complexes in response to changing standards or regulations but still keep rents
low enough to maintain social and economic diversity.


INSTRUMENTS

Gemeinnützigkeit
Gemeinnützigkeit is a legal term for a nonprofit enterprise with public benefit.
For cooperative housing, it means a permanent commitment to the provision of
housing under the premise of nonspeculation. Land and buildings are removed from
the private market and apartments priced following the cost-rent model.

Cost Rent
Cost rent is a mode of rent calculation that neither requires subsidies nor
generates a profit. It is determined by a formula which incorporates investment
value and building insurance value, multiplied by benchmark factors that are
regularly adjusted by municipal and federal agencies in relation to interest
rates and maintenance costs. 

Diagram showing cost rent's development over time
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Reports 1927–2019) and Statistik Stadt Zürich
How one Swiss Franc of cost rent is spent
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Report 2019)

The maximum cost rent for a property is calculated using a formula based on the
property’s building insurance value and investment value. These values are
multiplied by factors based on the benchmark interest rate and operating quota,
a coefficient defined by the City of Zurich that represents the estimated
oper­ating costs. The sum equals the property’s maximum allowable rental
revenue. These values change over time, as the example of ABZ’s Siedlung
Ottostrasse shows. While cost rent increases over time, it does so more
gradually than market rents because the land value of a cooperative does not
increase and cooperatives are not allowed to generate profit.


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Ottostrasse and surroundings, circa 1928
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Floor plan of typical three-room apartments, Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927
Source: ABZ Archives

Ottostrasse, completed in 1927, demonstrates how a cooperative complex, even in
a central location, can retain its original architectural features while being
continually upgraded and maintaining low rents. The three-room apartments today
rent for around 650 Swiss francs a month (and an initial share purchase of 3 000
Swiss francs), which is more than 50 percent below the market rent for
comparable apartments in the area. 1.An Idea of Sharing / Plan for Festivities
in Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927

 
 

Photograph of the youth protests and squatters’ movement in the 1980s
Photo: Gertrud Vogler/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-11-006-006)

In the 1980s, Zurich youth protested the municipality’s development policies
with a range of actions, including squatting and happenings. The youth opposed
policies that favored the demolition of existing housing to make space for new
construction of office and commercial space.  1. An Idea of
Sharing /  Manifesto bolo’bolo, 1983



Zwicky Süd, completed in 2015, is a former industrial site just beyond Zurich’s
city limits that was codeveloped 50/50 by Kraftwerk1 (a cooperative) and two
for-profit pension funds with a single architectural firm, Schneider Studer
Primas. 

Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Kraftwerk1, the cooperative
developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten
Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Pensimo Management AG, a
for-profit developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten

The floor plans for three-room apartments reveal the design priorities of
nonprofit and for-profit developers. The apartments designed and realized for
Kraftwerk1 are accessed by a shared exterior gallery, reflecting the emphasis on
casual social contacts, and exhibit interior flexibility. The pension funds
requested and realized a more standard layout: access is through a core, and
rooms have doors and defined uses.

At the time of completion, cooperative and market rents differed by
approximately 20 percent. Over time, they will diverge more dramatically because
maximization of revenue drives the pension funds, while decision-making in the
cooperative is focused on keeping rents low in line with the cost-rent model.

Research: Lale Geyer, Rebekka Hirschberg


4.
EQUITY

The limited amount of equity required for cooperatives to take out a mortgage
gives even socially marginalized groups access to financing. This has led to a
great diversity of many small, specialized organizations that offer specific
forms of living together to very different interest groups.


AGENCY

A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced from individuals whose desires and needs
are known to the organization’s management. This allows the cooperative to
develop housing models specific to its members’ needs. The Siedlung Lettenhof,
for example, was developed in the 1920s by and for single, women professionals
whose only housing options at the time were subletting or living with relatives.

Photograph of the courtyard of Siedlung Lettenhof during construction, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

In cooperative housing, the return on an individual’s equity investment is paid
out in use value, not cash. This “use value dividend” includes a life-long right
to stay, cost rent and collective self-governance.

A cooperative’s limited equity has outsize financial leverage not only in the
short term but over time. While a cooperative’s land and buildings cannot be
sold at market rates, they can be used to take on more debt for new development
projects, resulting in an even lower equity-to-debt ratio than has been required
since a 1924 municipal resolution. The larger and older a cooperative, the
greater the leverage of its equity.

The preferential access to financing has led to an outstandingly diverse field
of 141 small and large, young and old cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42.000 apartments embodying various forms of
living together.


INSTRUMENTS

Municipal Resolution
Zurich’s housing cooperatives need only 6 percent equity to access a
conventional bank loan, far less than the 20 percent typically required. This
has been the case since a 1924 municipal resolution in which Social Democrats
and conservatives struck a compromise to support cooperatives in the face of a
dire housing shortage. 2. Public Opinion

Share
A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced among its residents through the sale of
shares. A share is a certificate of partial ownership of the cooperative
corporation and entitles residents to participate in the governance of the
organization. 1. An Idea of Sharing

Savings Bank and Solidarity Fund
Zurich cooperatives generate additional financing through two self-managed
instruments. A cooperative’s savings bank allows members to deposit money and
earn a low interest rate in return. A cooperative’s solidarity fund pools
contributions to aid residents in case of financial need.

Diagrams of equity as a proportion of three cooperative organizations’ overall
balance sheet, 2018
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Annual reports of the three cooperatives from 2018

The three cooperative organizations ABZ, BBF (cooperative for working women),
and Kraftwerk1 differ in age, size, philosophy and equity as a share of their
overall balance sheet. A cooperative’s willingness to take on more debt is
shaped by whether it owns or leases the land on which it has built. 5. Debt  6.
Land


DOCUMENTS

Deposit slip for the payment of a share, BBF, no date
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich

Share prices vary depending on the age and location of the complex, as well as
the size and location of the apartment. Today, the cost of a share for a
three-room apartment in a Zurich cooperative ranges from 8 000 to 50 000 Swiss
francs.

Plan of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

Lettenhof provided a range of apartment sizes to accommodate a range of resident
needs and financial capabilities. The majority of the apartments at Lettenhof
were designed to provide maximum privacy to their residents. A private kitchen
and bath, as well as one or two private balconies, were important elements in
this strategy. The studio was the only apartment type to have a shared bath and
only a small kitchenette.

Photograph of the interior of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, no date
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen
Spread of an article on life at Lettenhof in the magazine Blatt für Alle, 1940
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen

In an article titled “Single working women created a homestead for themselves,”
the author focuses on the unusual liberties afforded to the doctors, teachers
and administrators living in Lettenhof.

Research: Hanae Balissat, Kristin Sasama


5.
DEBT

Around 80 percent of the value of Zurich’s cooperatives is debt. Private and
public-sector lenders alike consider cooperatives to be reliable borrowers and
to provide lucrative investment opportunities, a status materialized through
architecture that is built to last.

View across the Glattpark complex at the ground level, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

For Zurich cooperatives and their lenders, debt means security. Debt is not seen
as a short-term, high-risk endeavor but rather is understood as a long-term
commitment. As a result, architecture is built to last for generations. This
plays out in the choice of high-quality building materials, whether in façades,
floors or hardware. Siedlung Friesenberg, for example, has been in use for close
to a century.

For lenders, cooperatives provide lucrative investment opportunities. Zurich’s
minimal vacancy rate of 0.15 percent ensures that cooperative apartments,
offering high use value at low cost, will never go unrented. For cooperatives, a
choice of lenders allows debt to be rescheduled at favorable rates. In turn,
this gives cooperatives the leeway to pursue nonstandard architectural
solutions.

For cooperatives, servicing long-term debt goes hand in hand with a willingness
to take risks on endeavors that may only play out in the long term. This
includes developing large-scale projects in the urban periphery and embracing
urban design to encourage the use of open space by diverse actors, such as the
Glattpark development near Zurich Airport.


INSTRUMENTS

Loans from Conventional Banks
Most of the debt owed by Zurich cooperatives was obtained from banks at
conventional interest rates. These first mortgages typically cover 60–80 percent
of development costs. The Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), a private bank backed by
the Canton of Zurich, has had a legal obligation to lend to cooperatives since
1902. ( 2. Public Opinion.) Given two decades of low interest rates, other banks
are now competing for cooperatives’ business, because of their reputation as
reliable borrowers. 

Loans from Pension Funds and Other Private Entities
Since 1992, most cooperatives have also obtained second mortgages, which fund
14–34 percent of development costs, from the City of Zurich Pension Fund. This
is a private institution whose lending to cooperatives, however, is backed by
the City of Zurich. Additional long- and short-term loans are made by a variety
of private individuals and institutions. ( 4. Equity.) 

Loans from the Public Sector
The public sector, whether at the municipal, cantonal or federal level, provides
few direct loans to cooperatives. The indirect mechanisms for low-interest loans
include the Swiss Bond Issuance Cooperative (Emissionszentrale), which since
1990 has enabled cooperatives to refinance loans upon completion of a project. A
revolving fund (fonds de roulement) has been lending up to 50 000 Swiss francs
per dwelling unit since 2007.

Diagram of the types of financing available to Zurich cooperatives
Source: WBG Zürich

The balance sheet of an average Zurich cooperative organization shows a
surprisingly small amount of equity (red). The rest, even if it is funding that
the cooperative controls, is considered debt (beige/gold). This debt breaks down
as follows: the largest loans are provided by the ZKB and other banks, followed
by loans from private entities including pension funds. When, as now, interest
rates are at historic lows, all types of lenders consider lending to cooperative
organizations to be a safe and low-risk endeavor. The smallest percentage of
loans originate from the public sector. In addition, cooperatives operate their
own savings banks and a renewal fund. ( 4. Equity) The renewal fund, earmarked
for maintenance and repairs, is automatically funded by a fixed percentage of
the cost rent. 3. Nonspeculation


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph of Zurich’s city center with City Hall, Municipal Offices and
Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), 1910
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

From the beginning of its involvement in housing in 1896, the public sector in
Zurich has chosen not to lend directly to cooper­a­tives. Rather, private
entities like the ZKB (since 1902) and the City of Zurich Pension Fund (since
1992) have been obliged to do so, while the public sector insures them against
loss. Because cooperatives, despite receiving preferential access to financing,
are economically and fiscally independent actors in the real estate market,
elected officials have been able to maintain that the city does not directly
subsidize them. It is one reason cooperatives have had public support across the
political spectrum.

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Friesenberg, circa 1929
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Photograph of house entrance, Siedlung Friesenberg, 1925
Source: FGZ archives

The Familienheim-Genossenschaft Zürich (FGZ), a cooperative focused on providing
homes to families with children, was among the first cooperatives to take
advantage of the 1924 municipal resolution permitting cooperatives to access
financing with only 6 percent equity as collateral. During the first two
construction phases at Friesenberg in 1925–26 (of a total of 23 phases as
of 2021), the FGZ built 144 rowhouses and apartments in a garden city layout.
Today, the site’s future is highly contested. The FGZ would like to redevelop
the site as a whole, arguing that renovation is too expensive. Preservationists
counter that the design is unique and of high quality. They seek to prevent the
demolition of at least the 1925–26 phases.

Ground floor and landscape plan, Glattpark, 2017
Plan courtesy of pool Architekten

Through a land deal between the City of Zurich and ABZ in 2011, the cooperative
organization obtained some 24 000 m² of land in a new urban development near
Zurich Airport. In 2015, following an architectural competition, the ABZ general
assembly approved the development cost of 97.5 million Swiss francs to pursue
the winning project. In two phases, 286 apartments, ranging from 1.5 to 8.5
rooms, were realized for a broad mix of 800 residents, bringing the total number
of apartments operated by ABZ to over 5 000. A kindergarten, nursery and
restaurants are located in the ground-floor areas. The open courtyards between
the four buildings are connected by passages.

Photograph of the new urban development, Glattpark, 2020
Photo: Sanna Kattenbeck

The Glattpark neighborhood beyond the city limits of Zurich consists mainly of
private, for-profit development. The project for ABZ, designed by pool
Architekten (first three building blocks in the foreground), is an exception. It
articulates an urban facade toward the public square, and its courtyards are
accessible to residents and the general public alike. In contrast, private
developers tend to privatize the public space in their developments with
individual gardens or glazed balconies.

Research: Nina Baisch, Bianca Matzek


6.
LAND

The high percentage of cooperative land ownership in Zurich contributes to the
city’s socio-spatial balance. Land is removed from speculation, curbing
gentrification and keeping inner-city apartments affordable. Large, contiguous
sites allow for the collective use of urban green spaces.


AGENCY

Cooperative organizations own around 9 percent of Zurich’s buildable land and 18
percent of the city’s housing stock. Owning entire neighborhoods is key to
cooperatives’ resilient, long-term planning practices. Organizations can
rehabilitate or redevelop their housing stock in phases over several decades.
This sustainable occupancy policy allows lower-income groups to remain in place.

Urban expansions and cooperative land in Zurich, 2020
Visualization: Sanna Kattenbeck & Monobloque
Source: GIS-Browser Kanton Zürich

The majority of Zurich’s cooperative organizations acquired their land from the
1920s to the 1950s. Today’s low rents directly result from the low initial
purchase price of the land, as the rent calculation is based on the initial
price and not on the current market value.

Concurrently, that same land ownership guarantees cooperatives’ AAA credit
rating precisely because the theoretical market value of the land has increased
approximately a hundredfold since purchase. Cooperatives can finance
redevelopment projects by rescheduling debt backed by land, even though the land
is not for sale due to the cooperatives’ commitment to nonspeculation.

The garden city model of urban planning, premised on rejecting the individual
parcel, best exemplifies the promise of collective land ownership. Under
cooperative stewardship, generous collective landscapes and playgrounds are
accessible to the public and enjoyed by residents.


INSTRUMENTS

Outright Ownership
Outright ownership of land is a legal construct for assigning rights and
responsibilities of individual or juridical persons to a piece of property,
defined as a part of the earth’s surface and registered in a deed. The
collective private property of cooperative organizations is a hybrid of
ownership and rental models: residents are both collective shareholders and
individual renters.

Leasehold of Municipal Land
A leasehold (Baurecht) is a legal arrangement by which the land owner grants
rights to use of land against payment of rent. In Zurich, leaseholds of
municipal land are usually granted for 62 years, extendable by 30 years. For the
municipality, this ensures long-term control of urban development. For
cooperative organizations, it ensures access to buildable land that today has
become expensive and virtually impossible to come by, even as money is cheap.  


DOCUMENTS

Map of municipal land in Zurich, 1929
Source: Camille Martin, Hans Bernoulli. Städtebau in der Schweiz.
Grundlagen. Zurich: 
Fretz & Wasmuth, 1929

The land owned by the City of Zurich includes not only land in residential areas
but roads, infrastructure and forest. From the turn of the twentieth century
onward, the City of Zurich has supported cooperatives through a policy of land
reserves, possible because of low land prices. Between the urban expansions of
1893 and 1934, the share of land owned by the municipality (excluding streets
and squares) rose from one-eighth to over one-third of the total urban area.
Cooperative organizations had preferential access to this land, either through
large plots or favorable prices. Cooperatives also benefited from the urban
expansion of 1934 because it turned cheap agricultural land into buildable sites
with amenities and infrastructure. In the 1950s, the City of Zurich halted the
sale of municipal land. From 1965 onward, it systematically granted leaseholds.

Poster used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich
Map used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Aktionskomitee für die Eingemeindung. Für die Eingemeindung der Zürcher
Vororte. Zurich, 1929

Better urban design and bus service were used to make the case for incorporating
neighboring towns and villages into the city of Zurich. A referendum to approve
this was rejected by voters, but a second urban expansion was nonetheless put in
place in 1934.

Neighborhood plan (Quartiersplan), Zürich-Schwamendingen, 1948
Architect: City Architect Albert Heinrich Steiner
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Aerial photograph, Zürich-Schwamendingen, BGZ housing complex, 1954
Photo: Werner Friedli/Bildarchiv der ETH-Bibliothek
Redevelopment plan Schwamendinger-Dreieck, BGZ, 2012
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: BGZ masterplan, 2012

The size and long-standing ownership of land in Schwamendingen allows
Baugenossenschaft Glattal Zürich (BGZ), a cooperative organization founded in
1942, to pursue a phased renewal of its housing stock over 23 years.

Research: Anna Derriks, Sanna Kattenbeck


7.
ZONING

The City of Zurich uses its zoning code to give cooperatives access to buildable
land and to allow forms of urban design that support cooperatives’ collective
use of interior and exterior spaces.


AGENCY

In Zurich, the floor area of collectively used spaces does not count toward the
floor area ratio (FAR). This encourages developers to locate these spaces on the
ground floor or in other attractive places within the building. Cooperative
organizations make particular use of this rule to create inviting, multiuse
shared spaces.

The Planned Development Area promotes forms of urban design that privilege
collective open space over individual gardens since allowable FAR can be
distributed on the site more coherently than in parcel-based planning. Since
cooperatives tend to build more and smaller dwellings than private developers,
shared courtyards or landscaped terraces acquire key importance for design, use
and maintenance.

Since 1995, the Planned Development Area has been the decisive instrument to
promote densification as it allows building to a higher density than on
individual parcels. For cooperatives, however, it is also a tool to preserve the
relatively low-rise neighborhood identity of the garden city. Because of their
commitment to nonspeculation, cooperatives rarely maximize the legally permitted
building volume in redevelopment projects. 

Axonometric drawings of Entlisberg, original development (1929–32) and
redevelopment as a Planned Development Area (2013–17)
Visualizations: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque


INSTRUMENTS

Floor Area Ratio 
Floor area ratio or FAR (Ausnützungsziffer) is a relational measure of building
density, defined as the ratio of a building’s total floor area to the area of
the parcel upon which it is built. A unique aspect of Zurich’s FAR is that
ancillary spaces not used for permanent occupancy are excluded from the
calculation if they enhance overall livability. 

Planned Development Area 
The Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung) applies to properties that are at
least 6 000 m2 in size. It allows, as of right, higher density than on
individual parcels in the same zoning district and flexible placement of the
allowable building volume, but projects must comply with energy-efficiency and
design standards. Holding an architectural competition is one way to demonstrate
this compliance. 8. The Competition.

Appreciation Tax and Special Area Plan
The appreciation tax (Mehrwertabgabe) is a municipal tax of 20–40 percent levied
once on the appreciation of land values resulting from zoning or public
investment. Since 2009, the City of Zurich used the tax in conjunction with the
Special Area Plan (Gestaltungsplan), filed to apply for the rezoning of large
sites, where the tax is paid by allocating land to cooperative housing.

Maps of Zurich showing the zoning code and its revisions in 1946, 1995 and 2014
Visualization: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Gerechter. Die Entwicklung der Bau- und Zonenordnung
der Stadt Zürich. Zurich, 2013


DOCUMENTS

Photograph of Ursula Koch, city councilor and head of the Building Department
from 1986 to 1998, in front of the city model of Zurich, no date
Photo: Verena Eggmann/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5037-Fx-0005)

Ursula Koch played a decisive role in shaping Zurich’s urban development in
favor of cooperatives. The controversial zoning code of 1992, launched by her
office, promoted affordable, high-quality and family-friendly housing despite
the lobbying of investors who sought to strengthen Zurich’s finance and service
industries by creating new office space. 8. The Competition / History

The stand-off between the canton’s conservative government and the city’s
social-democratic administration ended in compromise in 1999, when the zoning
code was revised to limit the rezoning of former industrial areas for commercial
use but continued to allow for higher densities. The 1999 revision also
introduced other aspects important for cooperatives today: it formalized various
participatory processes in planning and created access to land via the Special
Area Plan, in conjunction with the appreciation tax.

Public demonstration in favor of the 1992 zoning code, 1992
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-07-155-008)

In the 1990s, the zoning code became a lightning rod for those questioning who
ought to benefit from higher-density development, especially on former
inner-city industrial sites: for-profit developers of office buildings or
nonprofit developers of housing for families? The centrality of these debates is
reflected in the increasing frequency of zoning code revisions: every fifteen
years after 1946 and every three to four years in the 1990s.

Diagram explaining the higher density permissible in a Planned Development Area
within a W4 residential zoning district, 2014
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Teilrevision der Bau- und Zonenordnung. BZO 2014.
Erläuterungsbericht. Zurich, 2014

Since its first zoning code was approved in 1946, the City of Zurich has used
the Planned Development Area to support cooperative housing. Known as
Comprehensive Development (Gesamtüberbauung) in the 1946 zoning code, the tool
facilitated modern, low-density Siedlungen. With the 1963 revision of the zoning
code, the tool was renamed Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung),
and was adjusted to encourage new development at higher densities. In the 1992
revision, the allowances for densification were further increased with the goal
encouraging redevelopment of existing projects, as shown in the diagram above.

Aerial photograph, Entlisberg original development, no date
Photo: Swissair/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Prior to the promulgation of the 1946 zoning code and the Planned Development
Area, garden city developments like Entlisberg were possible only through
variances to existing regulations.

View of the redevelopment of Entlisberg under construction, 2016
Photo: Juliet Haller/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Parts of the original Siedlung were demolished and redeveloped to make room for
a denser development under the premises of a Planned Development Area. The
flexibility of the Planned Development Area allowed preserving the openness of
the garden city in the Entlisberg redevelopment even as the density increased by
almost 50 percent. Meier Hug Architekten conceived of the new, collectively used
longitudinal courtyard space as a “machine for collective life” to transcend the
modernist machine for living. 

Photo of central courtyard, Entlisberg redevelopment, 2018
Photo: Roman Keller, Zurich

Research: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch


8.
THE COMPETITION

An architectural competition aligns the users, the client, the municipality and
the architect behind a common imaginary of the future living environment
articulated in the architectural project. A transparent and binding process, it
promotes public understanding and trust in what design can achieve.

View of the roof terrace at Kalkbreite, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

From writing the brief to the jury process, competitions build knowledge and
commitment among residents, cooperative organizations and architects alike.
Cooperatives must think carefully about what they want, so that architects can
be given a detailed and challenging competition brief. In the case of the
Kalkbreite complex, the competition process was essential for the new
organization to establish legitimacy and develop a shared vision of its future.

Because of the binding nature of the competition process, the winner receives a
commission, no matter how experimental or new the design is. Competitions are
therefore not only intellectually stimulating for architects but provide
potential financial rewards that justify the risk of investing 1 000-plus hours
of work.

Architectural competitions make innovation in housing economically profitable
and socially acceptable. A cooperative organization might invest 300 000 Swiss
francs or more in the process because residents and management will draw
long-lasting benefits from a proposal that has been vetted by all.


INSTRUMENTS

Competition Brief
To sponsor a competition, cooperative organizations must identify the goals of
the new complex in the form of a competition brief. To develop alternatives to
societal norms, organizations often launch elaborate participatory processes
involving the various stakeholders in the project. Because they know their
residents well, cooperatives can respond more precisely to residents’ current
and future needs than private investors could.

Competition for Land Lease
Since the late 1980s, the City of Zurich has held competitions among cooperative
and private developers for the leasehold of municipal land. Since 1991,
leasehold contracts have required leasehold winners to organize an architectural
competition to ensure the urban and architectural quality of the site’s future
development.

Architectural Competition
The goal of an architectural competition is to find the best proposal and avoid
cronyism in awarding contracts. The principles of competition were developed in
1877 by the Swiss Association of Engineers and Architects (SIA) and are still
valid today: a binding project brief, a jury with a majority of building
professionals, prize money commensurate to the effort, and a public exhibition
of all submitted works.

Axonometric diagram of the hallway and cores of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Source: Müller Sigrist Architekten


HISTORY

A few years after becoming the head of Zurich’s Building Department in 1986, the
Social Democrat Ursula Koch issued new guidelines for the city’s urban policy.
From then on, buildings on city-owned land were to be of outstanding design
quality. The goal was to make Zurich an attractive place for families to live.
From this moment onward, each competition for the leasehold of municipal land
obliged the winning developer to sponsor an architectural competition.

Cooperatives became a key beneficiary of this policy. By the 1980s, many were
managing existing complexes but were no longer building new ones. By expanding
competitions for leaseholds of municipal land and financially supporting
architectural competitions, the city persuaded cooperatives to become active
developers again—and not only of new land but through densification. Together,
leaseholds for municipal land and architectural competitions transformed
cooperatives from stewards to innovators. The public jury procedure triggered
public debate about submitted designs and increased confidence in the
transparency of the process. 

Today, the architectural competition has been voluntarily adopted by the
majority of Zurich housing developers, whether nonprofit or for-profit.


DOCUMENTS

Diagram of the Kalkbreite’s building program for the competition brief, 2006
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

In 2007, the Kalkbreite Association founded a cooperative organization. It won
the competition for the land lease on the basis of its daring but precise
building program: 5 000 m² of small-scale commercial and business space with
workplaces for 200 people, coupled with 7 500 m² of living space for 250
residents.

Housing was also determined by mix, through quotas for old and young, Swiss and
non-Swiss residents, as well as for new apartment types (e.g., cluster
apartments and rooms for short-term living).

Finally, the Kalkbreite program called for a new relationship between private
and collective spaces: only 30 m² instead of the Zurich average of 42 m² per
resident, counterbalanced with 600 m² of shared space in addition to the
courtyard with children’s playground, access zones, communal kitchens, a
library, guest rooms and a central laundry room.

Storytelling as an integral part of the competition program, 2008
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

Alongside a plaster model of the site and urban context, a 57-page document with
technical details and noise pollution studies, the competition brief included
eight postcards with so-called use cases. Members of the cooperative had taken
snapshots of their future living situation on the project site, an inner-city
tram depot. Architects were asked to respond to these stories with their design.

Cross-section of the winning design of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Plan courtesy of Müller Sigrist Architekten

In 2008 the project design by Müller Sigrist Architect won the open,
international, anonymous architectural competition for which 54 projects were
submitted. A polygonal courtyard building vertically separates residential and
commercial zones and places a publicly accessible courtyard on the roof of the
tram depot.

Research: Sébastien El Idrissi, Kana Ueda


INTRODUCTION:
HOUSING AND THE AGENCY OF NONSPECULATION

Anne Kockelkorn & Susanne Schindler

Zurich is a center of global finance and exemplifies the associated pressure of
a financialized real estate market on housing practices. Rents for new
residential leases have risen by more than 60 percent since 2000, property
prices have approximately doubled since 2009 and large-scale inner-city
developments are today run by globalized financial investors and pension
funds. At the same time, Switzerland’s largest and historically most
industrialized city has not been subject to the same processes of social
polarization and gentrification as Berlin or London. In fact, Zurich has a
century-old tradition of nonprofit housing, a sector that has grown continuously
since 1995. Today, 25 percent of the city’s dwelling units are permanently
withdrawn from the for-profit sector, with the largest share, 18 percent,
cooperatively owned and the remainder comprising municipal housing or housing
operated by other nonprofit entities.



What makes the Zurich case so remarkable is not just the sustained commitment to
decommodification. Cooperatives founded one hundred years ago offer city-center
rents at one-third the market rate, demonstrating the “collective possibility”
of architecture and urban design—a powerful conceptual counterpoint to the myth
of the autonomous individual. In the process of maintaining and expanding
Zurich’s noncommodified housing stock, the city’s cooperative
movement—activists, city officials, architects, funders—has supported and
realized experimental forms of living together that are able to accommodate and
incite social change. Emblematic projects of cooperative organizations such as
Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and mehr als wohnen, realized from 1998 to 2015, cater to
a variety of income groups and household formations. They also offer collective
spaces of stunning architectural and material quality and contribute to a public
realm of which multiple user groups, including the general public, can partake.

Photograph of gallery use, Zwicky Süd, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

Zurich proves that architectural innovation and social entrepreneurship in
housing—the simultaneity of social engagement and entrepreneurial action—is
possible at scale, even in the age of real estate financialization. This
striking case prompted us to ask: What enables a long-standing commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market? How can Zurich’s
cooperative model become transferrable to other places? How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition of
architecture?


1. APPRAISAL: HOUSING THE SELF, THE COLLECTIVE AND THE CITY


RESONANCE WITH THE WORLD

To appreciate what Zurich has achieved in one hundred years of nonspeculative
housing, we must take stock of the forces that shape how we live today. This
concerns in particular the continuous acceleration and multiplication of option
imposed by the process of modernization and its antinomy to modernity’s promise
of individual self-determination and autonomy. In most Western, industrialized
countries, these forces are in tension with one another: individuals often feel
torn, driven toward an individualism and entrepreneurial self-responsibility
that precludes the collective, while struggling to maintain a sense of the good
life to which they feel entitled.

In Society of Singularities (2017), sociologist Andreas Reckwitz observes that
the notion of the “collective” is becoming increasingly charged with imaginaries
of nationalism, racism and pejorative demarcations of sociocultural “losers.” At
the same time, Reckwitz describes a broad societal striving (active since the
1970s) among the educated middle classes in the postindustrial societies of
Western Europe to attain singularity; that is, the appreciation of a social
entity in terms of “inherent complexity and inner density.” Today, Reckwitz
argues, the individual’s performance of creativity and authenticity is what
leads to societal attention and approval, and this striving must transcend
anything related to the notion of a standardized mass society. But this
singularization comes at a price. It pressures individuals to perform constant
self-actualization in their professional and private lives, even as society’s
accelerating rate of change increasingly limits any one individual’s chances of
actually achieving singularization.

Chasing singularity and chasing the resources that seem necessary to achieve it
can obscure the very goal that triggered the chase; namely, to live what Hartmut
Rosa calls the “good life” based on the experience of a “positive resonance”
between the self, others and the environment. Western societies increasingly
confound the “good life” with the accumulation of resources—wealth, knowledge,
networks, space—instead of defining and delimiting the conditions of positive
resonance with the world.

Reckwitz’s and Rosa’s diagnoses help to explain why cooperatives are of
interest: they offer an economic model that counters an otherwise unquestioned
drive to maximize resources—including the unlimited appreciation of real estate
values. Zurich’s cooperatives are also relevant because they reconcile the
societal striving toward the singular with a notion of the collective that
defies reactionary imaginaries of “the other.” They answer to the specific
housing needs of an increasingly singularized society while offering the
possibility of collectively sharing spaces, knowledge and resources at multiple
scales of the city. 


NEW HOUSEHOLD FORMATIONS AND SHARED SPACES

At the scale of the household, the young cooperatives Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and
mehr als wohnen have adopted a transitional understanding of “household,” asking
who constitutes a social unit and for how long. Their apartment types embrace a
patchwork of household configurations, from part-time families to solo dwellers,
couples and the traditional “nuclear” family. Dwelling typologies include
cluster housing—groups of micro-units assembled into a larger whole—as well as
apartments for up to 50 people, sometimes with access to a serviced
kitchen. Such exceptional apartment types are then combined with conventional
flats to achieve a deliberately choreographed mix within a single development. 

Cooperatives also offer a broad range of collectively shared spaces that allow
these different household formations to live together. The ability to plan,
build and maintain community facilities and shared urban spaces is a key
characteristic of both new and old cooperative housing developments in Zurich:
this ability evolved over the course of 100 years to compensate for strict
occupancy rules (often allowing no more than one extra room per resident per
dwelling) and reduced allocations of private space to each resident (one of the
means by which cooperatives are able to offer cheaper rents than the for-profit
market). “Our dwellings don’t stop at the front door,” says Philipp Klaus, a
member of Kraftwerk1’s executive board. Shared spaces are therefore central to a
cooperative’s mode of functioning, but the new generation of cooperatives has
reframed their dimension and role. Kalkbreite, Zwicky Süd and House A at
Hunziker Areal impress with light-flooded atrium stairwells, inviting laundry
rooms, collective libraries, shared roof terraces and generous entry halls
offering sheltered arrival for those pushing prams and carrying shopping bags.

Atrium and laundry room of Haus A, Hunziker Areal (2007–15), 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

At the scale of the neighborhood, cooperatives are expanding the use of shared
space to include not only residents but neighbors and the wider public. This is
of paramount importance when attempting to confer urban qualities on new
developments in the urban periphery, and this is where the potential political
and architectural economy of the cooperative is most relevant for the
territorial equilibrium of cities today. Zwicky Süd and Hunziker Areal, both
situated in underserved locations, have succeeded in creating urban
micro-centralities by bringing small shops and other commercial enterprises to
the ground floors of their development. Whereas private developers often refrain
from implementing mixed-use in peripheral locations, cooperatives tend to be
more successful because they are under less pressure to generate immediate
revenue. As Anne Kaestle, principal of Duplex Architekten, master planners of
Hunziker Areal, explains, this allows cooperatives to “curate” users and “take
more time” to find suitable tenants.

Other large parcels on Zurich’s outskirts, cooperatives demonstrate a quieter
but possibly more important variation of urbanity—one that offers shared
experiences of urban spaces beyond those typically provided by commercial
developments. In ABZ’s Entlisberg project, for example, balconies filter the
private interiors toward landscaped areas that serve both as extensions of the
surrounding apartments and as public walkways. These projects are, as
Entlisberg’s architect Marius Hug, principal of Meier Hug Architekten, puts it,
“machines for collective life” rather than Corbusian machines-for-living geared
toward maximizing functional efficiency. This architecture offers public access
to a shared experience of the urban on sites where such possibilities are
anything but a given. 

At the scale of the city, cooperative developments keep rents affordable for the
lower and middle classes and protect residents’ right to remain for life—if not
in a given apartment itself, then at least in the neighborhood. In contrast,
residents of private developments generally pay higher rents, and this
difference increases over time as the market value of land is figured into the
for-profit rents, but not in the cost-rent of the cooperative developments. The
projects of for-profit developers in Zurich also typically do not offer the
broad scope of collective facilities and publicly accessible porous urban green
spaces that cooperative developments do. Instead, their primary goal is to
maximize financial revenue from privatized, marketable space. Urban space is
first and foremost considered as a factor that increases the value of apartments
and hence is preferably allocated to individual residents or the collective of
residents—but not to the city. 

These differing priorities become most obvious where cooperatives and for-profit
developers have realized different sections of a larger development. At
Glattpark, the space between the continuous building blocks of the for-profit
developments consists of mowed lawns enclosed by hedges and produced for the
gaze from the interior, while glazed balconies project the interior functions of
dwelling toward the outside space. In contrast, the project by ABZ and pool
Architekten offers publicly accessible walkways across a sequence of porous
courtyards, with children’s playgrounds, bike racks and a landscaped public
garden, while the receding loggias shelter residents on the upper floors from
public view. But the absence of shared spaces in for-profit developments also
indicates a knowledge gap: their developers know little about future users’
desires. Maintaining and managing shared facilities exceeds what they are
willing and able to do.

The provision of outstanding material and socio-spatial qualities combined with
the guarantee that they will remain exempt from commodification in perpetuity is
possible because the Zurich model of cooperative housing privileges the use
value of housing over its exchange value, or the commodity aspect of real
estate. This notion of use value has been institutionalized in the municipal
governance of urban space in Zurich for more than hundred years, and that is
precisely what is so remarkable and forward-thinking about this case. Among the
many regulatory instruments that allow for the positive resonance of Zurich’s
cooperative housing today are privileged access to mortgages and the definition
of Gemeinnützigkeit, which roughly translates as “nonprofit notion of the public
interest.” These regulatory tools create what is called, in
German, Handlungsspielraum, which best translates as “agency” but literally
describes the space in which action becomes possible. The German term, by
including Spiel, also implies a technical and theatrical notion of play and
movement—notions that we think with when we refer to architecture’s agency in
enabling a resonance with the world.


2. A TAXONOMY OF CONDITIONS: INSTRUMENTS, ORIGINS, AGENCY

As part of our project, we offer a primer comprising eight dossiers—An Idea of
Sharing, Public Opinion, Nonspeculation, Equity, Debt, Land, Zoning and The
Competition—that systematically relate the regulatory conditions of cooperative
housing to its concrete, socio-spatial materialization at the multiple scales of
the city. By doing so, we are taking aim at the Handlungsspielraum, or agency of
cooperative housing. This endeavor is based on two convictions. First, as
architects and historians, we must expand the temporal framework of what
constitutes the present and its possibilities for action by looking one hundred
years into the past and future. Second, we must expand the understanding of
architecture to include the socio-spatial relations that take place within the
set of possibilities created by a regulatory framework.

This exercise in transversality and co-temporality builds on a substantial (and
continuously increasing) body of scholarship both on cooperative housing in
general and on Zurich’s housing cooperatives in particular. Exhaustive
documentation by the Zurich city government has allowed researchers easy access
to relevant data. Seminal histories of Zurich’s housing cooperatives allowed us
to align with or contest existing interpretations of the past. Finally, we also
build on a growing body of comparative studies of alternate development models
as well as recent studies in the field of housing governmentality. In addition
to this scholarship, Zurich’s cooperatives have become well known through
exhibitions, magazines, journals and trade publications, as well as the
cooperative organizations themselves, which actively encourage tours of their
projects.

We expand this immense body of literature and the cooperatives’ own
marketization efforts by situating cooperatives within financial systems, by
showing how histories transform the future and by expanding understandings of
architecture as built form. The goal of this approach is to counter an
assumption, widely held in schools of architecture, that matters of
architecture, finance and regulation are not, and should not be, part of the
same field. Often, such arguments emerge from a fear of diminished disciplinary
standing, as if economic literacy would undermine one’s credibility as a
designer. Our approach also counters the separation between design courses and
history and theory—not because history and theory should serve design in terms
of the what or how but because they should empower designers to ask why.


CONDITIONS AND INSTRUMENTS

To answer our project’s first question—What enables a commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market?—we identified eight
conditions that are essential to the emergence of cooperative housing in
Zurich and its socio-spatial qualities. Each is elaborated in a website dossier
that sets architectural form, social space, territorial regulation and the
political economy of nonspeculation in relation to one another. For example, the
first condition, An Idea of Sharing, not only impacts joint ownership and
collective decision-making but also the disposition and use of shared spaces.
The second condition, Public Opinion, is essential both for political support
and the normalization of architectural typologies. The fourth and fifth
conditions—Equity and Debt—relate cooperatives’ financial constructs to their
organizational and architectural diversity. The conditions Land, Zoning and The
Competition analyze how regulations pertaining to land-use and process, under
the premise of nonspeculation, foster architectural and urban-design innovation.
The key condition of our investigation—Nonspeculation—thus sits squarely between
the regulatory, financial and spatial repercussions of the political economy of
cooperative housing.

To get at the regulatory mechanics of these conditions, each dossier
investigates two or three instruments of “territorial regulation” that describe
the legal and societal framework of urban development through norms, rules,
laws, conventions and other institutional relationships. The instruments answer
fundamental questions at both the abstract and the concrete levels of
government, such as the concept of Gemeinnützigkeit and “cost rent”. Instruments
in other dossiers refer to concepts and practices that have become so
naturalized that many practitioners rarely pause to question them; for instance,
owning land or owing money. Some tools, such as “municipal rulings” or “the
share” of a cooperative’s property are familiar to housing professionals but
rarely investigated as triggers of urban design and architectural form. In turn,
instruments well-known to architects and planners, such as zoning laws or
competitions for land leases, explain how the abstract idea of sharing can be
translated into concrete form.


HISTORIC ORIGINS AND AN EXPANDED TIME FRAME

To answer our second question—How can Zurich’s cooperative model become
transferrable to other places?—we investigated the historic origins of
conditions and instruments and considered them within an expanded time frame.

By focusing on the moment of emergence of a particular law or practice­­­—how
much equity is required to take out a loan or the way in which an architectural
competition is organized—we can understand why a law or practice gained enough
political support to become a reality. To whom and toward what end did it seem
desirable? The social, economic and legal aspects of regulation are societal
constructs: both negotiable and specific to a particular time and place. Thus,
in seeking to make instruments transferable, one ought to focus not on
transferring a law or practice from one place to another as is but on
understanding the perceived promise of that law or practice at a particular
moment in time.

To understand the relevance of such instruments today requires that they be
considered within a longer-term historic continuity­­. Extending the time frame
of analysis is particularly important for nonspeculative housing since its
benefits, like low rent, accrue across time. And expanding the time frame is
important not only for scholars who wish to study these effects. Crucially,
practitioners must also consider the impact of their work not only in the five-
to ten-year horizon that extends from idea to implementation but in a time frame
that extends one hundred years into the past and one hundred into the future. An
awareness of preceding generations’ struggles with similar challenges and how
they responded can open new perspectives onto the how and why of one’s work.
Similarly, reflecting on what present-day actions might mean one hundred years
from now can productively reframe a design project. The point is to ask, with
anthropologist Amanda Huron, how the benefits of the present extend beyond
current beneficiaries toward “as yet unknown” future generations.

Such an expanded conceptualization of the present also allows us to resituate
Zurich’s achievements in the context of Switzerland’s atypically high standard
of living and political stability. This small, landlocked countryhas enjoyed
remarkable longevity and thus trust in its institutions, disrupted neither by
wars nor major social upheavals. Several circumstances have favored the
emergence of cooperative practices: the political system is organized from the
local to the national, and the sharing of limited natural resources has long
been habitual. These aspects are hardly replicable. What can be transferred to
other places, however, are the ways in which activists, citizens, elected
officials, cooperative organizations and architects use legal, financial and
regulatory instruments, as well as the architectural imagination, to advance a
nonspeculative form of housing development and new forms of living together. The
instruments we describe can be negotiated within the specific political
struggles of other locales and will play out in a similar manner when deployed
over time.


AGENCY AND HANDLUNGSSPIELRAUM

A response to the third guiding question of this project—How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition
of architecture?—becomes possible only through consideration of regulatory
constructs, their historic origins and their long-standing impact on the built
environment. The process of relating instruments and historic origins within a
layered, condensed, yet expanded notion of time opens up architectural agency in
a twofold way. The first is the agency of architects, planners and citizens to
shape the built environment, to mediate social relations of living together and
to bring about change through a range of strategies: it is the space in which
action becomes possible, the Handlungsspielraum. The second notion of
architectural agency refers to the effect of form itself, its Wirksamkeit. We
argue that the use value of housing and the accessibility of desirable forms of
living is not a matter of form alone, but a process that is directly tied to a
regulatory framework and its ensuing urbanization processes. Hence, the agency
of form is something that takes place in resonance with situated variations of
use, the processes by which users’ selves are socially conditioned (i.e.,
subjectivation) and the ways territories and subjects are governed.

The floor plans for Zwicky Süd (2015), developed by a cooperative and two
for-profit developers, exemplify how architectural agency involves such
processes of subjectivation within a regulatory framework. Kraftwerk1, the
cooperative developer, emphasized gallery access to its apartments and flexible,
dividable floor plans, allowing residents to adapt their living environment as
needed and encouraging spontaneous encounters among residents. The private
developers, in contrast, prioritized point access and apartments with fixed,
separate rooms, thus minimizing opportunities for encounters with neighbors and
emphasizing privacy even within the apartment. However, it is not only the
architectural disposition of dwelling unit and the distribution of a building
that mediate different types of subjectivity, but also their mode of operation
and their situatedness within the city. Over time, rents in the cooperative
development will decrease while rents in the for-profit development will
increase; and paradoxically enough, it is the mixed-use offer in the cooperative
development that guarantees the attractivity of this otherwise peripheral site.
The architecture of Zwicky-Süd, as form, partakes in this partly territorial,
managerial and regulatory process—and this partaking expands our definition of
architecture as form.

If the stunning shared spaces and experimental floor plans of cooperative
housing in Zurich reveal how material form can positively resonate with the
lived spaces of its inhabitants, the Zurich case also shows that material form
can even give rise to a feedback loop that impacts the regulatory framework.
In the 1920s, for example, a push to adopt the garden city as an urban model led
to a revision of building laws and would shape Zurich’s first zoning code,
adopted in 1946. Nearly one hundred years later, the Federal Office of Housing
WBO chose the “cluster” typology created by Duplex Architekten for mehr als
wohnen’s House A in Hunziker Areal of 2015, for its design guidelines as
exemplary of flexible living forms. However, we argue that architecture can
sustain a positive resonance for the practice of dwelling only if society agrees
about the purpose and public benefit of the use value of dwelling. If public
opinion does not support a commitment to nonspeculation and use value in
housing, architectural form alone will have little chance to mediate the social
relations of living together and confer a positive resonance with the self, the
collective and the city. In this situation, architects, planners and citizens
will have to exclusively recur to the first modality of architectural agency and
redesign the regulatory framework itself. 


3. INSIGHTS: BOTH-AND

Our effort to understand how social entrepreneurialism and architectural
innovation come together in Zurich in an era of financialized real estate led to
three key insights about how cooperatives have bridged seemingly contradictory
realms in redefining certain widely held assumptions about the politics of
housing.


AFFORDABILITY REDEFINED: THE ARCHITECTURAL LEVERAGE OF NONSPECULATION

The first insight distilled from our investigation is that Zurich’s cooperatives
have been able to produce experimental architecture precisely because of, not
despite their commitment to, nonspeculation and affordability.

Low-rent housing is often conflated with housing of low quality; that is, built
with lower-grade materials and featuring standardized apartment layouts. In
Zurich’s cooperatives, the opposite is true. Precisely by renting their
apartments at below-market rates, cooperatives minimize the risk of vacancy.
Precisely because they are not forced to generate returns on investments, they
have the leeway to test new forms of living together. For example, conceiving
of, realizing and finding residents for the thirteen-room penthouse apartment at
Zwicky Süd was possible because Kraftwerk1 was not under pressure to immediately
generate revenue for a form of dwelling that the cooperative wanted to launch
and test.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for design innovation thus
challenges the widely held assumption that the best way to achieve low rents is
through design. Architectural strategies that have been tested for over a
century with this belief in mind include the repetition of standardized
elements, prefabrication, and limited floor area. While these strategies can
contribute to lowering construction costs and decreasing a building’s carbon
footprint, passing on the savings from such architectural decisions to the user
happens only if there is a commitment to doing so. Cooperatives, too, reduce
apartment sizes and experiment with construction methods, and these strategies
do effect rents; in this case, however, rents tend to fall over time because of
the cost-rent model, which is tied to investment costs and removes the main
contributor to housing prices—rising land values.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for high-quality architecture also
inverts the neoliberal paradigm which posits that housing built for lower-income
groups, assumed to be subsidized, should be of lower architectural quality lest
it become desirable for higher-income groups. This neoliberal critique has never
quite applied to Zurich’s cooperatives since they are not technically subsidized
and have never served only low-income households. At the same time, cooperatives
have proven these neoliberal critics right: they have pioneered forms of living
together that the private market has copied for higher-income clienteles. For
example, “cluster apartments” combining several minimal, single-person dwellings
around a large, shared kitchen were first tested by cooperatives but have become
mainstream among for-profit residential developers.

The criticism waged at cooperatives most often both from the political left and
the political right is that cooperatives are primarily a middle-class
proposition and are thus exclusive: residents must have some savings to afford a
share in the cooperative, and rents are not pegged to income but result from the
cost-rent model and thus often exceed low-income residents’ financial abilities,
especially in the case of new construction. Over the life of a property,
however, rents tend to decrease, sometimes in absolute terms and always in
relation to market rates. Access to cooperative housing thus widens over time.

Zurich’s cooperatives have thus redefined “affordability” by demonstrating that
it is a precondition for design exploration while at the same time showing that
residents’ incomes are not a precondition for enjoying its advantages. Zurich’s
cooperatives illuminate a way out of a bind often faced by potential residents:
the choice between “social housing,” where access is restricted by income and
availability, and “market-rate housing,” where access is restricted by
ever-rising costs. In contrast to both, Zurich’s cooperatives leverage
nonspeculation and architecture in equal parts to achieve the goal of at-cost
housing open to all.


THE COMMONS RESITUATED; OR, COOPERATIVES OPERATE AT ONCE BEYOND AND WITHIN
THE MARKET

A second key insight to emerge from our study of Zurich’s cooperatives is that
these entities, exemplars of the practice of urban commoning, have become actors
not only in opposition to but in concert with capitalism.

In the context of today’s low, even negative interest rates, high land values,
and de minimis vacancy rates, cooperatives have become more than reliable
borrowers; they have become highly coveted. Private banks, institutions and even
individual investors today compete with the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to sell
mortgages. What determines the creditworthiness of a nonprofit entity is the
value of its cooperative land. Even if that land technically cannot be sold at
market rates, it serves as collateral for various types of long- and short-term
loans. This has led to an astonishing situation: the balance sheet of Zurich’s
largest cooperative, ABZ, shows 30 million Swiss francs in equity and 1.05
billion Swiss francs in debt. In mid-2020, ABZ was rated by an accredited
institution as being on par if not higher-performing and more secure than
Switzerland’s largest publicly traded real estate companies. Zurich’s
cooperatives thus prove that low-rent housing can be produced and operated in
financially lucrative ways, requiring neither extensive state subsidies nor
later bailouts.

But the architectural and urban qualities of cooperative developments are
precisely where the tension and contradictions between a commitment to
nonspeculation and the logic of entrepreneurship become tangible. The current
rush by many cooperatives to demolish and replace functional, well-maintained
buildings has to do with a lack of buildable land and the political mandate to
densify within city limits. Fueling this rush is less residents’ dissatisfaction
with their living environments and more the ready availability of capital.
Increasingly, such projects have involved centrally located developments noted
as historically significant, such as the FGZ’s Friesenberg row houses from the
1920s or ABZ’s Kanzlei perimeter block from the 1930s. In the process,
cooperatives often seem to undermine their own goals, since the newly built,
larger apartments have higher rents than the ones they replaced, and increased
apartment size has led to the actual number of apartments increasing only
minimally.

The name of this practice is Ersatzneubau, literally “replacement through new
construction.” Cooperatives are under increasing pressure to contribute to the
municipal and federal mandates to increase density within built-up areas as part
of an effort to combat sprawl and climate change. Arguments made by cooperatives
in favor of Ersatzneubau are that the practice is necessary to meet current
lifestyle standards relating to the size and configuration of apartments and to
comply with new regulations, in particular those related to accessibility and
energy efficiency. Redevelopment has been incentivized by revisions to the
city’s zoning code allowing for higher density on large, contiguous sites
through the tool of the Arealüberbauung, or Planned Development Area. In this
way, in areas otherwise zoned for three-story buildings on individual parcels,
seven-story structures are permissible on large sites. While citizens and
preservationists are increasingly contesting the practice of Ersatzneubau, it
has also enabled sensitive, phased renewal intended to keep residents in place,
as in BGZ’s work in Schwamendingen.

Cooperatives’ current redevelopment practices, while controversial, bespeak a
commitment to and investment in a nonspeculative future. Across their more than
one-hundred-year history, not a single cooperative complex has ever “opted out”
of its commitment to nonspeculation. In theory, a two-thirds majority of members
could, once all public funding has been paid back and pending approval of the
municipality, vote to recommodify the housing. But as ABZ CEO Hans Rupp
observes, the nonprofit nature is deeply “written into the DNA” of Zurich’s
cooperatives. Nevertheless, debates continue. Cooperative leaders are well aware
that upgrading neighborhoods or spearheading the development of new ones, as
Kraftwerk1 did at Zwicky Süd, can increase the valuation of real estate and lead
to gentrification even if the new cooperative apartments are rented at cost.


AUTONOMY RE-EMBEDDED: PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT BACKED BY THE STATE

The third key insight from our research is a recognition that the sustained
growth of cooperatives across the last century in Zurich was possible only
because of their  embeddedness with Zurich’s municipal government.

Cooperatives have crafted an image (and self-image) of themselves as autonomous
actors creating alternatives to those offered by the market and as doing so
independently of the state. Various aspects of their functioning support this
image, including self-determination (they select their own members and draft
their own bylaws); self-governance (including all aspects of managing, planning
and organizing the life of the cooperative); and economic self-sufficiency (as
required by cost rent). A sense of being separate and independent has also been
a distinct feature of cooperative architecture and urbanism. That is, for much
of their history cooperatives have chosen to materialize as distinct entities in
the city, both at the scale of the Siedlung and in terms of a uniform
architectural expression across individual buildings.

Autonomy is also what has made this model of nonprofit housing politically
acceptable from left to right and across shifting political trends, as housing
scholar Julie Lawson notes. Geographers Ivo Balmer and Jean-David Gerber explain
the continued growth of the model this way: “Housing cooperatives owe their
success to the fact that, despite decommodification, they do not lead to an
expansion of state control. To a large extent, housing cooperatives are a
private, self-organized solution to a public problem.” Nonetheless, even Lawson
and Balmer and Gerber go into great detail to explain that continued political
and financial support for at-cost housing has been possible only because of the
close connections of cooperatives to the workings of municipal governments, as
well as initiatives and pressure from organized citizens. Zurich’s cooperatives
thus strike an unusual balance: Their claim to autonomy from the state ensures
them state support.

Across the last century, this embedded autonomy has led to various forms of
state support, the two most significant of which are preferential access to
municipal land and preferential access to financing. In 1902, the Canton of
Zurich obliged the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to lend to cooperatives. In 1910
the required equity was lowered to 10 percent of development costs; in 1924 it
was further lowered to 6 percent, where it has remained to this day, enabling
cooperatives to obtain mortgages at conventional interest rates but with less
than one-third of the equity required of other borrowers. This, in turn, has
allowed cooperatives and policymakers to argue that cooperatives are
self-sufficient entities that, despite enjoying preferential access to land and
financing, should not be considered subsidized. Not technically being subsidized
means, in turn, that residents are not subject to income restrictions, which in
turn reinforces the sense of cooperatives as autonomous, self-governed
communities. All in all, the preferential access to financing has led to an
outstandingly diverse field of 141 cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42 000 apartments—a remarkable realization of
collective self-determination and social entrepreneurship that reconciles the
strive for individual singularization with the collective.

This embedded autonomy is the result of a continual push and pull between
activists and citizens on the one hand and city officials on the other. The
Kalkbreite cooperative, a mixed-use development realized on centrally located,
municipal land, is a primary example of the effectiveness of a citizen-led
campaign to convince the City of Zurich to rededicate a municipal site formerly
considered unsuitable for residential use and grant it to a cooperative through
a leasehold. The open architectural competition for this project, however, was
the result of a municipal policy crafted within city government. In the early
1990s, the city prioritized new residential construction for families and
coupled this with requirements for higher-quality designs and transparent
selection processes. 

Together, these three key insights challenge some of the most persistent
assumptions held by architects, planners, scholars, the general public and
policymakers about housing—assumptions often framed as mutually exclusive
dichotomies rather than as examples of “both-and.” The affordability of housing
is the result of nonspeculation and can never be achieved by design alone. The
interplay of a nonprofit mission in housing and a profit-driven financial market
is real. And even independent, private actors depend on the regulatory powers of
the state to flourish. Together, these three insights help to explain what makes
social entrepreneurship and architectural experimentation possible in Zurich
even during an age when striving for singularities may be limiting our idea of
the good life.


4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: A COOPERATIVE PROJECT

Cooperative Conditions was developed with seventeen students in the Master of
Advanced Studies Program in the History and Theory of Architecture (MAS gta) at
ETH Zurich in the spring of 2020. A joint research project is an integral part
of the curriculum of this part-time, post-professional, two-year course;
students contribute to a given topic with the goal of producing a publication,
exhibition or other public format. 

When we began, we had already defined the eight conditions we would explore. We
had also determined that students would conduct interviews, engage in archival
research and synthesize the findings using an analytical framework organized
around Instruments, Historic Origin and Agency. The interviews were most
revealing with respect to the relationship of architecture, finance and
regulation. We spoke not just with architects and city officials, typically
eager to share their views on design and policy, but with the chief executives
of cooperative organizations, pension fund managers and bankers. The latter
conversations provided insight into the financial dimensions of architectural
decisions that even these decision-makers themselves had rarely considered.

The direction and outcome of the research, however, evolved through a continual
back and forth among students and instructors. This included the choice of
Instruments and the selection of projects to best highlight Agency. Students
often took the initiative. They expanded the range of projects to consider and
people to interview, and Rebekka Hirschberg proposed film as the best medium to
capture the projects’ atmospheres. 

In translating the research into graphic form, the feedback and art directorship
of Berlin-based graphic studio Monobloque were critical. First Dorothée Billard,
then also Clara Neumann, gave shape to aspects of cooperatives that are often
discussed but rarely made tangible. Key visualizations include how cost rent
develops over time and the relation of equity to various forms of debt.

For the exhibition and this web page, we developed a combined framework to bring
together short texts, original graphics and contemporary and historical
images. The inextricability of courtyard configurations, interest rates and
municipal rulings becomes apparent through the juxtaposition of different
artifacts. Visitors will thus find, side by side, a Twitter feed charting the
results of a 2020 referendum on housing, an album page commemorating the 1931
World Cooperative Day and contemporary photographs (taken by students) of
cooperative spaces.

The website captures a work in progress, at a half-way point between exhibition
and book.

Cooperative Conditions, then, is a product of minds working in cooperation to
create a primer on architecture, finance and regulation. It was made possible by
the many individuals and organizations who contributed knowledge, time, humor
and, not least, money. They did so out of a sense that the potential and
possibilities of this project would be worth the effort. Thank you.


1.
AN IDEA OF SHARING

Sharing is the foundation of any cooperative enterprise. Sharing occurs in three
overlapping realms: labor and resources; property; governance. Sharing means
access to more not less—not only for the cooperative community but for society
at large.

View of the laundry room of Haus A · Hunziker Areal, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

Shared governance plays out directly in planning decisions. In a cooperative,
members elect the board; approve expenditures, investments and future expansion;
and are encouraged to serve on committees that discuss everything from community
building to entrepreneurial strategy. This creates an ongoing feedback loop
allowing management to respond to members’ changing needs.  

Shared governance and shared ownership directly shape the configuration of
cooperative architecture. This might result in large, landscaped courtyards
rather than small private patios; hallways used not only to access dwelling
units but for interaction; and laundry rooms designed to accommodate washing
machines and to encourage children’s play. Because residents are at once
co-owners, co-governors and co-users, they trust one another in the use of these
shared spaces.

The conviction that resources are limited and must be shared has encouraged
cooperatives to respond with new spatial strategies. These include lowering the
size of dwelling units while increasing amenities that are available to all;
locating intermittently used spaces such as guest rooms outside of the
apartment; and offering a range of apartment configurations to accommodate
changing household needs. 


INSTRUMENTS

Shared Labor and Resources
A cooperative is a community whose members advance common interests by sharing
labor and resources. Any surplus value is shared equally among members. This
practice is referred to as “mutual self-help” and is often possible only through
uncompensated, volunteer labor.

Shared Property
A cooperative is a corporation co-owned by its members. Members become co-owners
of a housing complex when they become residents and buy a share.  4. Equity 

Shared Governance
A cooperative is a legal entity co-governed by its members. Its bylaws define
the rules of governance. These generally adhere to the democratic principle of
one member, one vote. The commitment to nonspeculation is an integral part of
any Zurich cooperative’s bylaws.  3. Nonspeculation

Diagram of the cooperative system of shared governance
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Cooperative organizations (ABZ, Kraftwerk1 and Kalkbreite) 

Zurich cooperatives can vary in structure depending on size and mission, but
some features are common to all. Members elect the (volunteer) board and various
(volunteer) committees, and the board makes strategic decisions and appoints the
(professional) management. The purchase of a share makes a member a resident and
co-owner of the cooperative.


DOCUMENTS

Album Page of the ABZ’s celebrations on the occasion of World Cooperative Day,
1931
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ F.03.2.30)

This event, staged to draw in the wider public, sought to spread the main idea
animating cooperatives: collective action for shared benefit rather than
competition for individual gain. That idea, itself older than capitalism, was
transposed to housing production in industrializing Europe during the
mid-nineteenth century. It was a response to the inability of both the state and
private enterprise to respond to the housing and other needs of the working
class and small entrepreneurs. 

Plan for Festivities in the Siedlung Ottostrasse, ABZ, 1927
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ A.32.15)

The markups in colored pencil show the temporary installations made for the
festivities on the occasion of the complex’s opening in 1927. The drawing
reveals the close attention paid to collective activities in shared spaces: a
music stage in the center of the courtyard, seating and buffets, and even a
lucky wheel. In one ground-floor apartment the cooperative exhibited
architectural plans for the complex. It also furnished two apartments as
showrooms for interested visitors. 3. Nonspeculation / Siedlung Ottostrasse

Manifesto “bolo’bolo,” 1983
Source: P.M., bolo'bolo, Paranoia City Verlag, Zurich 2015 (1983)

Writing during the youth protests, a period when squatting was common in
Zurich’s inner-city, the activist Hans Widmer proposed a self-sufficient
alternative to capitalist housing production: the “bolo.” Capable of
accommodating several hundred people, “bolos don’t have to be built in empty
spaces. They’re much more a utilization of existing structures. In larger
cities, a bolo can consist of one or two blocks, of a smaller neighborhood, of a
complex of adjacent buildings. You just have to build connecting arcades,
overpasses, using first floors as communal spaces, making openings in certain
walls, etc. So, a typical older neighborhood could be transformed into a bolo
like this.”

Photographs of the Sofa Uni, 1995
Photo: Gerda Tobler/Kraftwerk1

The Sofa Uni was a one-month installation in an industrial building conceived as
a laboratory for new forms of large households. The event was initiated by a
group of squatters, activists and architects dissatisfied with the type and cost
of new housing in Zurich. It led to the creation of a new cooperative
organization, Kraftwerk1. In their first publication, Kraftwerk1’s founders
wrote, “What may be lacking in terms of individual comfort will be provided—just
as in a high-end hotel—through shared luxury.” Other new cooperatives were
founded in the 2000s following Kraftwerk1’s example.

Research: Kadir Asani, Armin Fuchs, Abbas Mansouri


2.
PUBLIC OPINION

To grow beyond individual initiatives, cooperatives need political support,
which is dependent on public opinion. In Zurich, pro-cooperative policies won
important political victories in the 1920s, 1940s and late 1990s, resulting in a
significant increase in cooperative housing.


AGENCY

In Zurich, surveys have been instrumental in shaping public opinion and public
policy on housing since the late nineteenth century. Housing policy has been
continually debated, contested and revised by citizens and elected officials in
part through referenda. Swiss voters are called to the polls every three months;
ballot measures on land-use policy and housing appear every few years.

Public opinion, public policy and architecture are mediated through design
guidelines and housing regulations issued by public-sector entities. Zurich’s
cooperatives, because they are nonprofit, must adhere to both federal design
guidelines and cantonal housing regulations. As such, they, too, are a product
of societal consensus.

However, public opinion can be swayed by the tangibility of architecture. A
striking example is the highly experimental cluster floor plan designed by
Duplex Architekten für Hunziker Areal in Zurich, which was included in federal
design guidelines (the Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System) only a few years after the
project’s realization. Its inclusion signified an epochal shift: a move beyond
the nuclear family as the normative household model.

Haus A · Hunziker Areal (2009–15)
Plan courtesy of Duplex Architekten


INSTRUMENTS

Referendum
A referendum (Volksabstimmung) asks voters to approve or reject a particular
ballot measure; if approved, the measure becomes law. In Switzerland, a
mandatory (obligatorisches) referendum is required for any constitutional
change, while an optional (fakultatives) referendum can be initiated by citizens
in opposition to any law passed by the Swiss legislature (so long as 50 000
signatures asking for the referendum are collected within 100 days of the law’s
publication).

Popular Initiative
A referendum can also result from a popular initiative (Volksinitiative) on any
matter of common concern. To force a vote at the national level, a petition
requires 100 000 signatures.

Survey
A survey, study or report is an inquiry into the causes of social problems. It
is generally written by experts commissioned by a public entity or philanthropic
organization. Its normative power derives from the presumable objectivity of
science and allows policy makers to argue for or against public-sector
involvement in housing.

Timeline comparing the number of new dwelling units built by cooperative,
municipal and other developers in Zurich, 1893–2020
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Statistik Stadt Zürich


DOCUMENTS

Special issue of the daily Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich, 1907
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (Ar 32.90.5)

In 1896, a civic organization commissioned the first inquiry on the sanitary
conditions of industrial workers’ housing. The study paved the way for the City
of Zurich to define housing as a public-sector responsibility in its 1907
charter revision. An advertisement in the Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich called for
voters in the city to approve the revision in a mandatory referendum. The
revised charter was the first to define housing as a matter of public concern
and as worthy of public-sector support.

Photograph of demonstrators confronting mounted police in central Zurich during
the national strike, 1918
Photo: Wilhelm Gallas/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Even though it was a nonbelligerent, Switzerland experienced hunger, rampant
inflation, a flu epidemic and a severe lack of housing in the aftermath of World
War One. By official count, in 1919 only 20 apartments in Zurich were vacant out
of a total of 47 000. These conditions contributed to a nationwide general
strike. The emergency measures approved in response—federal subsidies for
nonprofit housing in 1918 (loans and grants), the establishment of the Swiss
Housing Federation in 1919 and the 1924 municipal ruling to lower cooperatives’
equity requirements from 10 percent to 6 percent—had lasting impacts at the
municipal and national levels.

Campaign poster of Social Democrat Emil Klöti, Zurich municipal elections, 1933
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F Pe-0910)
Exemplary floor plans for “Flexible Housing Forms” in the design guidelines of
the Federal Office for Housing (BWO), 2015 
Photo: BWO, Wohnbauten planen, beurteilen und vergleichen.
Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System. Grenchen, 2015

The 2015 Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System (Housing Evaluation System, WBS) chose the
“cluster” typology designed by Duplex Architekten for Hunziker Areal in Zurich
as exemplary of flexible living forms. The plan organizes five one- and
two-room-apartments, each with an individual bath and kitchenette, around
generous shared spaces. 

Twitter Profile of the popular initiative More Affordable Housing, held at the
federal level, 2020
Source: twitter.com/Wohninitiative

The initiative asked voters whether all municipalities in Switzerland should be
required to guarantee a certain percentage of nonprofit housing. Slogans for the
initiative included, “Stop Speculators,” and slogans against included, “No to
the Nationalization of the Housing Market.” The initiative was rejected by 57
percent of voters.

Research: Gina Rauschtenberger, Alexia Zeller


3.
NONSPECULATION

Nonstandard, experimental forms of living together are possible in Zurich
precisely because cooperatives reject the notion of exchange value in
architecture. The resulting high use value benefits not just current residents
but future generations.

Photograph of courtyard use at Siedlung Ottostrasse, 2020
Photo: Kristin Sasama


AGENCY

Nonspeculation has immediate implications for design. This is especially true
within a heated real estate market with virtually no risk of vacancies, such as
Zurich. Whereas for-profit developers tend to see a hot market as a reason to
follow existing practices, Zurich’s cooperatives see an opportunity to test new
forms of living together.

The key instrument for nonspeculation is cost-rent, which works best over time.
Upon completion of a new construction project, cost rent is only slightly below
market rent. Over time, however, cost rent declines relative to market rates
because loans are paid off and rising land values are not reflected in its
calculation. Today, rents of cooperative apartments in Zurich are, on average,
25 percent below market rents.

Taken together, the commitment to nonspeculation and cost rent encourages
careful and continuous stewardship of architectural and social structures. Even
in highly coveted central locations, cooperative organizations can renovate
complexes in response to changing standards or regulations but still keep rents
low enough to maintain social and economic diversity.


INSTRUMENTS

Gemeinnützigkeit
Gemeinnützigkeit is a legal term for a nonprofit enterprise with public benefit.
For cooperative housing, it means a permanent commitment to the provision of
housing under the premise of nonspeculation. Land and buildings are removed from
the private market and apartments priced following the cost-rent model.

Cost Rent
Cost rent is a mode of rent calculation that neither requires subsidies nor
generates a profit. It is determined by a formula which incorporates investment
value and building insurance value, multiplied by benchmark factors that are
regularly adjusted by municipal and federal agencies in relation to interest
rates and maintenance costs. 

Diagram showing cost rent's development over time
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Reports 1927–2019) and Statistik Stadt Zürich
How one Swiss Franc of cost rent is spent
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Report 2019)

The maximum cost rent for a property is calculated using a formula based on the
property’s building insurance value and investment value. These values are
multiplied by factors based on the benchmark interest rate and operating quota,
a coefficient defined by the City of Zurich that represents the estimated
oper­ating costs. The sum equals the property’s maximum allowable rental
revenue. These values change over time, as the example of ABZ’s Siedlung
Ottostrasse shows. While cost rent increases over time, it does so more
gradually than market rents because the land value of a cooperative does not
increase and cooperatives are not allowed to generate profit.


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Ottostrasse and surroundings, circa 1928
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Floor plan of typical three-room apartments, Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927
Source: ABZ Archives

Ottostrasse, completed in 1927, demonstrates how a cooperative complex, even in
a central location, can retain its original architectural features while being
continually upgraded and maintaining low rents. The three-room apartments today
rent for around 650 Swiss francs a month (and an initial share purchase of 3 000
Swiss francs), which is more than 50 percent below the market rent for
comparable apartments in the area. 1.An Idea of Sharing / Plan for Festivities
in Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927

 
 

Photograph of the youth protests and squatters’ movement in the 1980s
Photo: Gertrud Vogler/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-11-006-006)

In the 1980s, Zurich youth protested the municipality’s development policies
with a range of actions, including squatting and happenings. The youth opposed
policies that favored the demolition of existing housing to make space for new
construction of office and commercial space.  1. An Idea of
Sharing /  Manifesto bolo’bolo, 1983



Zwicky Süd, completed in 2015, is a former industrial site just beyond Zurich’s
city limits that was codeveloped 50/50 by Kraftwerk1 (a cooperative) and two
for-profit pension funds with a single architectural firm, Schneider Studer
Primas. 

Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Kraftwerk1, the cooperative
developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten
Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Pensimo Management AG, a
for-profit developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten

The floor plans for three-room apartments reveal the design priorities of
nonprofit and for-profit developers. The apartments designed and realized for
Kraftwerk1 are accessed by a shared exterior gallery, reflecting the emphasis on
casual social contacts, and exhibit interior flexibility. The pension funds
requested and realized a more standard layout: access is through a core, and
rooms have doors and defined uses.

At the time of completion, cooperative and market rents differed by
approximately 20 percent. Over time, they will diverge more dramatically because
maximization of revenue drives the pension funds, while decision-making in the
cooperative is focused on keeping rents low in line with the cost-rent model.

Research: Lale Geyer, Rebekka Hirschberg


4.
EQUITY

The limited amount of equity required for cooperatives to take out a mortgage
gives even socially marginalized groups access to financing. This has led to a
great diversity of many small, specialized organizations that offer specific
forms of living together to very different interest groups.


AGENCY

A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced from individuals whose desires and needs
are known to the organization’s management. This allows the cooperative to
develop housing models specific to its members’ needs. The Siedlung Lettenhof,
for example, was developed in the 1920s by and for single, women professionals
whose only housing options at the time were subletting or living with relatives.

Photograph of the courtyard of Siedlung Lettenhof during construction, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

In cooperative housing, the return on an individual’s equity investment is paid
out in use value, not cash. This “use value dividend” includes a life-long right
to stay, cost rent and collective self-governance.

A cooperative’s limited equity has outsize financial leverage not only in the
short term but over time. While a cooperative’s land and buildings cannot be
sold at market rates, they can be used to take on more debt for new development
projects, resulting in an even lower equity-to-debt ratio than has been required
since a 1924 municipal resolution. The larger and older a cooperative, the
greater the leverage of its equity.

The preferential access to financing has led to an outstandingly diverse field
of 141 small and large, young and old cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42.000 apartments embodying various forms of
living together.


INSTRUMENTS

Municipal Resolution
Zurich’s housing cooperatives need only 6 percent equity to access a
conventional bank loan, far less than the 20 percent typically required. This
has been the case since a 1924 municipal resolution in which Social Democrats
and conservatives struck a compromise to support cooperatives in the face of a
dire housing shortage. 2. Public Opinion

Share
A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced among its residents through the sale of
shares. A share is a certificate of partial ownership of the cooperative
corporation and entitles residents to participate in the governance of the
organization. 1. An Idea of Sharing

Savings Bank and Solidarity Fund
Zurich cooperatives generate additional financing through two self-managed
instruments. A cooperative’s savings bank allows members to deposit money and
earn a low interest rate in return. A cooperative’s solidarity fund pools
contributions to aid residents in case of financial need.

Diagrams of equity as a proportion of three cooperative organizations’ overall
balance sheet, 2018
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Annual reports of the three cooperatives from 2018

The three cooperative organizations ABZ, BBF (cooperative for working women),
and Kraftwerk1 differ in age, size, philosophy and equity as a share of their
overall balance sheet. A cooperative’s willingness to take on more debt is
shaped by whether it owns or leases the land on which it has built. 5. Debt  6.
Land


DOCUMENTS

Deposit slip for the payment of a share, BBF, no date
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich

Share prices vary depending on the age and location of the complex, as well as
the size and location of the apartment. Today, the cost of a share for a
three-room apartment in a Zurich cooperative ranges from 8 000 to 50 000 Swiss
francs.

Plan of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

Lettenhof provided a range of apartment sizes to accommodate a range of resident
needs and financial capabilities. The majority of the apartments at Lettenhof
were designed to provide maximum privacy to their residents. A private kitchen
and bath, as well as one or two private balconies, were important elements in
this strategy. The studio was the only apartment type to have a shared bath and
only a small kitchenette.

Photograph of the interior of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, no date
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen
Spread of an article on life at Lettenhof in the magazine Blatt für Alle, 1940
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen

In an article titled “Single working women created a homestead for themselves,”
the author focuses on the unusual liberties afforded to the doctors, teachers
and administrators living in Lettenhof.

Research: Hanae Balissat, Kristin Sasama


5.
DEBT

Around 80 percent of the value of Zurich’s cooperatives is debt. Private and
public-sector lenders alike consider cooperatives to be reliable borrowers and
to provide lucrative investment opportunities, a status materialized through
architecture that is built to last.

View across the Glattpark complex at the ground level, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

For Zurich cooperatives and their lenders, debt means security. Debt is not seen
as a short-term, high-risk endeavor but rather is understood as a long-term
commitment. As a result, architecture is built to last for generations. This
plays out in the choice of high-quality building materials, whether in façades,
floors or hardware. Siedlung Friesenberg, for example, has been in use for close
to a century.

For lenders, cooperatives provide lucrative investment opportunities. Zurich’s
minimal vacancy rate of 0.15 percent ensures that cooperative apartments,
offering high use value at low cost, will never go unrented. For cooperatives, a
choice of lenders allows debt to be rescheduled at favorable rates. In turn,
this gives cooperatives the leeway to pursue nonstandard architectural
solutions.

For cooperatives, servicing long-term debt goes hand in hand with a willingness
to take risks on endeavors that may only play out in the long term. This
includes developing large-scale projects in the urban periphery and embracing
urban design to encourage the use of open space by diverse actors, such as the
Glattpark development near Zurich Airport.


INSTRUMENTS

Loans from Conventional Banks
Most of the debt owed by Zurich cooperatives was obtained from banks at
conventional interest rates. These first mortgages typically cover 60–80 percent
of development costs. The Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), a private bank backed by
the Canton of Zurich, has had a legal obligation to lend to cooperatives since
1902. ( 2. Public Opinion.) Given two decades of low interest rates, other banks
are now competing for cooperatives’ business, because of their reputation as
reliable borrowers. 

Loans from Pension Funds and Other Private Entities
Since 1992, most cooperatives have also obtained second mortgages, which fund
14–34 percent of development costs, from the City of Zurich Pension Fund. This
is a private institution whose lending to cooperatives, however, is backed by
the City of Zurich. Additional long- and short-term loans are made by a variety
of private individuals and institutions. ( 4. Equity.) 

Loans from the Public Sector
The public sector, whether at the municipal, cantonal or federal level, provides
few direct loans to cooperatives. The indirect mechanisms for low-interest loans
include the Swiss Bond Issuance Cooperative (Emissionszentrale), which since
1990 has enabled cooperatives to refinance loans upon completion of a project. A
revolving fund (fonds de roulement) has been lending up to 50 000 Swiss francs
per dwelling unit since 2007.

Diagram of the types of financing available to Zurich cooperatives
Source: WBG Zürich

The balance sheet of an average Zurich cooperative organization shows a
surprisingly small amount of equity (red). The rest, even if it is funding that
the cooperative controls, is considered debt (beige/gold). This debt breaks down
as follows: the largest loans are provided by the ZKB and other banks, followed
by loans from private entities including pension funds. When, as now, interest
rates are at historic lows, all types of lenders consider lending to cooperative
organizations to be a safe and low-risk endeavor. The smallest percentage of
loans originate from the public sector. In addition, cooperatives operate their
own savings banks and a renewal fund. ( 4. Equity) The renewal fund, earmarked
for maintenance and repairs, is automatically funded by a fixed percentage of
the cost rent. 3. Nonspeculation


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph of Zurich’s city center with City Hall, Municipal Offices and
Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), 1910
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

From the beginning of its involvement in housing in 1896, the public sector in
Zurich has chosen not to lend directly to cooper­a­tives. Rather, private
entities like the ZKB (since 1902) and the City of Zurich Pension Fund (since
1992) have been obliged to do so, while the public sector insures them against
loss. Because cooperatives, despite receiving preferential access to financing,
are economically and fiscally independent actors in the real estate market,
elected officials have been able to maintain that the city does not directly
subsidize them. It is one reason cooperatives have had public support across the
political spectrum.

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Friesenberg, circa 1929
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Photograph of house entrance, Siedlung Friesenberg, 1925
Source: FGZ archives

The Familienheim-Genossenschaft Zürich (FGZ), a cooperative focused on providing
homes to families with children, was among the first cooperatives to take
advantage of the 1924 municipal resolution permitting cooperatives to access
financing with only 6 percent equity as collateral. During the first two
construction phases at Friesenberg in 1925–26 (of a total of 23 phases as
of 2021), the FGZ built 144 rowhouses and apartments in a garden city layout.
Today, the site’s future is highly contested. The FGZ would like to redevelop
the site as a whole, arguing that renovation is too expensive. Preservationists
counter that the design is unique and of high quality. They seek to prevent the
demolition of at least the 1925–26 phases.

Ground floor and landscape plan, Glattpark, 2017
Plan courtesy of pool Architekten

Through a land deal between the City of Zurich and ABZ in 2011, the cooperative
organization obtained some 24 000 m² of land in a new urban development near
Zurich Airport. In 2015, following an architectural competition, the ABZ general
assembly approved the development cost of 97.5 million Swiss francs to pursue
the winning project. In two phases, 286 apartments, ranging from 1.5 to 8.5
rooms, were realized for a broad mix of 800 residents, bringing the total number
of apartments operated by ABZ to over 5 000. A kindergarten, nursery and
restaurants are located in the ground-floor areas. The open courtyards between
the four buildings are connected by passages.

Photograph of the new urban development, Glattpark, 2020
Photo: Sanna Kattenbeck

The Glattpark neighborhood beyond the city limits of Zurich consists mainly of
private, for-profit development. The project for ABZ, designed by pool
Architekten (first three building blocks in the foreground), is an exception. It
articulates an urban facade toward the public square, and its courtyards are
accessible to residents and the general public alike. In contrast, private
developers tend to privatize the public space in their developments with
individual gardens or glazed balconies.

Research: Nina Baisch, Bianca Matzek


6.
LAND

The high percentage of cooperative land ownership in Zurich contributes to the
city’s socio-spatial balance. Land is removed from speculation, curbing
gentrification and keeping inner-city apartments affordable. Large, contiguous
sites allow for the collective use of urban green spaces.


AGENCY

Cooperative organizations own around 9 percent of Zurich’s buildable land and 18
percent of the city’s housing stock. Owning entire neighborhoods is key to
cooperatives’ resilient, long-term planning practices. Organizations can
rehabilitate or redevelop their housing stock in phases over several decades.
This sustainable occupancy policy allows lower-income groups to remain in place.

Urban expansions and cooperative land in Zurich, 2020
Visualization: Sanna Kattenbeck & Monobloque
Source: GIS-Browser Kanton Zürich

The majority of Zurich’s cooperative organizations acquired their land from the
1920s to the 1950s. Today’s low rents directly result from the low initial
purchase price of the land, as the rent calculation is based on the initial
price and not on the current market value.

Concurrently, that same land ownership guarantees cooperatives’ AAA credit
rating precisely because the theoretical market value of the land has increased
approximately a hundredfold since purchase. Cooperatives can finance
redevelopment projects by rescheduling debt backed by land, even though the land
is not for sale due to the cooperatives’ commitment to nonspeculation.

The garden city model of urban planning, premised on rejecting the individual
parcel, best exemplifies the promise of collective land ownership. Under
cooperative stewardship, generous collective landscapes and playgrounds are
accessible to the public and enjoyed by residents.


INSTRUMENTS

Outright Ownership
Outright ownership of land is a legal construct for assigning rights and
responsibilities of individual or juridical persons to a piece of property,
defined as a part of the earth’s surface and registered in a deed. The
collective private property of cooperative organizations is a hybrid of
ownership and rental models: residents are both collective shareholders and
individual renters.

Leasehold of Municipal Land
A leasehold (Baurecht) is a legal arrangement by which the land owner grants
rights to use of land against payment of rent. In Zurich, leaseholds of
municipal land are usually granted for 62 years, extendable by 30 years. For the
municipality, this ensures long-term control of urban development. For
cooperative organizations, it ensures access to buildable land that today has
become expensive and virtually impossible to come by, even as money is cheap.  


DOCUMENTS

Map of municipal land in Zurich, 1929
Source: Camille Martin, Hans Bernoulli. Städtebau in der Schweiz.
Grundlagen. Zurich: 
Fretz & Wasmuth, 1929

The land owned by the City of Zurich includes not only land in residential areas
but roads, infrastructure and forest. From the turn of the twentieth century
onward, the City of Zurich has supported cooperatives through a policy of land
reserves, possible because of low land prices. Between the urban expansions of
1893 and 1934, the share of land owned by the municipality (excluding streets
and squares) rose from one-eighth to over one-third of the total urban area.
Cooperative organizations had preferential access to this land, either through
large plots or favorable prices. Cooperatives also benefited from the urban
expansion of 1934 because it turned cheap agricultural land into buildable sites
with amenities and infrastructure. In the 1950s, the City of Zurich halted the
sale of municipal land. From 1965 onward, it systematically granted leaseholds.

Poster used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich
Map used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Aktionskomitee für die Eingemeindung. Für die Eingemeindung der Zürcher
Vororte. Zurich, 1929

Better urban design and bus service were used to make the case for incorporating
neighboring towns and villages into the city of Zurich. A referendum to approve
this was rejected by voters, but a second urban expansion was nonetheless put in
place in 1934.

Neighborhood plan (Quartiersplan), Zürich-Schwamendingen, 1948
Architect: City Architect Albert Heinrich Steiner
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Aerial photograph, Zürich-Schwamendingen, BGZ housing complex, 1954
Photo: Werner Friedli/Bildarchiv der ETH-Bibliothek
Redevelopment plan Schwamendinger-Dreieck, BGZ, 2012
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: BGZ masterplan, 2012

The size and long-standing ownership of land in Schwamendingen allows
Baugenossenschaft Glattal Zürich (BGZ), a cooperative organization founded in
1942, to pursue a phased renewal of its housing stock over 23 years.

Research: Anna Derriks, Sanna Kattenbeck


7.
ZONING

The City of Zurich uses its zoning code to give cooperatives access to buildable
land and to allow forms of urban design that support cooperatives’ collective
use of interior and exterior spaces.


AGENCY

In Zurich, the floor area of collectively used spaces does not count toward the
floor area ratio (FAR). This encourages developers to locate these spaces on the
ground floor or in other attractive places within the building. Cooperative
organizations make particular use of this rule to create inviting, multiuse
shared spaces.

The Planned Development Area promotes forms of urban design that privilege
collective open space over individual gardens since allowable FAR can be
distributed on the site more coherently than in parcel-based planning. Since
cooperatives tend to build more and smaller dwellings than private developers,
shared courtyards or landscaped terraces acquire key importance for design, use
and maintenance.

Since 1995, the Planned Development Area has been the decisive instrument to
promote densification as it allows building to a higher density than on
individual parcels. For cooperatives, however, it is also a tool to preserve the
relatively low-rise neighborhood identity of the garden city. Because of their
commitment to nonspeculation, cooperatives rarely maximize the legally permitted
building volume in redevelopment projects. 

Axonometric drawings of Entlisberg, original development (1929–32) and
redevelopment as a Planned Development Area (2013–17)
Visualizations: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque


INSTRUMENTS

Floor Area Ratio 
Floor area ratio or FAR (Ausnützungsziffer) is a relational measure of building
density, defined as the ratio of a building’s total floor area to the area of
the parcel upon which it is built. A unique aspect of Zurich’s FAR is that
ancillary spaces not used for permanent occupancy are excluded from the
calculation if they enhance overall livability. 

Planned Development Area 
The Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung) applies to properties that are at
least 6 000 m2 in size. It allows, as of right, higher density than on
individual parcels in the same zoning district and flexible placement of the
allowable building volume, but projects must comply with energy-efficiency and
design standards. Holding an architectural competition is one way to demonstrate
this compliance. 8. The Competition.

Appreciation Tax and Special Area Plan
The appreciation tax (Mehrwertabgabe) is a municipal tax of 20–40 percent levied
once on the appreciation of land values resulting from zoning or public
investment. Since 2009, the City of Zurich used the tax in conjunction with the
Special Area Plan (Gestaltungsplan), filed to apply for the rezoning of large
sites, where the tax is paid by allocating land to cooperative housing.

Maps of Zurich showing the zoning code and its revisions in 1946, 1995 and 2014
Visualization: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Gerechter. Die Entwicklung der Bau- und Zonenordnung
der Stadt Zürich. Zurich, 2013


DOCUMENTS

Photograph of Ursula Koch, city councilor and head of the Building Department
from 1986 to 1998, in front of the city model of Zurich, no date
Photo: Verena Eggmann/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5037-Fx-0005)

Ursula Koch played a decisive role in shaping Zurich’s urban development in
favor of cooperatives. The controversial zoning code of 1992, launched by her
office, promoted affordable, high-quality and family-friendly housing despite
the lobbying of investors who sought to strengthen Zurich’s finance and service
industries by creating new office space. 8. The Competition / History

The stand-off between the canton’s conservative government and the city’s
social-democratic administration ended in compromise in 1999, when the zoning
code was revised to limit the rezoning of former industrial areas for commercial
use but continued to allow for higher densities. The 1999 revision also
introduced other aspects important for cooperatives today: it formalized various
participatory processes in planning and created access to land via the Special
Area Plan, in conjunction with the appreciation tax.

Public demonstration in favor of the 1992 zoning code, 1992
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-07-155-008)

In the 1990s, the zoning code became a lightning rod for those questioning who
ought to benefit from higher-density development, especially on former
inner-city industrial sites: for-profit developers of office buildings or
nonprofit developers of housing for families? The centrality of these debates is
reflected in the increasing frequency of zoning code revisions: every fifteen
years after 1946 and every three to four years in the 1990s.

Diagram explaining the higher density permissible in a Planned Development Area
within a W4 residential zoning district, 2014
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Teilrevision der Bau- und Zonenordnung. BZO 2014.
Erläuterungsbericht. Zurich, 2014

Since its first zoning code was approved in 1946, the City of Zurich has used
the Planned Development Area to support cooperative housing. Known as
Comprehensive Development (Gesamtüberbauung) in the 1946 zoning code, the tool
facilitated modern, low-density Siedlungen. With the 1963 revision of the zoning
code, the tool was renamed Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung),
and was adjusted to encourage new development at higher densities. In the 1992
revision, the allowances for densification were further increased with the goal
encouraging redevelopment of existing projects, as shown in the diagram above.

Aerial photograph, Entlisberg original development, no date
Photo: Swissair/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Prior to the promulgation of the 1946 zoning code and the Planned Development
Area, garden city developments like Entlisberg were possible only through
variances to existing regulations.

View of the redevelopment of Entlisberg under construction, 2016
Photo: Juliet Haller/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Parts of the original Siedlung were demolished and redeveloped to make room for
a denser development under the premises of a Planned Development Area. The
flexibility of the Planned Development Area allowed preserving the openness of
the garden city in the Entlisberg redevelopment even as the density increased by
almost 50 percent. Meier Hug Architekten conceived of the new, collectively used
longitudinal courtyard space as a “machine for collective life” to transcend the
modernist machine for living. 

Photo of central courtyard, Entlisberg redevelopment, 2018
Photo: Roman Keller, Zurich

Research: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch


8.
THE COMPETITION

An architectural competition aligns the users, the client, the municipality and
the architect behind a common imaginary of the future living environment
articulated in the architectural project. A transparent and binding process, it
promotes public understanding and trust in what design can achieve.

View of the roof terrace at Kalkbreite, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

From writing the brief to the jury process, competitions build knowledge and
commitment among residents, cooperative organizations and architects alike.
Cooperatives must think carefully about what they want, so that architects can
be given a detailed and challenging competition brief. In the case of the
Kalkbreite complex, the competition process was essential for the new
organization to establish legitimacy and develop a shared vision of its future.

Because of the binding nature of the competition process, the winner receives a
commission, no matter how experimental or new the design is. Competitions are
therefore not only intellectually stimulating for architects but provide
potential financial rewards that justify the risk of investing 1 000-plus hours
of work.

Architectural competitions make innovation in housing economically profitable
and socially acceptable. A cooperative organization might invest 300 000 Swiss
francs or more in the process because residents and management will draw
long-lasting benefits from a proposal that has been vetted by all.


INSTRUMENTS

Competition Brief
To sponsor a competition, cooperative organizations must identify the goals of
the new complex in the form of a competition brief. To develop alternatives to
societal norms, organizations often launch elaborate participatory processes
involving the various stakeholders in the project. Because they know their
residents well, cooperatives can respond more precisely to residents’ current
and future needs than private investors could.

Competition for Land Lease
Since the late 1980s, the City of Zurich has held competitions among cooperative
and private developers for the leasehold of municipal land. Since 1991,
leasehold contracts have required leasehold winners to organize an architectural
competition to ensure the urban and architectural quality of the site’s future
development.

Architectural Competition
The goal of an architectural competition is to find the best proposal and avoid
cronyism in awarding contracts. The principles of competition were developed in
1877 by the Swiss Association of Engineers and Architects (SIA) and are still
valid today: a binding project brief, a jury with a majority of building
professionals, prize money commensurate to the effort, and a public exhibition
of all submitted works.

Axonometric diagram of the hallway and cores of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Source: Müller Sigrist Architekten


HISTORY

A few years after becoming the head of Zurich’s Building Department in 1986, the
Social Democrat Ursula Koch issued new guidelines for the city’s urban policy.
From then on, buildings on city-owned land were to be of outstanding design
quality. The goal was to make Zurich an attractive place for families to live.
From this moment onward, each competition for the leasehold of municipal land
obliged the winning developer to sponsor an architectural competition.

Cooperatives became a key beneficiary of this policy. By the 1980s, many were
managing existing complexes but were no longer building new ones. By expanding
competitions for leaseholds of municipal land and financially supporting
architectural competitions, the city persuaded cooperatives to become active
developers again—and not only of new land but through densification. Together,
leaseholds for municipal land and architectural competitions transformed
cooperatives from stewards to innovators. The public jury procedure triggered
public debate about submitted designs and increased confidence in the
transparency of the process. 

Today, the architectural competition has been voluntarily adopted by the
majority of Zurich housing developers, whether nonprofit or for-profit.


DOCUMENTS

Diagram of the Kalkbreite’s building program for the competition brief, 2006
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

In 2007, the Kalkbreite Association founded a cooperative organization. It won
the competition for the land lease on the basis of its daring but precise
building program: 5 000 m² of small-scale commercial and business space with
workplaces for 200 people, coupled with 7 500 m² of living space for 250
residents.

Housing was also determined by mix, through quotas for old and young, Swiss and
non-Swiss residents, as well as for new apartment types (e.g., cluster
apartments and rooms for short-term living).

Finally, the Kalkbreite program called for a new relationship between private
and collective spaces: only 30 m² instead of the Zurich average of 42 m² per
resident, counterbalanced with 600 m² of shared space in addition to the
courtyard with children’s playground, access zones, communal kitchens, a
library, guest rooms and a central laundry room.

Storytelling as an integral part of the competition program, 2008
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

Alongside a plaster model of the site and urban context, a 57-page document with
technical details and noise pollution studies, the competition brief included
eight postcards with so-called use cases. Members of the cooperative had taken
snapshots of their future living situation on the project site, an inner-city
tram depot. Architects were asked to respond to these stories with their design.

Cross-section of the winning design of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Plan courtesy of Müller Sigrist Architekten

In 2008 the project design by Müller Sigrist Architect won the open,
international, anonymous architectural competition for which 54 projects were
submitted. A polygonal courtyard building vertically separates residential and
commercial zones and places a publicly accessible courtyard on the roof of the
tram depot.

Research: Sébastien El Idrissi, Kana Ueda


INTRODUCTION:
HOUSING AND THE AGENCY OF NONSPECULATION

Anne Kockelkorn & Susanne Schindler

Zurich is a center of global finance and exemplifies the associated pressure of
a financialized real estate market on housing practices. Rents for new
residential leases have risen by more than 60 percent since 2000, property
prices have approximately doubled since 2009 and large-scale inner-city
developments are today run by globalized financial investors and pension
funds. At the same time, Switzerland’s largest and historically most
industrialized city has not been subject to the same processes of social
polarization and gentrification as Berlin or London. In fact, Zurich has a
century-old tradition of nonprofit housing, a sector that has grown continuously
since 1995. Today, 25 percent of the city’s dwelling units are permanently
withdrawn from the for-profit sector, with the largest share, 18 percent,
cooperatively owned and the remainder comprising municipal housing or housing
operated by other nonprofit entities.



What makes the Zurich case so remarkable is not just the sustained commitment to
decommodification. Cooperatives founded one hundred years ago offer city-center
rents at one-third the market rate, demonstrating the “collective possibility”
of architecture and urban design—a powerful conceptual counterpoint to the myth
of the autonomous individual. In the process of maintaining and expanding
Zurich’s noncommodified housing stock, the city’s cooperative
movement—activists, city officials, architects, funders—has supported and
realized experimental forms of living together that are able to accommodate and
incite social change. Emblematic projects of cooperative organizations such as
Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and mehr als wohnen, realized from 1998 to 2015, cater to
a variety of income groups and household formations. They also offer collective
spaces of stunning architectural and material quality and contribute to a public
realm of which multiple user groups, including the general public, can partake.

Photograph of gallery use, Zwicky Süd, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

Zurich proves that architectural innovation and social entrepreneurship in
housing—the simultaneity of social engagement and entrepreneurial action—is
possible at scale, even in the age of real estate financialization. This
striking case prompted us to ask: What enables a long-standing commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market? How can Zurich’s
cooperative model become transferrable to other places? How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition of
architecture?


1. APPRAISAL: HOUSING THE SELF, THE COLLECTIVE AND THE CITY


RESONANCE WITH THE WORLD

To appreciate what Zurich has achieved in one hundred years of nonspeculative
housing, we must take stock of the forces that shape how we live today. This
concerns in particular the continuous acceleration and multiplication of option
imposed by the process of modernization and its antinomy to modernity’s promise
of individual self-determination and autonomy. In most Western, industrialized
countries, these forces are in tension with one another: individuals often feel
torn, driven toward an individualism and entrepreneurial self-responsibility
that precludes the collective, while struggling to maintain a sense of the good
life to which they feel entitled.

In Society of Singularities (2017), sociologist Andreas Reckwitz observes that
the notion of the “collective” is becoming increasingly charged with imaginaries
of nationalism, racism and pejorative demarcations of sociocultural “losers.” At
the same time, Reckwitz describes a broad societal striving (active since the
1970s) among the educated middle classes in the postindustrial societies of
Western Europe to attain singularity; that is, the appreciation of a social
entity in terms of “inherent complexity and inner density.” Today, Reckwitz
argues, the individual’s performance of creativity and authenticity is what
leads to societal attention and approval, and this striving must transcend
anything related to the notion of a standardized mass society. But this
singularization comes at a price. It pressures individuals to perform constant
self-actualization in their professional and private lives, even as society’s
accelerating rate of change increasingly limits any one individual’s chances of
actually achieving singularization.

Chasing singularity and chasing the resources that seem necessary to achieve it
can obscure the very goal that triggered the chase; namely, to live what Hartmut
Rosa calls the “good life” based on the experience of a “positive resonance”
between the self, others and the environment. Western societies increasingly
confound the “good life” with the accumulation of resources—wealth, knowledge,
networks, space—instead of defining and delimiting the conditions of positive
resonance with the world.

Reckwitz’s and Rosa’s diagnoses help to explain why cooperatives are of
interest: they offer an economic model that counters an otherwise unquestioned
drive to maximize resources—including the unlimited appreciation of real estate
values. Zurich’s cooperatives are also relevant because they reconcile the
societal striving toward the singular with a notion of the collective that
defies reactionary imaginaries of “the other.” They answer to the specific
housing needs of an increasingly singularized society while offering the
possibility of collectively sharing spaces, knowledge and resources at multiple
scales of the city. 


NEW HOUSEHOLD FORMATIONS AND SHARED SPACES

At the scale of the household, the young cooperatives Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and
mehr als wohnen have adopted a transitional understanding of “household,” asking
who constitutes a social unit and for how long. Their apartment types embrace a
patchwork of household configurations, from part-time families to solo dwellers,
couples and the traditional “nuclear” family. Dwelling typologies include
cluster housing—groups of micro-units assembled into a larger whole—as well as
apartments for up to 50 people, sometimes with access to a serviced
kitchen. Such exceptional apartment types are then combined with conventional
flats to achieve a deliberately choreographed mix within a single development. 

Cooperatives also offer a broad range of collectively shared spaces that allow
these different household formations to live together. The ability to plan,
build and maintain community facilities and shared urban spaces is a key
characteristic of both new and old cooperative housing developments in Zurich:
this ability evolved over the course of 100 years to compensate for strict
occupancy rules (often allowing no more than one extra room per resident per
dwelling) and reduced allocations of private space to each resident (one of the
means by which cooperatives are able to offer cheaper rents than the for-profit
market). “Our dwellings don’t stop at the front door,” says Philipp Klaus, a
member of Kraftwerk1’s executive board. Shared spaces are therefore central to a
cooperative’s mode of functioning, but the new generation of cooperatives has
reframed their dimension and role. Kalkbreite, Zwicky Süd and House A at
Hunziker Areal impress with light-flooded atrium stairwells, inviting laundry
rooms, collective libraries, shared roof terraces and generous entry halls
offering sheltered arrival for those pushing prams and carrying shopping bags.

Atrium and laundry room of Haus A, Hunziker Areal (2007–15), 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

At the scale of the neighborhood, cooperatives are expanding the use of shared
space to include not only residents but neighbors and the wider public. This is
of paramount importance when attempting to confer urban qualities on new
developments in the urban periphery, and this is where the potential political
and architectural economy of the cooperative is most relevant for the
territorial equilibrium of cities today. Zwicky Süd and Hunziker Areal, both
situated in underserved locations, have succeeded in creating urban
micro-centralities by bringing small shops and other commercial enterprises to
the ground floors of their development. Whereas private developers often refrain
from implementing mixed-use in peripheral locations, cooperatives tend to be
more successful because they are under less pressure to generate immediate
revenue. As Anne Kaestle, principal of Duplex Architekten, master planners of
Hunziker Areal, explains, this allows cooperatives to “curate” users and “take
more time” to find suitable tenants.

Other large parcels on Zurich’s outskirts, cooperatives demonstrate a quieter
but possibly more important variation of urbanity—one that offers shared
experiences of urban spaces beyond those typically provided by commercial
developments. In ABZ’s Entlisberg project, for example, balconies filter the
private interiors toward landscaped areas that serve both as extensions of the
surrounding apartments and as public walkways. These projects are, as
Entlisberg’s architect Marius Hug, principal of Meier Hug Architekten, puts it,
“machines for collective life” rather than Corbusian machines-for-living geared
toward maximizing functional efficiency. This architecture offers public access
to a shared experience of the urban on sites where such possibilities are
anything but a given. 

At the scale of the city, cooperative developments keep rents affordable for the
lower and middle classes and protect residents’ right to remain for life—if not
in a given apartment itself, then at least in the neighborhood. In contrast,
residents of private developments generally pay higher rents, and this
difference increases over time as the market value of land is figured into the
for-profit rents, but not in the cost-rent of the cooperative developments. The
projects of for-profit developers in Zurich also typically do not offer the
broad scope of collective facilities and publicly accessible porous urban green
spaces that cooperative developments do. Instead, their primary goal is to
maximize financial revenue from privatized, marketable space. Urban space is
first and foremost considered as a factor that increases the value of apartments
and hence is preferably allocated to individual residents or the collective of
residents—but not to the city. 

These differing priorities become most obvious where cooperatives and for-profit
developers have realized different sections of a larger development. At
Glattpark, the space between the continuous building blocks of the for-profit
developments consists of mowed lawns enclosed by hedges and produced for the
gaze from the interior, while glazed balconies project the interior functions of
dwelling toward the outside space. In contrast, the project by ABZ and pool
Architekten offers publicly accessible walkways across a sequence of porous
courtyards, with children’s playgrounds, bike racks and a landscaped public
garden, while the receding loggias shelter residents on the upper floors from
public view. But the absence of shared spaces in for-profit developments also
indicates a knowledge gap: their developers know little about future users’
desires. Maintaining and managing shared facilities exceeds what they are
willing and able to do.

The provision of outstanding material and socio-spatial qualities combined with
the guarantee that they will remain exempt from commodification in perpetuity is
possible because the Zurich model of cooperative housing privileges the use
value of housing over its exchange value, or the commodity aspect of real
estate. This notion of use value has been institutionalized in the municipal
governance of urban space in Zurich for more than hundred years, and that is
precisely what is so remarkable and forward-thinking about this case. Among the
many regulatory instruments that allow for the positive resonance of Zurich’s
cooperative housing today are privileged access to mortgages and the definition
of Gemeinnützigkeit, which roughly translates as “nonprofit notion of the public
interest.” These regulatory tools create what is called, in
German, Handlungsspielraum, which best translates as “agency” but literally
describes the space in which action becomes possible. The German term, by
including Spiel, also implies a technical and theatrical notion of play and
movement—notions that we think with when we refer to architecture’s agency in
enabling a resonance with the world.


2. A TAXONOMY OF CONDITIONS: INSTRUMENTS, ORIGINS, AGENCY

As part of our project, we offer a primer comprising eight dossiers—An Idea of
Sharing, Public Opinion, Nonspeculation, Equity, Debt, Land, Zoning and The
Competition—that systematically relate the regulatory conditions of cooperative
housing to its concrete, socio-spatial materialization at the multiple scales of
the city. By doing so, we are taking aim at the Handlungsspielraum, or agency of
cooperative housing. This endeavor is based on two convictions. First, as
architects and historians, we must expand the temporal framework of what
constitutes the present and its possibilities for action by looking one hundred
years into the past and future. Second, we must expand the understanding of
architecture to include the socio-spatial relations that take place within the
set of possibilities created by a regulatory framework.

This exercise in transversality and co-temporality builds on a substantial (and
continuously increasing) body of scholarship both on cooperative housing in
general and on Zurich’s housing cooperatives in particular. Exhaustive
documentation by the Zurich city government has allowed researchers easy access
to relevant data. Seminal histories of Zurich’s housing cooperatives allowed us
to align with or contest existing interpretations of the past. Finally, we also
build on a growing body of comparative studies of alternate development models
as well as recent studies in the field of housing governmentality. In addition
to this scholarship, Zurich’s cooperatives have become well known through
exhibitions, magazines, journals and trade publications, as well as the
cooperative organizations themselves, which actively encourage tours of their
projects.

We expand this immense body of literature and the cooperatives’ own
marketization efforts by situating cooperatives within financial systems, by
showing how histories transform the future and by expanding understandings of
architecture as built form. The goal of this approach is to counter an
assumption, widely held in schools of architecture, that matters of
architecture, finance and regulation are not, and should not be, part of the
same field. Often, such arguments emerge from a fear of diminished disciplinary
standing, as if economic literacy would undermine one’s credibility as a
designer. Our approach also counters the separation between design courses and
history and theory—not because history and theory should serve design in terms
of the what or how but because they should empower designers to ask why.


CONDITIONS AND INSTRUMENTS

To answer our project’s first question—What enables a commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market?—we identified eight
conditions that are essential to the emergence of cooperative housing in
Zurich and its socio-spatial qualities. Each is elaborated in a website dossier
that sets architectural form, social space, territorial regulation and the
political economy of nonspeculation in relation to one another. For example, the
first condition, An Idea of Sharing, not only impacts joint ownership and
collective decision-making but also the disposition and use of shared spaces.
The second condition, Public Opinion, is essential both for political support
and the normalization of architectural typologies. The fourth and fifth
conditions—Equity and Debt—relate cooperatives’ financial constructs to their
organizational and architectural diversity. The conditions Land, Zoning and The
Competition analyze how regulations pertaining to land-use and process, under
the premise of nonspeculation, foster architectural and urban-design innovation.
The key condition of our investigation—Nonspeculation—thus sits squarely between
the regulatory, financial and spatial repercussions of the political economy of
cooperative housing.

To get at the regulatory mechanics of these conditions, each dossier
investigates two or three instruments of “territorial regulation” that describe
the legal and societal framework of urban development through norms, rules,
laws, conventions and other institutional relationships. The instruments answer
fundamental questions at both the abstract and the concrete levels of
government, such as the concept of Gemeinnützigkeit and “cost rent”. Instruments
in other dossiers refer to concepts and practices that have become so
naturalized that many practitioners rarely pause to question them; for instance,
owning land or owing money. Some tools, such as “municipal rulings” or “the
share” of a cooperative’s property are familiar to housing professionals but
rarely investigated as triggers of urban design and architectural form. In turn,
instruments well-known to architects and planners, such as zoning laws or
competitions for land leases, explain how the abstract idea of sharing can be
translated into concrete form.


HISTORIC ORIGINS AND AN EXPANDED TIME FRAME

To answer our second question—How can Zurich’s cooperative model become
transferrable to other places?—we investigated the historic origins of
conditions and instruments and considered them within an expanded time frame.

By focusing on the moment of emergence of a particular law or practice­­­—how
much equity is required to take out a loan or the way in which an architectural
competition is organized—we can understand why a law or practice gained enough
political support to become a reality. To whom and toward what end did it seem
desirable? The social, economic and legal aspects of regulation are societal
constructs: both negotiable and specific to a particular time and place. Thus,
in seeking to make instruments transferable, one ought to focus not on
transferring a law or practice from one place to another as is but on
understanding the perceived promise of that law or practice at a particular
moment in time.

To understand the relevance of such instruments today requires that they be
considered within a longer-term historic continuity­­. Extending the time frame
of analysis is particularly important for nonspeculative housing since its
benefits, like low rent, accrue across time. And expanding the time frame is
important not only for scholars who wish to study these effects. Crucially,
practitioners must also consider the impact of their work not only in the five-
to ten-year horizon that extends from idea to implementation but in a time frame
that extends one hundred years into the past and one hundred into the future. An
awareness of preceding generations’ struggles with similar challenges and how
they responded can open new perspectives onto the how and why of one’s work.
Similarly, reflecting on what present-day actions might mean one hundred years
from now can productively reframe a design project. The point is to ask, with
anthropologist Amanda Huron, how the benefits of the present extend beyond
current beneficiaries toward “as yet unknown” future generations.

Such an expanded conceptualization of the present also allows us to resituate
Zurich’s achievements in the context of Switzerland’s atypically high standard
of living and political stability. This small, landlocked countryhas enjoyed
remarkable longevity and thus trust in its institutions, disrupted neither by
wars nor major social upheavals. Several circumstances have favored the
emergence of cooperative practices: the political system is organized from the
local to the national, and the sharing of limited natural resources has long
been habitual. These aspects are hardly replicable. What can be transferred to
other places, however, are the ways in which activists, citizens, elected
officials, cooperative organizations and architects use legal, financial and
regulatory instruments, as well as the architectural imagination, to advance a
nonspeculative form of housing development and new forms of living together. The
instruments we describe can be negotiated within the specific political
struggles of other locales and will play out in a similar manner when deployed
over time.


AGENCY AND HANDLUNGSSPIELRAUM

A response to the third guiding question of this project—How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition
of architecture?—becomes possible only through consideration of regulatory
constructs, their historic origins and their long-standing impact on the built
environment. The process of relating instruments and historic origins within a
layered, condensed, yet expanded notion of time opens up architectural agency in
a twofold way. The first is the agency of architects, planners and citizens to
shape the built environment, to mediate social relations of living together and
to bring about change through a range of strategies: it is the space in which
action becomes possible, the Handlungsspielraum. The second notion of
architectural agency refers to the effect of form itself, its Wirksamkeit. We
argue that the use value of housing and the accessibility of desirable forms of
living is not a matter of form alone, but a process that is directly tied to a
regulatory framework and its ensuing urbanization processes. Hence, the agency
of form is something that takes place in resonance with situated variations of
use, the processes by which users’ selves are socially conditioned (i.e.,
subjectivation) and the ways territories and subjects are governed.

The floor plans for Zwicky Süd (2015), developed by a cooperative and two
for-profit developers, exemplify how architectural agency involves such
processes of subjectivation within a regulatory framework. Kraftwerk1, the
cooperative developer, emphasized gallery access to its apartments and flexible,
dividable floor plans, allowing residents to adapt their living environment as
needed and encouraging spontaneous encounters among residents. The private
developers, in contrast, prioritized point access and apartments with fixed,
separate rooms, thus minimizing opportunities for encounters with neighbors and
emphasizing privacy even within the apartment. However, it is not only the
architectural disposition of dwelling unit and the distribution of a building
that mediate different types of subjectivity, but also their mode of operation
and their situatedness within the city. Over time, rents in the cooperative
development will decrease while rents in the for-profit development will
increase; and paradoxically enough, it is the mixed-use offer in the cooperative
development that guarantees the attractivity of this otherwise peripheral site.
The architecture of Zwicky-Süd, as form, partakes in this partly territorial,
managerial and regulatory process—and this partaking expands our definition of
architecture as form.

If the stunning shared spaces and experimental floor plans of cooperative
housing in Zurich reveal how material form can positively resonate with the
lived spaces of its inhabitants, the Zurich case also shows that material form
can even give rise to a feedback loop that impacts the regulatory framework.
In the 1920s, for example, a push to adopt the garden city as an urban model led
to a revision of building laws and would shape Zurich’s first zoning code,
adopted in 1946. Nearly one hundred years later, the Federal Office of Housing
WBO chose the “cluster” typology created by Duplex Architekten for mehr als
wohnen’s House A in Hunziker Areal of 2015, for its design guidelines as
exemplary of flexible living forms. However, we argue that architecture can
sustain a positive resonance for the practice of dwelling only if society agrees
about the purpose and public benefit of the use value of dwelling. If public
opinion does not support a commitment to nonspeculation and use value in
housing, architectural form alone will have little chance to mediate the social
relations of living together and confer a positive resonance with the self, the
collective and the city. In this situation, architects, planners and citizens
will have to exclusively recur to the first modality of architectural agency and
redesign the regulatory framework itself. 


3. INSIGHTS: BOTH-AND

Our effort to understand how social entrepreneurialism and architectural
innovation come together in Zurich in an era of financialized real estate led to
three key insights about how cooperatives have bridged seemingly contradictory
realms in redefining certain widely held assumptions about the politics of
housing.


AFFORDABILITY REDEFINED: THE ARCHITECTURAL LEVERAGE OF NONSPECULATION

The first insight distilled from our investigation is that Zurich’s cooperatives
have been able to produce experimental architecture precisely because of, not
despite their commitment to, nonspeculation and affordability.

Low-rent housing is often conflated with housing of low quality; that is, built
with lower-grade materials and featuring standardized apartment layouts. In
Zurich’s cooperatives, the opposite is true. Precisely by renting their
apartments at below-market rates, cooperatives minimize the risk of vacancy.
Precisely because they are not forced to generate returns on investments, they
have the leeway to test new forms of living together. For example, conceiving
of, realizing and finding residents for the thirteen-room penthouse apartment at
Zwicky Süd was possible because Kraftwerk1 was not under pressure to immediately
generate revenue for a form of dwelling that the cooperative wanted to launch
and test.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for design innovation thus
challenges the widely held assumption that the best way to achieve low rents is
through design. Architectural strategies that have been tested for over a
century with this belief in mind include the repetition of standardized
elements, prefabrication, and limited floor area. While these strategies can
contribute to lowering construction costs and decreasing a building’s carbon
footprint, passing on the savings from such architectural decisions to the user
happens only if there is a commitment to doing so. Cooperatives, too, reduce
apartment sizes and experiment with construction methods, and these strategies
do effect rents; in this case, however, rents tend to fall over time because of
the cost-rent model, which is tied to investment costs and removes the main
contributor to housing prices—rising land values.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for high-quality architecture also
inverts the neoliberal paradigm which posits that housing built for lower-income
groups, assumed to be subsidized, should be of lower architectural quality lest
it become desirable for higher-income groups. This neoliberal critique has never
quite applied to Zurich’s cooperatives since they are not technically subsidized
and have never served only low-income households. At the same time, cooperatives
have proven these neoliberal critics right: they have pioneered forms of living
together that the private market has copied for higher-income clienteles. For
example, “cluster apartments” combining several minimal, single-person dwellings
around a large, shared kitchen were first tested by cooperatives but have become
mainstream among for-profit residential developers.

The criticism waged at cooperatives most often both from the political left and
the political right is that cooperatives are primarily a middle-class
proposition and are thus exclusive: residents must have some savings to afford a
share in the cooperative, and rents are not pegged to income but result from the
cost-rent model and thus often exceed low-income residents’ financial abilities,
especially in the case of new construction. Over the life of a property,
however, rents tend to decrease, sometimes in absolute terms and always in
relation to market rates. Access to cooperative housing thus widens over time.

Zurich’s cooperatives have thus redefined “affordability” by demonstrating that
it is a precondition for design exploration while at the same time showing that
residents’ incomes are not a precondition for enjoying its advantages. Zurich’s
cooperatives illuminate a way out of a bind often faced by potential residents:
the choice between “social housing,” where access is restricted by income and
availability, and “market-rate housing,” where access is restricted by
ever-rising costs. In contrast to both, Zurich’s cooperatives leverage
nonspeculation and architecture in equal parts to achieve the goal of at-cost
housing open to all.


THE COMMONS RESITUATED; OR, COOPERATIVES OPERATE AT ONCE BEYOND AND WITHIN
THE MARKET

A second key insight to emerge from our study of Zurich’s cooperatives is that
these entities, exemplars of the practice of urban commoning, have become actors
not only in opposition to but in concert with capitalism.

In the context of today’s low, even negative interest rates, high land values,
and de minimis vacancy rates, cooperatives have become more than reliable
borrowers; they have become highly coveted. Private banks, institutions and even
individual investors today compete with the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to sell
mortgages. What determines the creditworthiness of a nonprofit entity is the
value of its cooperative land. Even if that land technically cannot be sold at
market rates, it serves as collateral for various types of long- and short-term
loans. This has led to an astonishing situation: the balance sheet of Zurich’s
largest cooperative, ABZ, shows 30 million Swiss francs in equity and 1.05
billion Swiss francs in debt. In mid-2020, ABZ was rated by an accredited
institution as being on par if not higher-performing and more secure than
Switzerland’s largest publicly traded real estate companies. Zurich’s
cooperatives thus prove that low-rent housing can be produced and operated in
financially lucrative ways, requiring neither extensive state subsidies nor
later bailouts.

But the architectural and urban qualities of cooperative developments are
precisely where the tension and contradictions between a commitment to
nonspeculation and the logic of entrepreneurship become tangible. The current
rush by many cooperatives to demolish and replace functional, well-maintained
buildings has to do with a lack of buildable land and the political mandate to
densify within city limits. Fueling this rush is less residents’ dissatisfaction
with their living environments and more the ready availability of capital.
Increasingly, such projects have involved centrally located developments noted
as historically significant, such as the FGZ’s Friesenberg row houses from the
1920s or ABZ’s Kanzlei perimeter block from the 1930s. In the process,
cooperatives often seem to undermine their own goals, since the newly built,
larger apartments have higher rents than the ones they replaced, and increased
apartment size has led to the actual number of apartments increasing only
minimally.

The name of this practice is Ersatzneubau, literally “replacement through new
construction.” Cooperatives are under increasing pressure to contribute to the
municipal and federal mandates to increase density within built-up areas as part
of an effort to combat sprawl and climate change. Arguments made by cooperatives
in favor of Ersatzneubau are that the practice is necessary to meet current
lifestyle standards relating to the size and configuration of apartments and to
comply with new regulations, in particular those related to accessibility and
energy efficiency. Redevelopment has been incentivized by revisions to the
city’s zoning code allowing for higher density on large, contiguous sites
through the tool of the Arealüberbauung, or Planned Development Area. In this
way, in areas otherwise zoned for three-story buildings on individual parcels,
seven-story structures are permissible on large sites. While citizens and
preservationists are increasingly contesting the practice of Ersatzneubau, it
has also enabled sensitive, phased renewal intended to keep residents in place,
as in BGZ’s work in Schwamendingen.

Cooperatives’ current redevelopment practices, while controversial, bespeak a
commitment to and investment in a nonspeculative future. Across their more than
one-hundred-year history, not a single cooperative complex has ever “opted out”
of its commitment to nonspeculation. In theory, a two-thirds majority of members
could, once all public funding has been paid back and pending approval of the
municipality, vote to recommodify the housing. But as ABZ CEO Hans Rupp
observes, the nonprofit nature is deeply “written into the DNA” of Zurich’s
cooperatives. Nevertheless, debates continue. Cooperative leaders are well aware
that upgrading neighborhoods or spearheading the development of new ones, as
Kraftwerk1 did at Zwicky Süd, can increase the valuation of real estate and lead
to gentrification even if the new cooperative apartments are rented at cost.


AUTONOMY RE-EMBEDDED: PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT BACKED BY THE STATE

The third key insight from our research is a recognition that the sustained
growth of cooperatives across the last century in Zurich was possible only
because of their  embeddedness with Zurich’s municipal government.

Cooperatives have crafted an image (and self-image) of themselves as autonomous
actors creating alternatives to those offered by the market and as doing so
independently of the state. Various aspects of their functioning support this
image, including self-determination (they select their own members and draft
their own bylaws); self-governance (including all aspects of managing, planning
and organizing the life of the cooperative); and economic self-sufficiency (as
required by cost rent). A sense of being separate and independent has also been
a distinct feature of cooperative architecture and urbanism. That is, for much
of their history cooperatives have chosen to materialize as distinct entities in
the city, both at the scale of the Siedlung and in terms of a uniform
architectural expression across individual buildings.

Autonomy is also what has made this model of nonprofit housing politically
acceptable from left to right and across shifting political trends, as housing
scholar Julie Lawson notes. Geographers Ivo Balmer and Jean-David Gerber explain
the continued growth of the model this way: “Housing cooperatives owe their
success to the fact that, despite decommodification, they do not lead to an
expansion of state control. To a large extent, housing cooperatives are a
private, self-organized solution to a public problem.” Nonetheless, even Lawson
and Balmer and Gerber go into great detail to explain that continued political
and financial support for at-cost housing has been possible only because of the
close connections of cooperatives to the workings of municipal governments, as
well as initiatives and pressure from organized citizens. Zurich’s cooperatives
thus strike an unusual balance: Their claim to autonomy from the state ensures
them state support.

Across the last century, this embedded autonomy has led to various forms of
state support, the two most significant of which are preferential access to
municipal land and preferential access to financing. In 1902, the Canton of
Zurich obliged the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to lend to cooperatives. In 1910
the required equity was lowered to 10 percent of development costs; in 1924 it
was further lowered to 6 percent, where it has remained to this day, enabling
cooperatives to obtain mortgages at conventional interest rates but with less
than one-third of the equity required of other borrowers. This, in turn, has
allowed cooperatives and policymakers to argue that cooperatives are
self-sufficient entities that, despite enjoying preferential access to land and
financing, should not be considered subsidized. Not technically being subsidized
means, in turn, that residents are not subject to income restrictions, which in
turn reinforces the sense of cooperatives as autonomous, self-governed
communities. All in all, the preferential access to financing has led to an
outstandingly diverse field of 141 cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42 000 apartments—a remarkable realization of
collective self-determination and social entrepreneurship that reconciles the
strive for individual singularization with the collective.

This embedded autonomy is the result of a continual push and pull between
activists and citizens on the one hand and city officials on the other. The
Kalkbreite cooperative, a mixed-use development realized on centrally located,
municipal land, is a primary example of the effectiveness of a citizen-led
campaign to convince the City of Zurich to rededicate a municipal site formerly
considered unsuitable for residential use and grant it to a cooperative through
a leasehold. The open architectural competition for this project, however, was
the result of a municipal policy crafted within city government. In the early
1990s, the city prioritized new residential construction for families and
coupled this with requirements for higher-quality designs and transparent
selection processes. 

Together, these three key insights challenge some of the most persistent
assumptions held by architects, planners, scholars, the general public and
policymakers about housing—assumptions often framed as mutually exclusive
dichotomies rather than as examples of “both-and.” The affordability of housing
is the result of nonspeculation and can never be achieved by design alone. The
interplay of a nonprofit mission in housing and a profit-driven financial market
is real. And even independent, private actors depend on the regulatory powers of
the state to flourish. Together, these three insights help to explain what makes
social entrepreneurship and architectural experimentation possible in Zurich
even during an age when striving for singularities may be limiting our idea of
the good life.


4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: A COOPERATIVE PROJECT

Cooperative Conditions was developed with seventeen students in the Master of
Advanced Studies Program in the History and Theory of Architecture (MAS gta) at
ETH Zurich in the spring of 2020. A joint research project is an integral part
of the curriculum of this part-time, post-professional, two-year course;
students contribute to a given topic with the goal of producing a publication,
exhibition or other public format. 

When we began, we had already defined the eight conditions we would explore. We
had also determined that students would conduct interviews, engage in archival
research and synthesize the findings using an analytical framework organized
around Instruments, Historic Origin and Agency. The interviews were most
revealing with respect to the relationship of architecture, finance and
regulation. We spoke not just with architects and city officials, typically
eager to share their views on design and policy, but with the chief executives
of cooperative organizations, pension fund managers and bankers. The latter
conversations provided insight into the financial dimensions of architectural
decisions that even these decision-makers themselves had rarely considered.

The direction and outcome of the research, however, evolved through a continual
back and forth among students and instructors. This included the choice of
Instruments and the selection of projects to best highlight Agency. Students
often took the initiative. They expanded the range of projects to consider and
people to interview, and Rebekka Hirschberg proposed film as the best medium to
capture the projects’ atmospheres. 

In translating the research into graphic form, the feedback and art directorship
of Berlin-based graphic studio Monobloque were critical. First Dorothée Billard,
then also Clara Neumann, gave shape to aspects of cooperatives that are often
discussed but rarely made tangible. Key visualizations include how cost rent
develops over time and the relation of equity to various forms of debt.

For the exhibition and this web page, we developed a combined framework to bring
together short texts, original graphics and contemporary and historical
images. The inextricability of courtyard configurations, interest rates and
municipal rulings becomes apparent through the juxtaposition of different
artifacts. Visitors will thus find, side by side, a Twitter feed charting the
results of a 2020 referendum on housing, an album page commemorating the 1931
World Cooperative Day and contemporary photographs (taken by students) of
cooperative spaces.

The website captures a work in progress, at a half-way point between exhibition
and book.

Cooperative Conditions, then, is a product of minds working in cooperation to
create a primer on architecture, finance and regulation. It was made possible by
the many individuals and organizations who contributed knowledge, time, humor
and, not least, money. They did so out of a sense that the potential and
possibilities of this project would be worth the effort. Thank you.


1.
AN IDEA OF SHARING

Sharing is the foundation of any cooperative enterprise. Sharing occurs in three
overlapping realms: labor and resources; property; governance. Sharing means
access to more not less—not only for the cooperative community but for society
at large.

View of the laundry room of Haus A · Hunziker Areal, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

Shared governance plays out directly in planning decisions. In a cooperative,
members elect the board; approve expenditures, investments and future expansion;
and are encouraged to serve on committees that discuss everything from community
building to entrepreneurial strategy. This creates an ongoing feedback loop
allowing management to respond to members’ changing needs.  

Shared governance and shared ownership directly shape the configuration of
cooperative architecture. This might result in large, landscaped courtyards
rather than small private patios; hallways used not only to access dwelling
units but for interaction; and laundry rooms designed to accommodate washing
machines and to encourage children’s play. Because residents are at once
co-owners, co-governors and co-users, they trust one another in the use of these
shared spaces.

The conviction that resources are limited and must be shared has encouraged
cooperatives to respond with new spatial strategies. These include lowering the
size of dwelling units while increasing amenities that are available to all;
locating intermittently used spaces such as guest rooms outside of the
apartment; and offering a range of apartment configurations to accommodate
changing household needs. 


INSTRUMENTS

Shared Labor and Resources
A cooperative is a community whose members advance common interests by sharing
labor and resources. Any surplus value is shared equally among members. This
practice is referred to as “mutual self-help” and is often possible only through
uncompensated, volunteer labor.

Shared Property
A cooperative is a corporation co-owned by its members. Members become co-owners
of a housing complex when they become residents and buy a share.  4. Equity 

Shared Governance
A cooperative is a legal entity co-governed by its members. Its bylaws define
the rules of governance. These generally adhere to the democratic principle of
one member, one vote. The commitment to nonspeculation is an integral part of
any Zurich cooperative’s bylaws.  3. Nonspeculation

Diagram of the cooperative system of shared governance
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Cooperative organizations (ABZ, Kraftwerk1 and Kalkbreite) 

Zurich cooperatives can vary in structure depending on size and mission, but
some features are common to all. Members elect the (volunteer) board and various
(volunteer) committees, and the board makes strategic decisions and appoints the
(professional) management. The purchase of a share makes a member a resident and
co-owner of the cooperative.


DOCUMENTS

Album Page of the ABZ’s celebrations on the occasion of World Cooperative Day,
1931
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ F.03.2.30)

This event, staged to draw in the wider public, sought to spread the main idea
animating cooperatives: collective action for shared benefit rather than
competition for individual gain. That idea, itself older than capitalism, was
transposed to housing production in industrializing Europe during the
mid-nineteenth century. It was a response to the inability of both the state and
private enterprise to respond to the housing and other needs of the working
class and small entrepreneurs. 

Plan for Festivities in the Siedlung Ottostrasse, ABZ, 1927
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ A.32.15)

The markups in colored pencil show the temporary installations made for the
festivities on the occasion of the complex’s opening in 1927. The drawing
reveals the close attention paid to collective activities in shared spaces: a
music stage in the center of the courtyard, seating and buffets, and even a
lucky wheel. In one ground-floor apartment the cooperative exhibited
architectural plans for the complex. It also furnished two apartments as
showrooms for interested visitors. 3. Nonspeculation / Siedlung Ottostrasse

Manifesto “bolo’bolo,” 1983
Source: P.M., bolo'bolo, Paranoia City Verlag, Zurich 2015 (1983)

Writing during the youth protests, a period when squatting was common in
Zurich’s inner-city, the activist Hans Widmer proposed a self-sufficient
alternative to capitalist housing production: the “bolo.” Capable of
accommodating several hundred people, “bolos don’t have to be built in empty
spaces. They’re much more a utilization of existing structures. In larger
cities, a bolo can consist of one or two blocks, of a smaller neighborhood, of a
complex of adjacent buildings. You just have to build connecting arcades,
overpasses, using first floors as communal spaces, making openings in certain
walls, etc. So, a typical older neighborhood could be transformed into a bolo
like this.”

Photographs of the Sofa Uni, 1995
Photo: Gerda Tobler/Kraftwerk1

The Sofa Uni was a one-month installation in an industrial building conceived as
a laboratory for new forms of large households. The event was initiated by a
group of squatters, activists and architects dissatisfied with the type and cost
of new housing in Zurich. It led to the creation of a new cooperative
organization, Kraftwerk1. In their first publication, Kraftwerk1’s founders
wrote, “What may be lacking in terms of individual comfort will be provided—just
as in a high-end hotel—through shared luxury.” Other new cooperatives were
founded in the 2000s following Kraftwerk1’s example.

Research: Kadir Asani, Armin Fuchs, Abbas Mansouri


2.
PUBLIC OPINION

To grow beyond individual initiatives, cooperatives need political support,
which is dependent on public opinion. In Zurich, pro-cooperative policies won
important political victories in the 1920s, 1940s and late 1990s, resulting in a
significant increase in cooperative housing.


AGENCY

In Zurich, surveys have been instrumental in shaping public opinion and public
policy on housing since the late nineteenth century. Housing policy has been
continually debated, contested and revised by citizens and elected officials in
part through referenda. Swiss voters are called to the polls every three months;
ballot measures on land-use policy and housing appear every few years.

Public opinion, public policy and architecture are mediated through design
guidelines and housing regulations issued by public-sector entities. Zurich’s
cooperatives, because they are nonprofit, must adhere to both federal design
guidelines and cantonal housing regulations. As such, they, too, are a product
of societal consensus.

However, public opinion can be swayed by the tangibility of architecture. A
striking example is the highly experimental cluster floor plan designed by
Duplex Architekten für Hunziker Areal in Zurich, which was included in federal
design guidelines (the Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System) only a few years after the
project’s realization. Its inclusion signified an epochal shift: a move beyond
the nuclear family as the normative household model.

Haus A · Hunziker Areal (2009–15)
Plan courtesy of Duplex Architekten


INSTRUMENTS

Referendum
A referendum (Volksabstimmung) asks voters to approve or reject a particular
ballot measure; if approved, the measure becomes law. In Switzerland, a
mandatory (obligatorisches) referendum is required for any constitutional
change, while an optional (fakultatives) referendum can be initiated by citizens
in opposition to any law passed by the Swiss legislature (so long as 50 000
signatures asking for the referendum are collected within 100 days of the law’s
publication).

Popular Initiative
A referendum can also result from a popular initiative (Volksinitiative) on any
matter of common concern. To force a vote at the national level, a petition
requires 100 000 signatures.

Survey
A survey, study or report is an inquiry into the causes of social problems. It
is generally written by experts commissioned by a public entity or philanthropic
organization. Its normative power derives from the presumable objectivity of
science and allows policy makers to argue for or against public-sector
involvement in housing.

Timeline comparing the number of new dwelling units built by cooperative,
municipal and other developers in Zurich, 1893–2020
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Statistik Stadt Zürich


DOCUMENTS

Special issue of the daily Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich, 1907
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (Ar 32.90.5)

In 1896, a civic organization commissioned the first inquiry on the sanitary
conditions of industrial workers’ housing. The study paved the way for the City
of Zurich to define housing as a public-sector responsibility in its 1907
charter revision. An advertisement in the Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich called for
voters in the city to approve the revision in a mandatory referendum. The
revised charter was the first to define housing as a matter of public concern
and as worthy of public-sector support.

Photograph of demonstrators confronting mounted police in central Zurich during
the national strike, 1918
Photo: Wilhelm Gallas/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Even though it was a nonbelligerent, Switzerland experienced hunger, rampant
inflation, a flu epidemic and a severe lack of housing in the aftermath of World
War One. By official count, in 1919 only 20 apartments in Zurich were vacant out
of a total of 47 000. These conditions contributed to a nationwide general
strike. The emergency measures approved in response—federal subsidies for
nonprofit housing in 1918 (loans and grants), the establishment of the Swiss
Housing Federation in 1919 and the 1924 municipal ruling to lower cooperatives’
equity requirements from 10 percent to 6 percent—had lasting impacts at the
municipal and national levels.

Campaign poster of Social Democrat Emil Klöti, Zurich municipal elections, 1933
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F Pe-0910)
Exemplary floor plans for “Flexible Housing Forms” in the design guidelines of
the Federal Office for Housing (BWO), 2015 
Photo: BWO, Wohnbauten planen, beurteilen und vergleichen.
Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System. Grenchen, 2015

The 2015 Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System (Housing Evaluation System, WBS) chose the
“cluster” typology designed by Duplex Architekten for Hunziker Areal in Zurich
as exemplary of flexible living forms. The plan organizes five one- and
two-room-apartments, each with an individual bath and kitchenette, around
generous shared spaces. 

Twitter Profile of the popular initiative More Affordable Housing, held at the
federal level, 2020
Source: twitter.com/Wohninitiative

The initiative asked voters whether all municipalities in Switzerland should be
required to guarantee a certain percentage of nonprofit housing. Slogans for the
initiative included, “Stop Speculators,” and slogans against included, “No to
the Nationalization of the Housing Market.” The initiative was rejected by 57
percent of voters.

Research: Gina Rauschtenberger, Alexia Zeller


3.
NONSPECULATION

Nonstandard, experimental forms of living together are possible in Zurich
precisely because cooperatives reject the notion of exchange value in
architecture. The resulting high use value benefits not just current residents
but future generations.

Photograph of courtyard use at Siedlung Ottostrasse, 2020
Photo: Kristin Sasama


AGENCY

Nonspeculation has immediate implications for design. This is especially true
within a heated real estate market with virtually no risk of vacancies, such as
Zurich. Whereas for-profit developers tend to see a hot market as a reason to
follow existing practices, Zurich’s cooperatives see an opportunity to test new
forms of living together.

The key instrument for nonspeculation is cost-rent, which works best over time.
Upon completion of a new construction project, cost rent is only slightly below
market rent. Over time, however, cost rent declines relative to market rates
because loans are paid off and rising land values are not reflected in its
calculation. Today, rents of cooperative apartments in Zurich are, on average,
25 percent below market rents.

Taken together, the commitment to nonspeculation and cost rent encourages
careful and continuous stewardship of architectural and social structures. Even
in highly coveted central locations, cooperative organizations can renovate
complexes in response to changing standards or regulations but still keep rents
low enough to maintain social and economic diversity.


INSTRUMENTS

Gemeinnützigkeit
Gemeinnützigkeit is a legal term for a nonprofit enterprise with public benefit.
For cooperative housing, it means a permanent commitment to the provision of
housing under the premise of nonspeculation. Land and buildings are removed from
the private market and apartments priced following the cost-rent model.

Cost Rent
Cost rent is a mode of rent calculation that neither requires subsidies nor
generates a profit. It is determined by a formula which incorporates investment
value and building insurance value, multiplied by benchmark factors that are
regularly adjusted by municipal and federal agencies in relation to interest
rates and maintenance costs. 

Diagram showing cost rent's development over time
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Reports 1927–2019) and Statistik Stadt Zürich
How one Swiss Franc of cost rent is spent
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Report 2019)

The maximum cost rent for a property is calculated using a formula based on the
property’s building insurance value and investment value. These values are
multiplied by factors based on the benchmark interest rate and operating quota,
a coefficient defined by the City of Zurich that represents the estimated
oper­ating costs. The sum equals the property’s maximum allowable rental
revenue. These values change over time, as the example of ABZ’s Siedlung
Ottostrasse shows. While cost rent increases over time, it does so more
gradually than market rents because the land value of a cooperative does not
increase and cooperatives are not allowed to generate profit.


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Ottostrasse and surroundings, circa 1928
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Floor plan of typical three-room apartments, Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927
Source: ABZ Archives

Ottostrasse, completed in 1927, demonstrates how a cooperative complex, even in
a central location, can retain its original architectural features while being
continually upgraded and maintaining low rents. The three-room apartments today
rent for around 650 Swiss francs a month (and an initial share purchase of 3 000
Swiss francs), which is more than 50 percent below the market rent for
comparable apartments in the area. 1.An Idea of Sharing / Plan for Festivities
in Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927

 
 

Photograph of the youth protests and squatters’ movement in the 1980s
Photo: Gertrud Vogler/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-11-006-006)

In the 1980s, Zurich youth protested the municipality’s development policies
with a range of actions, including squatting and happenings. The youth opposed
policies that favored the demolition of existing housing to make space for new
construction of office and commercial space.  1. An Idea of
Sharing /  Manifesto bolo’bolo, 1983



Zwicky Süd, completed in 2015, is a former industrial site just beyond Zurich’s
city limits that was codeveloped 50/50 by Kraftwerk1 (a cooperative) and two
for-profit pension funds with a single architectural firm, Schneider Studer
Primas. 

Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Kraftwerk1, the cooperative
developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten
Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Pensimo Management AG, a
for-profit developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten

The floor plans for three-room apartments reveal the design priorities of
nonprofit and for-profit developers. The apartments designed and realized for
Kraftwerk1 are accessed by a shared exterior gallery, reflecting the emphasis on
casual social contacts, and exhibit interior flexibility. The pension funds
requested and realized a more standard layout: access is through a core, and
rooms have doors and defined uses.

At the time of completion, cooperative and market rents differed by
approximately 20 percent. Over time, they will diverge more dramatically because
maximization of revenue drives the pension funds, while decision-making in the
cooperative is focused on keeping rents low in line with the cost-rent model.

Research: Lale Geyer, Rebekka Hirschberg


4.
EQUITY

The limited amount of equity required for cooperatives to take out a mortgage
gives even socially marginalized groups access to financing. This has led to a
great diversity of many small, specialized organizations that offer specific
forms of living together to very different interest groups.


AGENCY

A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced from individuals whose desires and needs
are known to the organization’s management. This allows the cooperative to
develop housing models specific to its members’ needs. The Siedlung Lettenhof,
for example, was developed in the 1920s by and for single, women professionals
whose only housing options at the time were subletting or living with relatives.

Photograph of the courtyard of Siedlung Lettenhof during construction, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

In cooperative housing, the return on an individual’s equity investment is paid
out in use value, not cash. This “use value dividend” includes a life-long right
to stay, cost rent and collective self-governance.

A cooperative’s limited equity has outsize financial leverage not only in the
short term but over time. While a cooperative’s land and buildings cannot be
sold at market rates, they can be used to take on more debt for new development
projects, resulting in an even lower equity-to-debt ratio than has been required
since a 1924 municipal resolution. The larger and older a cooperative, the
greater the leverage of its equity.

The preferential access to financing has led to an outstandingly diverse field
of 141 small and large, young and old cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42.000 apartments embodying various forms of
living together.


INSTRUMENTS

Municipal Resolution
Zurich’s housing cooperatives need only 6 percent equity to access a
conventional bank loan, far less than the 20 percent typically required. This
has been the case since a 1924 municipal resolution in which Social Democrats
and conservatives struck a compromise to support cooperatives in the face of a
dire housing shortage. 2. Public Opinion

Share
A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced among its residents through the sale of
shares. A share is a certificate of partial ownership of the cooperative
corporation and entitles residents to participate in the governance of the
organization. 1. An Idea of Sharing

Savings Bank and Solidarity Fund
Zurich cooperatives generate additional financing through two self-managed
instruments. A cooperative’s savings bank allows members to deposit money and
earn a low interest rate in return. A cooperative’s solidarity fund pools
contributions to aid residents in case of financial need.

Diagrams of equity as a proportion of three cooperative organizations’ overall
balance sheet, 2018
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Annual reports of the three cooperatives from 2018

The three cooperative organizations ABZ, BBF (cooperative for working women),
and Kraftwerk1 differ in age, size, philosophy and equity as a share of their
overall balance sheet. A cooperative’s willingness to take on more debt is
shaped by whether it owns or leases the land on which it has built. 5. Debt  6.
Land


DOCUMENTS

Deposit slip for the payment of a share, BBF, no date
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich

Share prices vary depending on the age and location of the complex, as well as
the size and location of the apartment. Today, the cost of a share for a
three-room apartment in a Zurich cooperative ranges from 8 000 to 50 000 Swiss
francs.

Plan of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

Lettenhof provided a range of apartment sizes to accommodate a range of resident
needs and financial capabilities. The majority of the apartments at Lettenhof
were designed to provide maximum privacy to their residents. A private kitchen
and bath, as well as one or two private balconies, were important elements in
this strategy. The studio was the only apartment type to have a shared bath and
only a small kitchenette.

Photograph of the interior of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, no date
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen
Spread of an article on life at Lettenhof in the magazine Blatt für Alle, 1940
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen

In an article titled “Single working women created a homestead for themselves,”
the author focuses on the unusual liberties afforded to the doctors, teachers
and administrators living in Lettenhof.

Research: Hanae Balissat, Kristin Sasama


5.
DEBT

Around 80 percent of the value of Zurich’s cooperatives is debt. Private and
public-sector lenders alike consider cooperatives to be reliable borrowers and
to provide lucrative investment opportunities, a status materialized through
architecture that is built to last.

View across the Glattpark complex at the ground level, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

For Zurich cooperatives and their lenders, debt means security. Debt is not seen
as a short-term, high-risk endeavor but rather is understood as a long-term
commitment. As a result, architecture is built to last for generations. This
plays out in the choice of high-quality building materials, whether in façades,
floors or hardware. Siedlung Friesenberg, for example, has been in use for close
to a century.

For lenders, cooperatives provide lucrative investment opportunities. Zurich’s
minimal vacancy rate of 0.15 percent ensures that cooperative apartments,
offering high use value at low cost, will never go unrented. For cooperatives, a
choice of lenders allows debt to be rescheduled at favorable rates. In turn,
this gives cooperatives the leeway to pursue nonstandard architectural
solutions.

For cooperatives, servicing long-term debt goes hand in hand with a willingness
to take risks on endeavors that may only play out in the long term. This
includes developing large-scale projects in the urban periphery and embracing
urban design to encourage the use of open space by diverse actors, such as the
Glattpark development near Zurich Airport.


INSTRUMENTS

Loans from Conventional Banks
Most of the debt owed by Zurich cooperatives was obtained from banks at
conventional interest rates. These first mortgages typically cover 60–80 percent
of development costs. The Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), a private bank backed by
the Canton of Zurich, has had a legal obligation to lend to cooperatives since
1902. ( 2. Public Opinion.) Given two decades of low interest rates, other banks
are now competing for cooperatives’ business, because of their reputation as
reliable borrowers. 

Loans from Pension Funds and Other Private Entities
Since 1992, most cooperatives have also obtained second mortgages, which fund
14–34 percent of development costs, from the City of Zurich Pension Fund. This
is a private institution whose lending to cooperatives, however, is backed by
the City of Zurich. Additional long- and short-term loans are made by a variety
of private individuals and institutions. ( 4. Equity.) 

Loans from the Public Sector
The public sector, whether at the municipal, cantonal or federal level, provides
few direct loans to cooperatives. The indirect mechanisms for low-interest loans
include the Swiss Bond Issuance Cooperative (Emissionszentrale), which since
1990 has enabled cooperatives to refinance loans upon completion of a project. A
revolving fund (fonds de roulement) has been lending up to 50 000 Swiss francs
per dwelling unit since 2007.

Diagram of the types of financing available to Zurich cooperatives
Source: WBG Zürich

The balance sheet of an average Zurich cooperative organization shows a
surprisingly small amount of equity (red). The rest, even if it is funding that
the cooperative controls, is considered debt (beige/gold). This debt breaks down
as follows: the largest loans are provided by the ZKB and other banks, followed
by loans from private entities including pension funds. When, as now, interest
rates are at historic lows, all types of lenders consider lending to cooperative
organizations to be a safe and low-risk endeavor. The smallest percentage of
loans originate from the public sector. In addition, cooperatives operate their
own savings banks and a renewal fund. ( 4. Equity) The renewal fund, earmarked
for maintenance and repairs, is automatically funded by a fixed percentage of
the cost rent. 3. Nonspeculation


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph of Zurich’s city center with City Hall, Municipal Offices and
Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), 1910
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

From the beginning of its involvement in housing in 1896, the public sector in
Zurich has chosen not to lend directly to cooper­a­tives. Rather, private
entities like the ZKB (since 1902) and the City of Zurich Pension Fund (since
1992) have been obliged to do so, while the public sector insures them against
loss. Because cooperatives, despite receiving preferential access to financing,
are economically and fiscally independent actors in the real estate market,
elected officials have been able to maintain that the city does not directly
subsidize them. It is one reason cooperatives have had public support across the
political spectrum.

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Friesenberg, circa 1929
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Photograph of house entrance, Siedlung Friesenberg, 1925
Source: FGZ archives

The Familienheim-Genossenschaft Zürich (FGZ), a cooperative focused on providing
homes to families with children, was among the first cooperatives to take
advantage of the 1924 municipal resolution permitting cooperatives to access
financing with only 6 percent equity as collateral. During the first two
construction phases at Friesenberg in 1925–26 (of a total of 23 phases as
of 2021), the FGZ built 144 rowhouses and apartments in a garden city layout.
Today, the site’s future is highly contested. The FGZ would like to redevelop
the site as a whole, arguing that renovation is too expensive. Preservationists
counter that the design is unique and of high quality. They seek to prevent the
demolition of at least the 1925–26 phases.

Ground floor and landscape plan, Glattpark, 2017
Plan courtesy of pool Architekten

Through a land deal between the City of Zurich and ABZ in 2011, the cooperative
organization obtained some 24 000 m² of land in a new urban development near
Zurich Airport. In 2015, following an architectural competition, the ABZ general
assembly approved the development cost of 97.5 million Swiss francs to pursue
the winning project. In two phases, 286 apartments, ranging from 1.5 to 8.5
rooms, were realized for a broad mix of 800 residents, bringing the total number
of apartments operated by ABZ to over 5 000. A kindergarten, nursery and
restaurants are located in the ground-floor areas. The open courtyards between
the four buildings are connected by passages.

Photograph of the new urban development, Glattpark, 2020
Photo: Sanna Kattenbeck

The Glattpark neighborhood beyond the city limits of Zurich consists mainly of
private, for-profit development. The project for ABZ, designed by pool
Architekten (first three building blocks in the foreground), is an exception. It
articulates an urban facade toward the public square, and its courtyards are
accessible to residents and the general public alike. In contrast, private
developers tend to privatize the public space in their developments with
individual gardens or glazed balconies.

Research: Nina Baisch, Bianca Matzek


6.
LAND

The high percentage of cooperative land ownership in Zurich contributes to the
city’s socio-spatial balance. Land is removed from speculation, curbing
gentrification and keeping inner-city apartments affordable. Large, contiguous
sites allow for the collective use of urban green spaces.


AGENCY

Cooperative organizations own around 9 percent of Zurich’s buildable land and 18
percent of the city’s housing stock. Owning entire neighborhoods is key to
cooperatives’ resilient, long-term planning practices. Organizations can
rehabilitate or redevelop their housing stock in phases over several decades.
This sustainable occupancy policy allows lower-income groups to remain in place.

Urban expansions and cooperative land in Zurich, 2020
Visualization: Sanna Kattenbeck & Monobloque
Source: GIS-Browser Kanton Zürich

The majority of Zurich’s cooperative organizations acquired their land from the
1920s to the 1950s. Today’s low rents directly result from the low initial
purchase price of the land, as the rent calculation is based on the initial
price and not on the current market value.

Concurrently, that same land ownership guarantees cooperatives’ AAA credit
rating precisely because the theoretical market value of the land has increased
approximately a hundredfold since purchase. Cooperatives can finance
redevelopment projects by rescheduling debt backed by land, even though the land
is not for sale due to the cooperatives’ commitment to nonspeculation.

The garden city model of urban planning, premised on rejecting the individual
parcel, best exemplifies the promise of collective land ownership. Under
cooperative stewardship, generous collective landscapes and playgrounds are
accessible to the public and enjoyed by residents.


INSTRUMENTS

Outright Ownership
Outright ownership of land is a legal construct for assigning rights and
responsibilities of individual or juridical persons to a piece of property,
defined as a part of the earth’s surface and registered in a deed. The
collective private property of cooperative organizations is a hybrid of
ownership and rental models: residents are both collective shareholders and
individual renters.

Leasehold of Municipal Land
A leasehold (Baurecht) is a legal arrangement by which the land owner grants
rights to use of land against payment of rent. In Zurich, leaseholds of
municipal land are usually granted for 62 years, extendable by 30 years. For the
municipality, this ensures long-term control of urban development. For
cooperative organizations, it ensures access to buildable land that today has
become expensive and virtually impossible to come by, even as money is cheap.  


DOCUMENTS

Map of municipal land in Zurich, 1929
Source: Camille Martin, Hans Bernoulli. Städtebau in der Schweiz.
Grundlagen. Zurich: 
Fretz & Wasmuth, 1929

The land owned by the City of Zurich includes not only land in residential areas
but roads, infrastructure and forest. From the turn of the twentieth century
onward, the City of Zurich has supported cooperatives through a policy of land
reserves, possible because of low land prices. Between the urban expansions of
1893 and 1934, the share of land owned by the municipality (excluding streets
and squares) rose from one-eighth to over one-third of the total urban area.
Cooperative organizations had preferential access to this land, either through
large plots or favorable prices. Cooperatives also benefited from the urban
expansion of 1934 because it turned cheap agricultural land into buildable sites
with amenities and infrastructure. In the 1950s, the City of Zurich halted the
sale of municipal land. From 1965 onward, it systematically granted leaseholds.

Poster used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich
Map used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Aktionskomitee für die Eingemeindung. Für die Eingemeindung der Zürcher
Vororte. Zurich, 1929

Better urban design and bus service were used to make the case for incorporating
neighboring towns and villages into the city of Zurich. A referendum to approve
this was rejected by voters, but a second urban expansion was nonetheless put in
place in 1934.

Neighborhood plan (Quartiersplan), Zürich-Schwamendingen, 1948
Architect: City Architect Albert Heinrich Steiner
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Aerial photograph, Zürich-Schwamendingen, BGZ housing complex, 1954
Photo: Werner Friedli/Bildarchiv der ETH-Bibliothek
Redevelopment plan Schwamendinger-Dreieck, BGZ, 2012
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: BGZ masterplan, 2012

The size and long-standing ownership of land in Schwamendingen allows
Baugenossenschaft Glattal Zürich (BGZ), a cooperative organization founded in
1942, to pursue a phased renewal of its housing stock over 23 years.

Research: Anna Derriks, Sanna Kattenbeck


7.
ZONING

The City of Zurich uses its zoning code to give cooperatives access to buildable
land and to allow forms of urban design that support cooperatives’ collective
use of interior and exterior spaces.


AGENCY

In Zurich, the floor area of collectively used spaces does not count toward the
floor area ratio (FAR). This encourages developers to locate these spaces on the
ground floor or in other attractive places within the building. Cooperative
organizations make particular use of this rule to create inviting, multiuse
shared spaces.

The Planned Development Area promotes forms of urban design that privilege
collective open space over individual gardens since allowable FAR can be
distributed on the site more coherently than in parcel-based planning. Since
cooperatives tend to build more and smaller dwellings than private developers,
shared courtyards or landscaped terraces acquire key importance for design, use
and maintenance.

Since 1995, the Planned Development Area has been the decisive instrument to
promote densification as it allows building to a higher density than on
individual parcels. For cooperatives, however, it is also a tool to preserve the
relatively low-rise neighborhood identity of the garden city. Because of their
commitment to nonspeculation, cooperatives rarely maximize the legally permitted
building volume in redevelopment projects. 

Axonometric drawings of Entlisberg, original development (1929–32) and
redevelopment as a Planned Development Area (2013–17)
Visualizations: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque


INSTRUMENTS

Floor Area Ratio 
Floor area ratio or FAR (Ausnützungsziffer) is a relational measure of building
density, defined as the ratio of a building’s total floor area to the area of
the parcel upon which it is built. A unique aspect of Zurich’s FAR is that
ancillary spaces not used for permanent occupancy are excluded from the
calculation if they enhance overall livability. 

Planned Development Area 
The Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung) applies to properties that are at
least 6 000 m2 in size. It allows, as of right, higher density than on
individual parcels in the same zoning district and flexible placement of the
allowable building volume, but projects must comply with energy-efficiency and
design standards. Holding an architectural competition is one way to demonstrate
this compliance. 8. The Competition.

Appreciation Tax and Special Area Plan
The appreciation tax (Mehrwertabgabe) is a municipal tax of 20–40 percent levied
once on the appreciation of land values resulting from zoning or public
investment. Since 2009, the City of Zurich used the tax in conjunction with the
Special Area Plan (Gestaltungsplan), filed to apply for the rezoning of large
sites, where the tax is paid by allocating land to cooperative housing.

Maps of Zurich showing the zoning code and its revisions in 1946, 1995 and 2014
Visualization: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch & Monobloque
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Gerechter. Die Entwicklung der Bau- und Zonenordnung
der Stadt Zürich. Zurich, 2013


DOCUMENTS

Photograph of Ursula Koch, city councilor and head of the Building Department
from 1986 to 1998, in front of the city model of Zurich, no date
Photo: Verena Eggmann/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5037-Fx-0005)

Ursula Koch played a decisive role in shaping Zurich’s urban development in
favor of cooperatives. The controversial zoning code of 1992, launched by her
office, promoted affordable, high-quality and family-friendly housing despite
the lobbying of investors who sought to strengthen Zurich’s finance and service
industries by creating new office space. 8. The Competition / History

The stand-off between the canton’s conservative government and the city’s
social-democratic administration ended in compromise in 1999, when the zoning
code was revised to limit the rezoning of former industrial areas for commercial
use but continued to allow for higher densities. The 1999 revision also
introduced other aspects important for cooperatives today: it formalized various
participatory processes in planning and created access to land via the Special
Area Plan, in conjunction with the appreciation tax.

Public demonstration in favor of the 1992 zoning code, 1992
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-07-155-008)

In the 1990s, the zoning code became a lightning rod for those questioning who
ought to benefit from higher-density development, especially on former
inner-city industrial sites: for-profit developers of office buildings or
nonprofit developers of housing for families? The centrality of these debates is
reflected in the increasing frequency of zoning code revisions: every fifteen
years after 1946 and every three to four years in the 1990s.

Diagram explaining the higher density permissible in a Planned Development Area
within a W4 residential zoning district, 2014
Source: Amt für Städtebau. Teilrevision der Bau- und Zonenordnung. BZO 2014.
Erläuterungsbericht. Zurich, 2014

Since its first zoning code was approved in 1946, the City of Zurich has used
the Planned Development Area to support cooperative housing. Known as
Comprehensive Development (Gesamtüberbauung) in the 1946 zoning code, the tool
facilitated modern, low-density Siedlungen. With the 1963 revision of the zoning
code, the tool was renamed Planned Development Area (Arealüberbauung),
and was adjusted to encourage new development at higher densities. In the 1992
revision, the allowances for densification were further increased with the goal
encouraging redevelopment of existing projects, as shown in the diagram above.

Aerial photograph, Entlisberg original development, no date
Photo: Swissair/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Prior to the promulgation of the 1946 zoning code and the Planned Development
Area, garden city developments like Entlisberg were possible only through
variances to existing regulations.

View of the redevelopment of Entlisberg under construction, 2016
Photo: Juliet Haller/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Parts of the original Siedlung were demolished and redeveloped to make room for
a denser development under the premises of a Planned Development Area. The
flexibility of the Planned Development Area allowed preserving the openness of
the garden city in the Entlisberg redevelopment even as the density increased by
almost 50 percent. Meier Hug Architekten conceived of the new, collectively used
longitudinal courtyard space as a “machine for collective life” to transcend the
modernist machine for living. 

Photo of central courtyard, Entlisberg redevelopment, 2018
Photo: Roman Keller, Zurich

Research: Sarah Hummel, Olga Rausch


8.
THE COMPETITION

An architectural competition aligns the users, the client, the municipality and
the architect behind a common imaginary of the future living environment
articulated in the architectural project. A transparent and binding process, it
promotes public understanding and trust in what design can achieve.

View of the roof terrace at Kalkbreite, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

From writing the brief to the jury process, competitions build knowledge and
commitment among residents, cooperative organizations and architects alike.
Cooperatives must think carefully about what they want, so that architects can
be given a detailed and challenging competition brief. In the case of the
Kalkbreite complex, the competition process was essential for the new
organization to establish legitimacy and develop a shared vision of its future.

Because of the binding nature of the competition process, the winner receives a
commission, no matter how experimental or new the design is. Competitions are
therefore not only intellectually stimulating for architects but provide
potential financial rewards that justify the risk of investing 1 000-plus hours
of work.

Architectural competitions make innovation in housing economically profitable
and socially acceptable. A cooperative organization might invest 300 000 Swiss
francs or more in the process because residents and management will draw
long-lasting benefits from a proposal that has been vetted by all.


INSTRUMENTS

Competition Brief
To sponsor a competition, cooperative organizations must identify the goals of
the new complex in the form of a competition brief. To develop alternatives to
societal norms, organizations often launch elaborate participatory processes
involving the various stakeholders in the project. Because they know their
residents well, cooperatives can respond more precisely to residents’ current
and future needs than private investors could.

Competition for Land Lease
Since the late 1980s, the City of Zurich has held competitions among cooperative
and private developers for the leasehold of municipal land. Since 1991,
leasehold contracts have required leasehold winners to organize an architectural
competition to ensure the urban and architectural quality of the site’s future
development.

Architectural Competition
The goal of an architectural competition is to find the best proposal and avoid
cronyism in awarding contracts. The principles of competition were developed in
1877 by the Swiss Association of Engineers and Architects (SIA) and are still
valid today: a binding project brief, a jury with a majority of building
professionals, prize money commensurate to the effort, and a public exhibition
of all submitted works.

Axonometric diagram of the hallway and cores of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Source: Müller Sigrist Architekten


HISTORY

A few years after becoming the head of Zurich’s Building Department in 1986, the
Social Democrat Ursula Koch issued new guidelines for the city’s urban policy.
From then on, buildings on city-owned land were to be of outstanding design
quality. The goal was to make Zurich an attractive place for families to live.
From this moment onward, each competition for the leasehold of municipal land
obliged the winning developer to sponsor an architectural competition.

Cooperatives became a key beneficiary of this policy. By the 1980s, many were
managing existing complexes but were no longer building new ones. By expanding
competitions for leaseholds of municipal land and financially supporting
architectural competitions, the city persuaded cooperatives to become active
developers again—and not only of new land but through densification. Together,
leaseholds for municipal land and architectural competitions transformed
cooperatives from stewards to innovators. The public jury procedure triggered
public debate about submitted designs and increased confidence in the
transparency of the process. 

Today, the architectural competition has been voluntarily adopted by the
majority of Zurich housing developers, whether nonprofit or for-profit.


DOCUMENTS

Diagram of the Kalkbreite’s building program for the competition brief, 2006
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

In 2007, the Kalkbreite Association founded a cooperative organization. It won
the competition for the land lease on the basis of its daring but precise
building program: 5 000 m² of small-scale commercial and business space with
workplaces for 200 people, coupled with 7 500 m² of living space for 250
residents.

Housing was also determined by mix, through quotas for old and young, Swiss and
non-Swiss residents, as well as for new apartment types (e.g., cluster
apartments and rooms for short-term living).

Finally, the Kalkbreite program called for a new relationship between private
and collective spaces: only 30 m² instead of the Zurich average of 42 m² per
resident, counterbalanced with 600 m² of shared space in addition to the
courtyard with children’s playground, access zones, communal kitchens, a
library, guest rooms and a central laundry room.

Storytelling as an integral part of the competition program, 2008
Source: Genossenschaft Kalkbreite

Alongside a plaster model of the site and urban context, a 57-page document with
technical details and noise pollution studies, the competition brief included
eight postcards with so-called use cases. Members of the cooperative had taken
snapshots of their future living situation on the project site, an inner-city
tram depot. Architects were asked to respond to these stories with their design.

Cross-section of the winning design of the Kalkbreite complex, 2014
Plan courtesy of Müller Sigrist Architekten

In 2008 the project design by Müller Sigrist Architect won the open,
international, anonymous architectural competition for which 54 projects were
submitted. A polygonal courtyard building vertically separates residential and
commercial zones and places a publicly accessible courtyard on the roof of the
tram depot.

Research: Sébastien El Idrissi, Kana Ueda


INTRODUCTION:
HOUSING AND THE AGENCY OF NONSPECULATION

Anne Kockelkorn & Susanne Schindler

Zurich is a center of global finance and exemplifies the associated pressure of
a financialized real estate market on housing practices. Rents for new
residential leases have risen by more than 60 percent since 2000, property
prices have approximately doubled since 2009 and large-scale inner-city
developments are today run by globalized financial investors and pension
funds. At the same time, Switzerland’s largest and historically most
industrialized city has not been subject to the same processes of social
polarization and gentrification as Berlin or London. In fact, Zurich has a
century-old tradition of nonprofit housing, a sector that has grown continuously
since 1995. Today, 25 percent of the city’s dwelling units are permanently
withdrawn from the for-profit sector, with the largest share, 18 percent,
cooperatively owned and the remainder comprising municipal housing or housing
operated by other nonprofit entities.



What makes the Zurich case so remarkable is not just the sustained commitment to
decommodification. Cooperatives founded one hundred years ago offer city-center
rents at one-third the market rate, demonstrating the “collective possibility”
of architecture and urban design—a powerful conceptual counterpoint to the myth
of the autonomous individual. In the process of maintaining and expanding
Zurich’s noncommodified housing stock, the city’s cooperative
movement—activists, city officials, architects, funders—has supported and
realized experimental forms of living together that are able to accommodate and
incite social change. Emblematic projects of cooperative organizations such as
Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and mehr als wohnen, realized from 1998 to 2015, cater to
a variety of income groups and household formations. They also offer collective
spaces of stunning architectural and material quality and contribute to a public
realm of which multiple user groups, including the general public, can partake.

Photograph of gallery use, Zwicky Süd, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

Zurich proves that architectural innovation and social entrepreneurship in
housing—the simultaneity of social engagement and entrepreneurial action—is
possible at scale, even in the age of real estate financialization. This
striking case prompted us to ask: What enables a long-standing commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market? How can Zurich’s
cooperative model become transferrable to other places? How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition of
architecture?


1. APPRAISAL: HOUSING THE SELF, THE COLLECTIVE AND THE CITY


RESONANCE WITH THE WORLD

To appreciate what Zurich has achieved in one hundred years of nonspeculative
housing, we must take stock of the forces that shape how we live today. This
concerns in particular the continuous acceleration and multiplication of option
imposed by the process of modernization and its antinomy to modernity’s promise
of individual self-determination and autonomy. In most Western, industrialized
countries, these forces are in tension with one another: individuals often feel
torn, driven toward an individualism and entrepreneurial self-responsibility
that precludes the collective, while struggling to maintain a sense of the good
life to which they feel entitled.

In Society of Singularities (2017), sociologist Andreas Reckwitz observes that
the notion of the “collective” is becoming increasingly charged with imaginaries
of nationalism, racism and pejorative demarcations of sociocultural “losers.” At
the same time, Reckwitz describes a broad societal striving (active since the
1970s) among the educated middle classes in the postindustrial societies of
Western Europe to attain singularity; that is, the appreciation of a social
entity in terms of “inherent complexity and inner density.” Today, Reckwitz
argues, the individual’s performance of creativity and authenticity is what
leads to societal attention and approval, and this striving must transcend
anything related to the notion of a standardized mass society. But this
singularization comes at a price. It pressures individuals to perform constant
self-actualization in their professional and private lives, even as society’s
accelerating rate of change increasingly limits any one individual’s chances of
actually achieving singularization.

Chasing singularity and chasing the resources that seem necessary to achieve it
can obscure the very goal that triggered the chase; namely, to live what Hartmut
Rosa calls the “good life” based on the experience of a “positive resonance”
between the self, others and the environment. Western societies increasingly
confound the “good life” with the accumulation of resources—wealth, knowledge,
networks, space—instead of defining and delimiting the conditions of positive
resonance with the world.

Reckwitz’s and Rosa’s diagnoses help to explain why cooperatives are of
interest: they offer an economic model that counters an otherwise unquestioned
drive to maximize resources—including the unlimited appreciation of real estate
values. Zurich’s cooperatives are also relevant because they reconcile the
societal striving toward the singular with a notion of the collective that
defies reactionary imaginaries of “the other.” They answer to the specific
housing needs of an increasingly singularized society while offering the
possibility of collectively sharing spaces, knowledge and resources at multiple
scales of the city. 


NEW HOUSEHOLD FORMATIONS AND SHARED SPACES

At the scale of the household, the young cooperatives Kraftwerk1, Kalkbreite and
mehr als wohnen have adopted a transitional understanding of “household,” asking
who constitutes a social unit and for how long. Their apartment types embrace a
patchwork of household configurations, from part-time families to solo dwellers,
couples and the traditional “nuclear” family. Dwelling typologies include
cluster housing—groups of micro-units assembled into a larger whole—as well as
apartments for up to 50 people, sometimes with access to a serviced
kitchen. Such exceptional apartment types are then combined with conventional
flats to achieve a deliberately choreographed mix within a single development. 

Cooperatives also offer a broad range of collectively shared spaces that allow
these different household formations to live together. The ability to plan,
build and maintain community facilities and shared urban spaces is a key
characteristic of both new and old cooperative housing developments in Zurich:
this ability evolved over the course of 100 years to compensate for strict
occupancy rules (often allowing no more than one extra room per resident per
dwelling) and reduced allocations of private space to each resident (one of the
means by which cooperatives are able to offer cheaper rents than the for-profit
market). “Our dwellings don’t stop at the front door,” says Philipp Klaus, a
member of Kraftwerk1’s executive board. Shared spaces are therefore central to a
cooperative’s mode of functioning, but the new generation of cooperatives has
reframed their dimension and role. Kalkbreite, Zwicky Süd and House A at
Hunziker Areal impress with light-flooded atrium stairwells, inviting laundry
rooms, collective libraries, shared roof terraces and generous entry halls
offering sheltered arrival for those pushing prams and carrying shopping bags.

Atrium and laundry room of Haus A, Hunziker Areal (2007–15), 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks

At the scale of the neighborhood, cooperatives are expanding the use of shared
space to include not only residents but neighbors and the wider public. This is
of paramount importance when attempting to confer urban qualities on new
developments in the urban periphery, and this is where the potential political
and architectural economy of the cooperative is most relevant for the
territorial equilibrium of cities today. Zwicky Süd and Hunziker Areal, both
situated in underserved locations, have succeeded in creating urban
micro-centralities by bringing small shops and other commercial enterprises to
the ground floors of their development. Whereas private developers often refrain
from implementing mixed-use in peripheral locations, cooperatives tend to be
more successful because they are under less pressure to generate immediate
revenue. As Anne Kaestle, principal of Duplex Architekten, master planners of
Hunziker Areal, explains, this allows cooperatives to “curate” users and “take
more time” to find suitable tenants.

Other large parcels on Zurich’s outskirts, cooperatives demonstrate a quieter
but possibly more important variation of urbanity—one that offers shared
experiences of urban spaces beyond those typically provided by commercial
developments. In ABZ’s Entlisberg project, for example, balconies filter the
private interiors toward landscaped areas that serve both as extensions of the
surrounding apartments and as public walkways. These projects are, as
Entlisberg’s architect Marius Hug, principal of Meier Hug Architekten, puts it,
“machines for collective life” rather than Corbusian machines-for-living geared
toward maximizing functional efficiency. This architecture offers public access
to a shared experience of the urban on sites where such possibilities are
anything but a given. 

At the scale of the city, cooperative developments keep rents affordable for the
lower and middle classes and protect residents’ right to remain for life—if not
in a given apartment itself, then at least in the neighborhood. In contrast,
residents of private developments generally pay higher rents, and this
difference increases over time as the market value of land is figured into the
for-profit rents, but not in the cost-rent of the cooperative developments. The
projects of for-profit developers in Zurich also typically do not offer the
broad scope of collective facilities and publicly accessible porous urban green
spaces that cooperative developments do. Instead, their primary goal is to
maximize financial revenue from privatized, marketable space. Urban space is
first and foremost considered as a factor that increases the value of apartments
and hence is preferably allocated to individual residents or the collective of
residents—but not to the city. 

These differing priorities become most obvious where cooperatives and for-profit
developers have realized different sections of a larger development. At
Glattpark, the space between the continuous building blocks of the for-profit
developments consists of mowed lawns enclosed by hedges and produced for the
gaze from the interior, while glazed balconies project the interior functions of
dwelling toward the outside space. In contrast, the project by ABZ and pool
Architekten offers publicly accessible walkways across a sequence of porous
courtyards, with children’s playgrounds, bike racks and a landscaped public
garden, while the receding loggias shelter residents on the upper floors from
public view. But the absence of shared spaces in for-profit developments also
indicates a knowledge gap: their developers know little about future users’
desires. Maintaining and managing shared facilities exceeds what they are
willing and able to do.

The provision of outstanding material and socio-spatial qualities combined with
the guarantee that they will remain exempt from commodification in perpetuity is
possible because the Zurich model of cooperative housing privileges the use
value of housing over its exchange value, or the commodity aspect of real
estate. This notion of use value has been institutionalized in the municipal
governance of urban space in Zurich for more than hundred years, and that is
precisely what is so remarkable and forward-thinking about this case. Among the
many regulatory instruments that allow for the positive resonance of Zurich’s
cooperative housing today are privileged access to mortgages and the definition
of Gemeinnützigkeit, which roughly translates as “nonprofit notion of the public
interest.” These regulatory tools create what is called, in
German, Handlungsspielraum, which best translates as “agency” but literally
describes the space in which action becomes possible. The German term, by
including Spiel, also implies a technical and theatrical notion of play and
movement—notions that we think with when we refer to architecture’s agency in
enabling a resonance with the world.


2. A TAXONOMY OF CONDITIONS: INSTRUMENTS, ORIGINS, AGENCY

As part of our project, we offer a primer comprising eight dossiers—An Idea of
Sharing, Public Opinion, Nonspeculation, Equity, Debt, Land, Zoning and The
Competition—that systematically relate the regulatory conditions of cooperative
housing to its concrete, socio-spatial materialization at the multiple scales of
the city. By doing so, we are taking aim at the Handlungsspielraum, or agency of
cooperative housing. This endeavor is based on two convictions. First, as
architects and historians, we must expand the temporal framework of what
constitutes the present and its possibilities for action by looking one hundred
years into the past and future. Second, we must expand the understanding of
architecture to include the socio-spatial relations that take place within the
set of possibilities created by a regulatory framework.

This exercise in transversality and co-temporality builds on a substantial (and
continuously increasing) body of scholarship both on cooperative housing in
general and on Zurich’s housing cooperatives in particular. Exhaustive
documentation by the Zurich city government has allowed researchers easy access
to relevant data. Seminal histories of Zurich’s housing cooperatives allowed us
to align with or contest existing interpretations of the past. Finally, we also
build on a growing body of comparative studies of alternate development models
as well as recent studies in the field of housing governmentality. In addition
to this scholarship, Zurich’s cooperatives have become well known through
exhibitions, magazines, journals and trade publications, as well as the
cooperative organizations themselves, which actively encourage tours of their
projects.

We expand this immense body of literature and the cooperatives’ own
marketization efforts by situating cooperatives within financial systems, by
showing how histories transform the future and by expanding understandings of
architecture as built form. The goal of this approach is to counter an
assumption, widely held in schools of architecture, that matters of
architecture, finance and regulation are not, and should not be, part of the
same field. Often, such arguments emerge from a fear of diminished disciplinary
standing, as if economic literacy would undermine one’s credibility as a
designer. Our approach also counters the separation between design courses and
history and theory—not because history and theory should serve design in terms
of the what or how but because they should empower designers to ask why.


CONDITIONS AND INSTRUMENTS

To answer our project’s first question—What enables a commitment to
nonspeculation within a for-profit real estate market?—we identified eight
conditions that are essential to the emergence of cooperative housing in
Zurich and its socio-spatial qualities. Each is elaborated in a website dossier
that sets architectural form, social space, territorial regulation and the
political economy of nonspeculation in relation to one another. For example, the
first condition, An Idea of Sharing, not only impacts joint ownership and
collective decision-making but also the disposition and use of shared spaces.
The second condition, Public Opinion, is essential both for political support
and the normalization of architectural typologies. The fourth and fifth
conditions—Equity and Debt—relate cooperatives’ financial constructs to their
organizational and architectural diversity. The conditions Land, Zoning and The
Competition analyze how regulations pertaining to land-use and process, under
the premise of nonspeculation, foster architectural and urban-design innovation.
The key condition of our investigation—Nonspeculation—thus sits squarely between
the regulatory, financial and spatial repercussions of the political economy of
cooperative housing.

To get at the regulatory mechanics of these conditions, each dossier
investigates two or three instruments of “territorial regulation” that describe
the legal and societal framework of urban development through norms, rules,
laws, conventions and other institutional relationships. The instruments answer
fundamental questions at both the abstract and the concrete levels of
government, such as the concept of Gemeinnützigkeit and “cost rent”. Instruments
in other dossiers refer to concepts and practices that have become so
naturalized that many practitioners rarely pause to question them; for instance,
owning land or owing money. Some tools, such as “municipal rulings” or “the
share” of a cooperative’s property are familiar to housing professionals but
rarely investigated as triggers of urban design and architectural form. In turn,
instruments well-known to architects and planners, such as zoning laws or
competitions for land leases, explain how the abstract idea of sharing can be
translated into concrete form.


HISTORIC ORIGINS AND AN EXPANDED TIME FRAME

To answer our second question—How can Zurich’s cooperative model become
transferrable to other places?—we investigated the historic origins of
conditions and instruments and considered them within an expanded time frame.

By focusing on the moment of emergence of a particular law or practice­­­—how
much equity is required to take out a loan or the way in which an architectural
competition is organized—we can understand why a law or practice gained enough
political support to become a reality. To whom and toward what end did it seem
desirable? The social, economic and legal aspects of regulation are societal
constructs: both negotiable and specific to a particular time and place. Thus,
in seeking to make instruments transferable, one ought to focus not on
transferring a law or practice from one place to another as is but on
understanding the perceived promise of that law or practice at a particular
moment in time.

To understand the relevance of such instruments today requires that they be
considered within a longer-term historic continuity­­. Extending the time frame
of analysis is particularly important for nonspeculative housing since its
benefits, like low rent, accrue across time. And expanding the time frame is
important not only for scholars who wish to study these effects. Crucially,
practitioners must also consider the impact of their work not only in the five-
to ten-year horizon that extends from idea to implementation but in a time frame
that extends one hundred years into the past and one hundred into the future. An
awareness of preceding generations’ struggles with similar challenges and how
they responded can open new perspectives onto the how and why of one’s work.
Similarly, reflecting on what present-day actions might mean one hundred years
from now can productively reframe a design project. The point is to ask, with
anthropologist Amanda Huron, how the benefits of the present extend beyond
current beneficiaries toward “as yet unknown” future generations.

Such an expanded conceptualization of the present also allows us to resituate
Zurich’s achievements in the context of Switzerland’s atypically high standard
of living and political stability. This small, landlocked countryhas enjoyed
remarkable longevity and thus trust in its institutions, disrupted neither by
wars nor major social upheavals. Several circumstances have favored the
emergence of cooperative practices: the political system is organized from the
local to the national, and the sharing of limited natural resources has long
been habitual. These aspects are hardly replicable. What can be transferred to
other places, however, are the ways in which activists, citizens, elected
officials, cooperative organizations and architects use legal, financial and
regulatory instruments, as well as the architectural imagination, to advance a
nonspeculative form of housing development and new forms of living together. The
instruments we describe can be negotiated within the specific political
struggles of other locales and will play out in a similar manner when deployed
over time.


AGENCY AND HANDLUNGSSPIELRAUM

A response to the third guiding question of this project—How does architecture
partake in these processes, and how does its partaking expand the definition
of architecture?—becomes possible only through consideration of regulatory
constructs, their historic origins and their long-standing impact on the built
environment. The process of relating instruments and historic origins within a
layered, condensed, yet expanded notion of time opens up architectural agency in
a twofold way. The first is the agency of architects, planners and citizens to
shape the built environment, to mediate social relations of living together and
to bring about change through a range of strategies: it is the space in which
action becomes possible, the Handlungsspielraum. The second notion of
architectural agency refers to the effect of form itself, its Wirksamkeit. We
argue that the use value of housing and the accessibility of desirable forms of
living is not a matter of form alone, but a process that is directly tied to a
regulatory framework and its ensuing urbanization processes. Hence, the agency
of form is something that takes place in resonance with situated variations of
use, the processes by which users’ selves are socially conditioned (i.e.,
subjectivation) and the ways territories and subjects are governed.

The floor plans for Zwicky Süd (2015), developed by a cooperative and two
for-profit developers, exemplify how architectural agency involves such
processes of subjectivation within a regulatory framework. Kraftwerk1, the
cooperative developer, emphasized gallery access to its apartments and flexible,
dividable floor plans, allowing residents to adapt their living environment as
needed and encouraging spontaneous encounters among residents. The private
developers, in contrast, prioritized point access and apartments with fixed,
separate rooms, thus minimizing opportunities for encounters with neighbors and
emphasizing privacy even within the apartment. However, it is not only the
architectural disposition of dwelling unit and the distribution of a building
that mediate different types of subjectivity, but also their mode of operation
and their situatedness within the city. Over time, rents in the cooperative
development will decrease while rents in the for-profit development will
increase; and paradoxically enough, it is the mixed-use offer in the cooperative
development that guarantees the attractivity of this otherwise peripheral site.
The architecture of Zwicky-Süd, as form, partakes in this partly territorial,
managerial and regulatory process—and this partaking expands our definition of
architecture as form.

If the stunning shared spaces and experimental floor plans of cooperative
housing in Zurich reveal how material form can positively resonate with the
lived spaces of its inhabitants, the Zurich case also shows that material form
can even give rise to a feedback loop that impacts the regulatory framework.
In the 1920s, for example, a push to adopt the garden city as an urban model led
to a revision of building laws and would shape Zurich’s first zoning code,
adopted in 1946. Nearly one hundred years later, the Federal Office of Housing
WBO chose the “cluster” typology created by Duplex Architekten for mehr als
wohnen’s House A in Hunziker Areal of 2015, for its design guidelines as
exemplary of flexible living forms. However, we argue that architecture can
sustain a positive resonance for the practice of dwelling only if society agrees
about the purpose and public benefit of the use value of dwelling. If public
opinion does not support a commitment to nonspeculation and use value in
housing, architectural form alone will have little chance to mediate the social
relations of living together and confer a positive resonance with the self, the
collective and the city. In this situation, architects, planners and citizens
will have to exclusively recur to the first modality of architectural agency and
redesign the regulatory framework itself. 


3. INSIGHTS: BOTH-AND

Our effort to understand how social entrepreneurialism and architectural
innovation come together in Zurich in an era of financialized real estate led to
three key insights about how cooperatives have bridged seemingly contradictory
realms in redefining certain widely held assumptions about the politics of
housing.


AFFORDABILITY REDEFINED: THE ARCHITECTURAL LEVERAGE OF NONSPECULATION

The first insight distilled from our investigation is that Zurich’s cooperatives
have been able to produce experimental architecture precisely because of, not
despite their commitment to, nonspeculation and affordability.

Low-rent housing is often conflated with housing of low quality; that is, built
with lower-grade materials and featuring standardized apartment layouts. In
Zurich’s cooperatives, the opposite is true. Precisely by renting their
apartments at below-market rates, cooperatives minimize the risk of vacancy.
Precisely because they are not forced to generate returns on investments, they
have the leeway to test new forms of living together. For example, conceiving
of, realizing and finding residents for the thirteen-room penthouse apartment at
Zwicky Süd was possible because Kraftwerk1 was not under pressure to immediately
generate revenue for a form of dwelling that the cooperative wanted to launch
and test.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for design innovation thus
challenges the widely held assumption that the best way to achieve low rents is
through design. Architectural strategies that have been tested for over a
century with this belief in mind include the repetition of standardized
elements, prefabrication, and limited floor area. While these strategies can
contribute to lowering construction costs and decreasing a building’s carbon
footprint, passing on the savings from such architectural decisions to the user
happens only if there is a commitment to doing so. Cooperatives, too, reduce
apartment sizes and experiment with construction methods, and these strategies
do effect rents; in this case, however, rents tend to fall over time because of
the cost-rent model, which is tied to investment costs and removes the main
contributor to housing prices—rising land values.

Understanding nonspeculation as a condition for high-quality architecture also
inverts the neoliberal paradigm which posits that housing built for lower-income
groups, assumed to be subsidized, should be of lower architectural quality lest
it become desirable for higher-income groups. This neoliberal critique has never
quite applied to Zurich’s cooperatives since they are not technically subsidized
and have never served only low-income households. At the same time, cooperatives
have proven these neoliberal critics right: they have pioneered forms of living
together that the private market has copied for higher-income clienteles. For
example, “cluster apartments” combining several minimal, single-person dwellings
around a large, shared kitchen were first tested by cooperatives but have become
mainstream among for-profit residential developers.

The criticism waged at cooperatives most often both from the political left and
the political right is that cooperatives are primarily a middle-class
proposition and are thus exclusive: residents must have some savings to afford a
share in the cooperative, and rents are not pegged to income but result from the
cost-rent model and thus often exceed low-income residents’ financial abilities,
especially in the case of new construction. Over the life of a property,
however, rents tend to decrease, sometimes in absolute terms and always in
relation to market rates. Access to cooperative housing thus widens over time.

Zurich’s cooperatives have thus redefined “affordability” by demonstrating that
it is a precondition for design exploration while at the same time showing that
residents’ incomes are not a precondition for enjoying its advantages. Zurich’s
cooperatives illuminate a way out of a bind often faced by potential residents:
the choice between “social housing,” where access is restricted by income and
availability, and “market-rate housing,” where access is restricted by
ever-rising costs. In contrast to both, Zurich’s cooperatives leverage
nonspeculation and architecture in equal parts to achieve the goal of at-cost
housing open to all.


THE COMMONS RESITUATED; OR, COOPERATIVES OPERATE AT ONCE BEYOND AND WITHIN
THE MARKET

A second key insight to emerge from our study of Zurich’s cooperatives is that
these entities, exemplars of the practice of urban commoning, have become actors
not only in opposition to but in concert with capitalism.

In the context of today’s low, even negative interest rates, high land values,
and de minimis vacancy rates, cooperatives have become more than reliable
borrowers; they have become highly coveted. Private banks, institutions and even
individual investors today compete with the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to sell
mortgages. What determines the creditworthiness of a nonprofit entity is the
value of its cooperative land. Even if that land technically cannot be sold at
market rates, it serves as collateral for various types of long- and short-term
loans. This has led to an astonishing situation: the balance sheet of Zurich’s
largest cooperative, ABZ, shows 30 million Swiss francs in equity and 1.05
billion Swiss francs in debt. In mid-2020, ABZ was rated by an accredited
institution as being on par if not higher-performing and more secure than
Switzerland’s largest publicly traded real estate companies. Zurich’s
cooperatives thus prove that low-rent housing can be produced and operated in
financially lucrative ways, requiring neither extensive state subsidies nor
later bailouts.

But the architectural and urban qualities of cooperative developments are
precisely where the tension and contradictions between a commitment to
nonspeculation and the logic of entrepreneurship become tangible. The current
rush by many cooperatives to demolish and replace functional, well-maintained
buildings has to do with a lack of buildable land and the political mandate to
densify within city limits. Fueling this rush is less residents’ dissatisfaction
with their living environments and more the ready availability of capital.
Increasingly, such projects have involved centrally located developments noted
as historically significant, such as the FGZ’s Friesenberg row houses from the
1920s or ABZ’s Kanzlei perimeter block from the 1930s. In the process,
cooperatives often seem to undermine their own goals, since the newly built,
larger apartments have higher rents than the ones they replaced, and increased
apartment size has led to the actual number of apartments increasing only
minimally.

The name of this practice is Ersatzneubau, literally “replacement through new
construction.” Cooperatives are under increasing pressure to contribute to the
municipal and federal mandates to increase density within built-up areas as part
of an effort to combat sprawl and climate change. Arguments made by cooperatives
in favor of Ersatzneubau are that the practice is necessary to meet current
lifestyle standards relating to the size and configuration of apartments and to
comply with new regulations, in particular those related to accessibility and
energy efficiency. Redevelopment has been incentivized by revisions to the
city’s zoning code allowing for higher density on large, contiguous sites
through the tool of the Arealüberbauung, or Planned Development Area. In this
way, in areas otherwise zoned for three-story buildings on individual parcels,
seven-story structures are permissible on large sites. While citizens and
preservationists are increasingly contesting the practice of Ersatzneubau, it
has also enabled sensitive, phased renewal intended to keep residents in place,
as in BGZ’s work in Schwamendingen.

Cooperatives’ current redevelopment practices, while controversial, bespeak a
commitment to and investment in a nonspeculative future. Across their more than
one-hundred-year history, not a single cooperative complex has ever “opted out”
of its commitment to nonspeculation. In theory, a two-thirds majority of members
could, once all public funding has been paid back and pending approval of the
municipality, vote to recommodify the housing. But as ABZ CEO Hans Rupp
observes, the nonprofit nature is deeply “written into the DNA” of Zurich’s
cooperatives. Nevertheless, debates continue. Cooperative leaders are well aware
that upgrading neighborhoods or spearheading the development of new ones, as
Kraftwerk1 did at Zwicky Süd, can increase the valuation of real estate and lead
to gentrification even if the new cooperative apartments are rented at cost.


AUTONOMY RE-EMBEDDED: PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT BACKED BY THE STATE

The third key insight from our research is a recognition that the sustained
growth of cooperatives across the last century in Zurich was possible only
because of their  embeddedness with Zurich’s municipal government.

Cooperatives have crafted an image (and self-image) of themselves as autonomous
actors creating alternatives to those offered by the market and as doing so
independently of the state. Various aspects of their functioning support this
image, including self-determination (they select their own members and draft
their own bylaws); self-governance (including all aspects of managing, planning
and organizing the life of the cooperative); and economic self-sufficiency (as
required by cost rent). A sense of being separate and independent has also been
a distinct feature of cooperative architecture and urbanism. That is, for much
of their history cooperatives have chosen to materialize as distinct entities in
the city, both at the scale of the Siedlung and in terms of a uniform
architectural expression across individual buildings.

Autonomy is also what has made this model of nonprofit housing politically
acceptable from left to right and across shifting political trends, as housing
scholar Julie Lawson notes. Geographers Ivo Balmer and Jean-David Gerber explain
the continued growth of the model this way: “Housing cooperatives owe their
success to the fact that, despite decommodification, they do not lead to an
expansion of state control. To a large extent, housing cooperatives are a
private, self-organized solution to a public problem.” Nonetheless, even Lawson
and Balmer and Gerber go into great detail to explain that continued political
and financial support for at-cost housing has been possible only because of the
close connections of cooperatives to the workings of municipal governments, as
well as initiatives and pressure from organized citizens. Zurich’s cooperatives
thus strike an unusual balance: Their claim to autonomy from the state ensures
them state support.

Across the last century, this embedded autonomy has led to various forms of
state support, the two most significant of which are preferential access to
municipal land and preferential access to financing. In 1902, the Canton of
Zurich obliged the Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB) to lend to cooperatives. In 1910
the required equity was lowered to 10 percent of development costs; in 1924 it
was further lowered to 6 percent, where it has remained to this day, enabling
cooperatives to obtain mortgages at conventional interest rates but with less
than one-third of the equity required of other borrowers. This, in turn, has
allowed cooperatives and policymakers to argue that cooperatives are
self-sufficient entities that, despite enjoying preferential access to land and
financing, should not be considered subsidized. Not technically being subsidized
means, in turn, that residents are not subject to income restrictions, which in
turn reinforces the sense of cooperatives as autonomous, self-governed
communities. All in all, the preferential access to financing has led to an
outstandingly diverse field of 141 cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42 000 apartments—a remarkable realization of
collective self-determination and social entrepreneurship that reconciles the
strive for individual singularization with the collective.

This embedded autonomy is the result of a continual push and pull between
activists and citizens on the one hand and city officials on the other. The
Kalkbreite cooperative, a mixed-use development realized on centrally located,
municipal land, is a primary example of the effectiveness of a citizen-led
campaign to convince the City of Zurich to rededicate a municipal site formerly
considered unsuitable for residential use and grant it to a cooperative through
a leasehold. The open architectural competition for this project, however, was
the result of a municipal policy crafted within city government. In the early
1990s, the city prioritized new residential construction for families and
coupled this with requirements for higher-quality designs and transparent
selection processes. 

Together, these three key insights challenge some of the most persistent
assumptions held by architects, planners, scholars, the general public and
policymakers about housing—assumptions often framed as mutually exclusive
dichotomies rather than as examples of “both-and.” The affordability of housing
is the result of nonspeculation and can never be achieved by design alone. The
interplay of a nonprofit mission in housing and a profit-driven financial market
is real. And even independent, private actors depend on the regulatory powers of
the state to flourish. Together, these three insights help to explain what makes
social entrepreneurship and architectural experimentation possible in Zurich
even during an age when striving for singularities may be limiting our idea of
the good life.


4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: A COOPERATIVE PROJECT

Cooperative Conditions was developed with seventeen students in the Master of
Advanced Studies Program in the History and Theory of Architecture (MAS gta) at
ETH Zurich in the spring of 2020. A joint research project is an integral part
of the curriculum of this part-time, post-professional, two-year course;
students contribute to a given topic with the goal of producing a publication,
exhibition or other public format. 

When we began, we had already defined the eight conditions we would explore. We
had also determined that students would conduct interviews, engage in archival
research and synthesize the findings using an analytical framework organized
around Instruments, Historic Origin and Agency. The interviews were most
revealing with respect to the relationship of architecture, finance and
regulation. We spoke not just with architects and city officials, typically
eager to share their views on design and policy, but with the chief executives
of cooperative organizations, pension fund managers and bankers. The latter
conversations provided insight into the financial dimensions of architectural
decisions that even these decision-makers themselves had rarely considered.

The direction and outcome of the research, however, evolved through a continual
back and forth among students and instructors. This included the choice of
Instruments and the selection of projects to best highlight Agency. Students
often took the initiative. They expanded the range of projects to consider and
people to interview, and Rebekka Hirschberg proposed film as the best medium to
capture the projects’ atmospheres. 

In translating the research into graphic form, the feedback and art directorship
of Berlin-based graphic studio Monobloque were critical. First Dorothée Billard,
then also Clara Neumann, gave shape to aspects of cooperatives that are often
discussed but rarely made tangible. Key visualizations include how cost rent
develops over time and the relation of equity to various forms of debt.

For the exhibition and this web page, we developed a combined framework to bring
together short texts, original graphics and contemporary and historical
images. The inextricability of courtyard configurations, interest rates and
municipal rulings becomes apparent through the juxtaposition of different
artifacts. Visitors will thus find, side by side, a Twitter feed charting the
results of a 2020 referendum on housing, an album page commemorating the 1931
World Cooperative Day and contemporary photographs (taken by students) of
cooperative spaces.

The website captures a work in progress, at a half-way point between exhibition
and book.

Cooperative Conditions, then, is a product of minds working in cooperation to
create a primer on architecture, finance and regulation. It was made possible by
the many individuals and organizations who contributed knowledge, time, humor
and, not least, money. They did so out of a sense that the potential and
possibilities of this project would be worth the effort. Thank you.


1.
AN IDEA OF SHARING

Sharing is the foundation of any cooperative enterprise. Sharing occurs in three
overlapping realms: labor and resources; property; governance. Sharing means
access to more not less—not only for the cooperative community but for society
at large.

View of the laundry room of Haus A · Hunziker Areal, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

Shared governance plays out directly in planning decisions. In a cooperative,
members elect the board; approve expenditures, investments and future expansion;
and are encouraged to serve on committees that discuss everything from community
building to entrepreneurial strategy. This creates an ongoing feedback loop
allowing management to respond to members’ changing needs.  

Shared governance and shared ownership directly shape the configuration of
cooperative architecture. This might result in large, landscaped courtyards
rather than small private patios; hallways used not only to access dwelling
units but for interaction; and laundry rooms designed to accommodate washing
machines and to encourage children’s play. Because residents are at once
co-owners, co-governors and co-users, they trust one another in the use of these
shared spaces.

The conviction that resources are limited and must be shared has encouraged
cooperatives to respond with new spatial strategies. These include lowering the
size of dwelling units while increasing amenities that are available to all;
locating intermittently used spaces such as guest rooms outside of the
apartment; and offering a range of apartment configurations to accommodate
changing household needs. 


INSTRUMENTS

Shared Labor and Resources
A cooperative is a community whose members advance common interests by sharing
labor and resources. Any surplus value is shared equally among members. This
practice is referred to as “mutual self-help” and is often possible only through
uncompensated, volunteer labor.

Shared Property
A cooperative is a corporation co-owned by its members. Members become co-owners
of a housing complex when they become residents and buy a share.  4. Equity 

Shared Governance
A cooperative is a legal entity co-governed by its members. Its bylaws define
the rules of governance. These generally adhere to the democratic principle of
one member, one vote. The commitment to nonspeculation is an integral part of
any Zurich cooperative’s bylaws.  3. Nonspeculation

Diagram of the cooperative system of shared governance
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Cooperative organizations (ABZ, Kraftwerk1 and Kalkbreite) 

Zurich cooperatives can vary in structure depending on size and mission, but
some features are common to all. Members elect the (volunteer) board and various
(volunteer) committees, and the board makes strategic decisions and appoints the
(professional) management. The purchase of a share makes a member a resident and
co-owner of the cooperative.


DOCUMENTS

Album Page of the ABZ’s celebrations on the occasion of World Cooperative Day,
1931
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ F.03.2.30)

This event, staged to draw in the wider public, sought to spread the main idea
animating cooperatives: collective action for shared benefit rather than
competition for individual gain. That idea, itself older than capitalism, was
transposed to housing production in industrializing Europe during the
mid-nineteenth century. It was a response to the inability of both the state and
private enterprise to respond to the housing and other needs of the working
class and small entrepreneurs. 

Plan for Festivities in the Siedlung Ottostrasse, ABZ, 1927
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (ABZ A.32.15)

The markups in colored pencil show the temporary installations made for the
festivities on the occasion of the complex’s opening in 1927. The drawing
reveals the close attention paid to collective activities in shared spaces: a
music stage in the center of the courtyard, seating and buffets, and even a
lucky wheel. In one ground-floor apartment the cooperative exhibited
architectural plans for the complex. It also furnished two apartments as
showrooms for interested visitors. 3. Nonspeculation / Siedlung Ottostrasse

Manifesto “bolo’bolo,” 1983
Source: P.M., bolo'bolo, Paranoia City Verlag, Zurich 2015 (1983)

Writing during the youth protests, a period when squatting was common in
Zurich’s inner-city, the activist Hans Widmer proposed a self-sufficient
alternative to capitalist housing production: the “bolo.” Capable of
accommodating several hundred people, “bolos don’t have to be built in empty
spaces. They’re much more a utilization of existing structures. In larger
cities, a bolo can consist of one or two blocks, of a smaller neighborhood, of a
complex of adjacent buildings. You just have to build connecting arcades,
overpasses, using first floors as communal spaces, making openings in certain
walls, etc. So, a typical older neighborhood could be transformed into a bolo
like this.”

Photographs of the Sofa Uni, 1995
Photo: Gerda Tobler/Kraftwerk1

The Sofa Uni was a one-month installation in an industrial building conceived as
a laboratory for new forms of large households. The event was initiated by a
group of squatters, activists and architects dissatisfied with the type and cost
of new housing in Zurich. It led to the creation of a new cooperative
organization, Kraftwerk1. In their first publication, Kraftwerk1’s founders
wrote, “What may be lacking in terms of individual comfort will be provided—just
as in a high-end hotel—through shared luxury.” Other new cooperatives were
founded in the 2000s following Kraftwerk1’s example.

Research: Kadir Asani, Armin Fuchs, Abbas Mansouri


2.
PUBLIC OPINION

To grow beyond individual initiatives, cooperatives need political support,
which is dependent on public opinion. In Zurich, pro-cooperative policies won
important political victories in the 1920s, 1940s and late 1990s, resulting in a
significant increase in cooperative housing.


AGENCY

In Zurich, surveys have been instrumental in shaping public opinion and public
policy on housing since the late nineteenth century. Housing policy has been
continually debated, contested and revised by citizens and elected officials in
part through referenda. Swiss voters are called to the polls every three months;
ballot measures on land-use policy and housing appear every few years.

Public opinion, public policy and architecture are mediated through design
guidelines and housing regulations issued by public-sector entities. Zurich’s
cooperatives, because they are nonprofit, must adhere to both federal design
guidelines and cantonal housing regulations. As such, they, too, are a product
of societal consensus.

However, public opinion can be swayed by the tangibility of architecture. A
striking example is the highly experimental cluster floor plan designed by
Duplex Architekten für Hunziker Areal in Zurich, which was included in federal
design guidelines (the Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System) only a few years after the
project’s realization. Its inclusion signified an epochal shift: a move beyond
the nuclear family as the normative household model.

Haus A · Hunziker Areal (2009–15)
Plan courtesy of Duplex Architekten


INSTRUMENTS

Referendum
A referendum (Volksabstimmung) asks voters to approve or reject a particular
ballot measure; if approved, the measure becomes law. In Switzerland, a
mandatory (obligatorisches) referendum is required for any constitutional
change, while an optional (fakultatives) referendum can be initiated by citizens
in opposition to any law passed by the Swiss legislature (so long as 50 000
signatures asking for the referendum are collected within 100 days of the law’s
publication).

Popular Initiative
A referendum can also result from a popular initiative (Volksinitiative) on any
matter of common concern. To force a vote at the national level, a petition
requires 100 000 signatures.

Survey
A survey, study or report is an inquiry into the causes of social problems. It
is generally written by experts commissioned by a public entity or philanthropic
organization. Its normative power derives from the presumable objectivity of
science and allows policy makers to argue for or against public-sector
involvement in housing.

Timeline comparing the number of new dwelling units built by cooperative,
municipal and other developers in Zurich, 1893–2020
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Statistik Stadt Zürich


DOCUMENTS

Special issue of the daily Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich, 1907
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (Ar 32.90.5)

In 1896, a civic organization commissioned the first inquiry on the sanitary
conditions of industrial workers’ housing. The study paved the way for the City
of Zurich to define housing as a public-sector responsibility in its 1907
charter revision. An advertisement in the Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich called for
voters in the city to approve the revision in a mandatory referendum. The
revised charter was the first to define housing as a matter of public concern
and as worthy of public-sector support.

Photograph of demonstrators confronting mounted police in central Zurich during
the national strike, 1918
Photo: Wilhelm Gallas/Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Even though it was a nonbelligerent, Switzerland experienced hunger, rampant
inflation, a flu epidemic and a severe lack of housing in the aftermath of World
War One. By official count, in 1919 only 20 apartments in Zurich were vacant out
of a total of 47 000. These conditions contributed to a nationwide general
strike. The emergency measures approved in response—federal subsidies for
nonprofit housing in 1918 (loans and grants), the establishment of the Swiss
Housing Federation in 1919 and the 1924 municipal ruling to lower cooperatives’
equity requirements from 10 percent to 6 percent—had lasting impacts at the
municipal and national levels.

Campaign poster of Social Democrat Emil Klöti, Zurich municipal elections, 1933
Source: Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F Pe-0910)
Exemplary floor plans for “Flexible Housing Forms” in the design guidelines of
the Federal Office for Housing (BWO), 2015 
Photo: BWO, Wohnbauten planen, beurteilen und vergleichen.
Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System. Grenchen, 2015

The 2015 Wohnungs-Bewertungs-System (Housing Evaluation System, WBS) chose the
“cluster” typology designed by Duplex Architekten for Hunziker Areal in Zurich
as exemplary of flexible living forms. The plan organizes five one- and
two-room-apartments, each with an individual bath and kitchenette, around
generous shared spaces. 

Twitter Profile of the popular initiative More Affordable Housing, held at the
federal level, 2020
Source: twitter.com/Wohninitiative

The initiative asked voters whether all municipalities in Switzerland should be
required to guarantee a certain percentage of nonprofit housing. Slogans for the
initiative included, “Stop Speculators,” and slogans against included, “No to
the Nationalization of the Housing Market.” The initiative was rejected by 57
percent of voters.

Research: Gina Rauschtenberger, Alexia Zeller


3.
NONSPECULATION

Nonstandard, experimental forms of living together are possible in Zurich
precisely because cooperatives reject the notion of exchange value in
architecture. The resulting high use value benefits not just current residents
but future generations.

Photograph of courtyard use at Siedlung Ottostrasse, 2020
Photo: Kristin Sasama


AGENCY

Nonspeculation has immediate implications for design. This is especially true
within a heated real estate market with virtually no risk of vacancies, such as
Zurich. Whereas for-profit developers tend to see a hot market as a reason to
follow existing practices, Zurich’s cooperatives see an opportunity to test new
forms of living together.

The key instrument for nonspeculation is cost-rent, which works best over time.
Upon completion of a new construction project, cost rent is only slightly below
market rent. Over time, however, cost rent declines relative to market rates
because loans are paid off and rising land values are not reflected in its
calculation. Today, rents of cooperative apartments in Zurich are, on average,
25 percent below market rents.

Taken together, the commitment to nonspeculation and cost rent encourages
careful and continuous stewardship of architectural and social structures. Even
in highly coveted central locations, cooperative organizations can renovate
complexes in response to changing standards or regulations but still keep rents
low enough to maintain social and economic diversity.


INSTRUMENTS

Gemeinnützigkeit
Gemeinnützigkeit is a legal term for a nonprofit enterprise with public benefit.
For cooperative housing, it means a permanent commitment to the provision of
housing under the premise of nonspeculation. Land and buildings are removed from
the private market and apartments priced following the cost-rent model.

Cost Rent
Cost rent is a mode of rent calculation that neither requires subsidies nor
generates a profit. It is determined by a formula which incorporates investment
value and building insurance value, multiplied by benchmark factors that are
regularly adjusted by municipal and federal agencies in relation to interest
rates and maintenance costs. 

Diagram showing cost rent's development over time
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Reports 1927–2019) and Statistik Stadt Zürich
How one Swiss Franc of cost rent is spent
Visualization: Rebekka Hirschberg & Monobloque
Source: ABZ (Annual Report 2019)

The maximum cost rent for a property is calculated using a formula based on the
property’s building insurance value and investment value. These values are
multiplied by factors based on the benchmark interest rate and operating quota,
a coefficient defined by the City of Zurich that represents the estimated
oper­ating costs. The sum equals the property’s maximum allowable rental
revenue. These values change over time, as the example of ABZ’s Siedlung
Ottostrasse shows. While cost rent increases over time, it does so more
gradually than market rents because the land value of a cooperative does not
increase and cooperatives are not allowed to generate profit.


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Ottostrasse and surroundings, circa 1928
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Floor plan of typical three-room apartments, Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927
Source: ABZ Archives

Ottostrasse, completed in 1927, demonstrates how a cooperative complex, even in
a central location, can retain its original architectural features while being
continually upgraded and maintaining low rents. The three-room apartments today
rent for around 650 Swiss francs a month (and an initial share purchase of 3 000
Swiss francs), which is more than 50 percent below the market rent for
comparable apartments in the area. 1.An Idea of Sharing / Plan for Festivities
in Siedlung Ottostrasse, 1927

 
 

Photograph of the youth protests and squatters’ movement in the 1980s
Photo: Gertrud Vogler/Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (F 5107-Na-11-006-006)

In the 1980s, Zurich youth protested the municipality’s development policies
with a range of actions, including squatting and happenings. The youth opposed
policies that favored the demolition of existing housing to make space for new
construction of office and commercial space.  1. An Idea of
Sharing /  Manifesto bolo’bolo, 1983



Zwicky Süd, completed in 2015, is a former industrial site just beyond Zurich’s
city limits that was codeveloped 50/50 by Kraftwerk1 (a cooperative) and two
for-profit pension funds with a single architectural firm, Schneider Studer
Primas. 

Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Kraftwerk1, the cooperative
developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten
Floor plan of a three-room apartment developed by Pensimo Management AG, a
for-profit developer
Plan courtesy of Schneider Studer Primas Architekten

The floor plans for three-room apartments reveal the design priorities of
nonprofit and for-profit developers. The apartments designed and realized for
Kraftwerk1 are accessed by a shared exterior gallery, reflecting the emphasis on
casual social contacts, and exhibit interior flexibility. The pension funds
requested and realized a more standard layout: access is through a core, and
rooms have doors and defined uses.

At the time of completion, cooperative and market rents differed by
approximately 20 percent. Over time, they will diverge more dramatically because
maximization of revenue drives the pension funds, while decision-making in the
cooperative is focused on keeping rents low in line with the cost-rent model.

Research: Lale Geyer, Rebekka Hirschberg


4.
EQUITY

The limited amount of equity required for cooperatives to take out a mortgage
gives even socially marginalized groups access to financing. This has led to a
great diversity of many small, specialized organizations that offer specific
forms of living together to very different interest groups.


AGENCY

A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced from individuals whose desires and needs
are known to the organization’s management. This allows the cooperative to
develop housing models specific to its members’ needs. The Siedlung Lettenhof,
for example, was developed in the 1920s by and for single, women professionals
whose only housing options at the time were subletting or living with relatives.

Photograph of the courtyard of Siedlung Lettenhof during construction, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

In cooperative housing, the return on an individual’s equity investment is paid
out in use value, not cash. This “use value dividend” includes a life-long right
to stay, cost rent and collective self-governance.

A cooperative’s limited equity has outsize financial leverage not only in the
short term but over time. While a cooperative’s land and buildings cannot be
sold at market rates, they can be used to take on more debt for new development
projects, resulting in an even lower equity-to-debt ratio than has been required
since a 1924 municipal resolution. The larger and older a cooperative, the
greater the leverage of its equity.

The preferential access to financing has led to an outstandingly diverse field
of 141 small and large, young and old cooperative organizations in Zurich that
today collectively manage over 42.000 apartments embodying various forms of
living together.


INSTRUMENTS

Municipal Resolution
Zurich’s housing cooperatives need only 6 percent equity to access a
conventional bank loan, far less than the 20 percent typically required. This
has been the case since a 1924 municipal resolution in which Social Democrats
and conservatives struck a compromise to support cooperatives in the face of a
dire housing shortage. 2. Public Opinion

Share
A cooperative’s equity is crowdsourced among its residents through the sale of
shares. A share is a certificate of partial ownership of the cooperative
corporation and entitles residents to participate in the governance of the
organization. 1. An Idea of Sharing

Savings Bank and Solidarity Fund
Zurich cooperatives generate additional financing through two self-managed
instruments. A cooperative’s savings bank allows members to deposit money and
earn a low interest rate in return. A cooperative’s solidarity fund pools
contributions to aid residents in case of financial need.

Diagrams of equity as a proportion of three cooperative organizations’ overall
balance sheet, 2018
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Annual reports of the three cooperatives from 2018

The three cooperative organizations ABZ, BBF (cooperative for working women),
and Kraftwerk1 differ in age, size, philosophy and equity as a share of their
overall balance sheet. A cooperative’s willingness to take on more debt is
shaped by whether it owns or leases the land on which it has built. 5. Debt  6.
Land


DOCUMENTS

Deposit slip for the payment of a share, BBF, no date
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich

Share prices vary depending on the age and location of the complex, as well as
the size and location of the apartment. Today, the cost of a share for a
three-room apartment in a Zurich cooperative ranges from 8 000 to 50 000 Swiss
francs.

Plan of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, 1927
Source: gta Archives/ETH Zurich, Lux Guyer

Lettenhof provided a range of apartment sizes to accommodate a range of resident
needs and financial capabilities. The majority of the apartments at Lettenhof
were designed to provide maximum privacy to their residents. A private kitchen
and bath, as well as one or two private balconies, were important elements in
this strategy. The studio was the only apartment type to have a shared bath and
only a small kitchenette.

Photograph of the interior of a studio apartment, Lettenhof, no date
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen
Spread of an article on life at Lettenhof in the magazine Blatt für Alle, 1940
Source: Archives of Baugenossenschaft berufstätiger Frauen

In an article titled “Single working women created a homestead for themselves,”
the author focuses on the unusual liberties afforded to the doctors, teachers
and administrators living in Lettenhof.

Research: Hanae Balissat, Kristin Sasama


5.
DEBT

Around 80 percent of the value of Zurich’s cooperatives is debt. Private and
public-sector lenders alike consider cooperatives to be reliable borrowers and
to provide lucrative investment opportunities, a status materialized through
architecture that is built to last.

View across the Glattpark complex at the ground level, 2020
Photo: Anna Derriks


AGENCY

For Zurich cooperatives and their lenders, debt means security. Debt is not seen
as a short-term, high-risk endeavor but rather is understood as a long-term
commitment. As a result, architecture is built to last for generations. This
plays out in the choice of high-quality building materials, whether in façades,
floors or hardware. Siedlung Friesenberg, for example, has been in use for close
to a century.

For lenders, cooperatives provide lucrative investment opportunities. Zurich’s
minimal vacancy rate of 0.15 percent ensures that cooperative apartments,
offering high use value at low cost, will never go unrented. For cooperatives, a
choice of lenders allows debt to be rescheduled at favorable rates. In turn,
this gives cooperatives the leeway to pursue nonstandard architectural
solutions.

For cooperatives, servicing long-term debt goes hand in hand with a willingness
to take risks on endeavors that may only play out in the long term. This
includes developing large-scale projects in the urban periphery and embracing
urban design to encourage the use of open space by diverse actors, such as the
Glattpark development near Zurich Airport.


INSTRUMENTS

Loans from Conventional Banks
Most of the debt owed by Zurich cooperatives was obtained from banks at
conventional interest rates. These first mortgages typically cover 60–80 percent
of development costs. The Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), a private bank backed by
the Canton of Zurich, has had a legal obligation to lend to cooperatives since
1902. ( 2. Public Opinion.) Given two decades of low interest rates, other banks
are now competing for cooperatives’ business, because of their reputation as
reliable borrowers. 

Loans from Pension Funds and Other Private Entities
Since 1992, most cooperatives have also obtained second mortgages, which fund
14–34 percent of development costs, from the City of Zurich Pension Fund. This
is a private institution whose lending to cooperatives, however, is backed by
the City of Zurich. Additional long- and short-term loans are made by a variety
of private individuals and institutions. ( 4. Equity.) 

Loans from the Public Sector
The public sector, whether at the municipal, cantonal or federal level, provides
few direct loans to cooperatives. The indirect mechanisms for low-interest loans
include the Swiss Bond Issuance Cooperative (Emissionszentrale), which since
1990 has enabled cooperatives to refinance loans upon completion of a project. A
revolving fund (fonds de roulement) has been lending up to 50 000 Swiss francs
per dwelling unit since 2007.

Diagram of the types of financing available to Zurich cooperatives
Source: WBG Zürich

The balance sheet of an average Zurich cooperative organization shows a
surprisingly small amount of equity (red). The rest, even if it is funding that
the cooperative controls, is considered debt (beige/gold). This debt breaks down
as follows: the largest loans are provided by the ZKB and other banks, followed
by loans from private entities including pension funds. When, as now, interest
rates are at historic lows, all types of lenders consider lending to cooperative
organizations to be a safe and low-risk endeavor. The smallest percentage of
loans originate from the public sector. In addition, cooperatives operate their
own savings banks and a renewal fund. ( 4. Equity) The renewal fund, earmarked
for maintenance and repairs, is automatically funded by a fixed percentage of
the cost rent. 3. Nonspeculation


DOCUMENTS

Aerial photograph of Zurich’s city center with City Hall, Municipal Offices and
Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB), 1910
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

From the beginning of its involvement in housing in 1896, the public sector in
Zurich has chosen not to lend directly to cooper­a­tives. Rather, private
entities like the ZKB (since 1902) and the City of Zurich Pension Fund (since
1992) have been obliged to do so, while the public sector insures them against
loss. Because cooperatives, despite receiving preferential access to financing,
are economically and fiscally independent actors in the real estate market,
elected officials have been able to maintain that the city does not directly
subsidize them. It is one reason cooperatives have had public support across the
political spectrum.

Aerial photograph, Siedlung Friesenberg, circa 1929
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Photograph of house entrance, Siedlung Friesenberg, 1925
Source: FGZ archives

The Familienheim-Genossenschaft Zürich (FGZ), a cooperative focused on providing
homes to families with children, was among the first cooperatives to take
advantage of the 1924 municipal resolution permitting cooperatives to access
financing with only 6 percent equity as collateral. During the first two
construction phases at Friesenberg in 1925–26 (of a total of 23 phases as
of 2021), the FGZ built 144 rowhouses and apartments in a garden city layout.
Today, the site’s future is highly contested. The FGZ would like to redevelop
the site as a whole, arguing that renovation is too expensive. Preservationists
counter that the design is unique and of high quality. They seek to prevent the
demolition of at least the 1925–26 phases.

Ground floor and landscape plan, Glattpark, 2017
Plan courtesy of pool Architekten

Through a land deal between the City of Zurich and ABZ in 2011, the cooperative
organization obtained some 24 000 m² of land in a new urban development near
Zurich Airport. In 2015, following an architectural competition, the ABZ general
assembly approved the development cost of 97.5 million Swiss francs to pursue
the winning project. In two phases, 286 apartments, ranging from 1.5 to 8.5
rooms, were realized for a broad mix of 800 residents, bringing the total number
of apartments operated by ABZ to over 5 000. A kindergarten, nursery and
restaurants are located in the ground-floor areas. The open courtyards between
the four buildings are connected by passages.

Photograph of the new urban development, Glattpark, 2020
Photo: Sanna Kattenbeck

The Glattpark neighborhood beyond the city limits of Zurich consists mainly of
private, for-profit development. The project for ABZ, designed by pool
Architekten (first three building blocks in the foreground), is an exception. It
articulates an urban facade toward the public square, and its courtyards are
accessible to residents and the general public alike. In contrast, private
developers tend to privatize the public space in their developments with
individual gardens or glazed balconies.

Research: Nina Baisch, Bianca Matzek


6.
LAND

The high percentage of cooperative land ownership in Zurich contributes to the
city’s socio-spatial balance. Land is removed from speculation, curbing
gentrification and keeping inner-city apartments affordable. Large, contiguous
sites allow for the collective use of urban green spaces.


AGENCY

Cooperative organizations own around 9 percent of Zurich’s buildable land and 18
percent of the city’s housing stock. Owning entire neighborhoods is key to
cooperatives’ resilient, long-term planning practices. Organizations can
rehabilitate or redevelop their housing stock in phases over several decades.
This sustainable occupancy policy allows lower-income groups to remain in place.

Urban expansions and cooperative land in Zurich, 2020
Visualization: Sanna Kattenbeck & Monobloque
Source: GIS-Browser Kanton Zürich

The majority of Zurich’s cooperative organizations acquired their land from the
1920s to the 1950s. Today’s low rents directly result from the low initial
purchase price of the land, as the rent calculation is based on the initial
price and not on the current market value.

Concurrently, that same land ownership guarantees cooperatives’ AAA credit
rating precisely because the theoretical market value of the land has increased
approximately a hundredfold since purchase. Cooperatives can finance
redevelopment projects by rescheduling debt backed by land, even though the land
is not for sale due to the cooperatives’ commitment to nonspeculation.

The garden city model of urban planning, premised on rejecting the individual
parcel, best exemplifies the promise of collective land ownership. Under
cooperative stewardship, generous collective landscapes and playgrounds are
accessible to the public and enjoyed by residents.


INSTRUMENTS

Outright Ownership
Outright ownership of land is a legal construct for assigning rights and
responsibilities of individual or juridical persons to a piece of property,
defined as a part of the earth’s surface and registered in a deed. The
collective private property of cooperative organizations is a hybrid of
ownership and rental models: residents are both collective shareholders and
individual renters.

Leasehold of Municipal Land
A leasehold (Baurecht) is a legal arrangement by which the land owner grants
rights to use of land against payment of rent. In Zurich, leaseholds of
municipal land are usually granted for 62 years, extendable by 30 years. For the
municipality, this ensures long-term control of urban development. For
cooperative organizations, it ensures access to buildable land that today has
become expensive and virtually impossible to come by, even as money is cheap.  


DOCUMENTS

Map of municipal land in Zurich, 1929
Source: Camille Martin, Hans Bernoulli. Städtebau in der Schweiz.
Grundlagen. Zurich: 
Fretz & Wasmuth, 1929

The land owned by the City of Zurich includes not only land in residential areas
but roads, infrastructure and forest. From the turn of the twentieth century
onward, the City of Zurich has supported cooperatives through a policy of land
reserves, possible because of low land prices. Between the urban expansions of
1893 and 1934, the share of land owned by the municipality (excluding streets
and squares) rose from one-eighth to over one-third of the total urban area.
Cooperative organizations had preferential access to this land, either through
large plots or favorable prices. Cooperatives also benefited from the urban
expansion of 1934 because it turned cheap agricultural land into buildable sites
with amenities and infrastructure. In the 1950s, the City of Zurich halted the
sale of municipal land. From 1965 onward, it systematically granted leaseholds.

Poster used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Stadtarchiv Zürich
Map used in the campaign in favor of Zurich’s second urban expansion, 1929
Source: Aktionskomitee für die Eingemeindung. Für die Eingemeindung der Zürcher
Vororte. Zurich, 1929

Better urban design and bus service were used to make the case for incorporating
neighboring towns and villages into the city of Zurich. A referendum to approve
this was rejected by voters, but a second urban expansion was nonetheless put in
place in 1934.

Neighborhood plan (Quartiersplan), Zürich-Schwamendingen, 1948
Architect: City Architect Albert Heinrich Steiner
Source: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich
Aerial photograph, Zürich-Schwamendingen, BGZ housing complex, 1954
Photo: Werner Friedli/Bildarchiv der ETH-Bibliothek
Redevelopment plan Schwamendinger-Dreieck, BGZ, 2012
Visualization: Monobloque
Source: BGZ masterplan, 2012

The size and long-standing ownership of land in Schwamendingen allows
Baugenossenschaft Glattal Zürich (BGZ), a cooperative organization founded in
1942, to pursue a phased renewal of its housing stock over 23 years.

Research: Anna Derriks, Sanna Kattenbeck

Cooperative Conditions


BOOK

The book Cooperative Conditions: A Primer on Architecture, Finance and
Regulation in Zurich, by Anne Kockelkorn and Susanne Schindler with Rebekka
Hirschberg, was published by gta Verlag in September 2024.

Book launch in Zurich on October 30, 2024 at Architekturforum.
Further book launches planned in Berlin, Boston, Brussels, New York and Vienna.




VENUES


VENICE BIENNALE

Research Project, invited to Stations, section out of competition at Biennale
Architettura 2021 curated by Hashim Sarkis. #HowWillWeLiveTogether

Anne Kockelkorn and Susanne Schindler with the students of the MAS GTA, ETH
Zurich, 2020–2021

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slide 1 of 3

The wall at the Arsenale, May 2021
Photos: Kristin Sasama / Rebekka Hirschberg

The wall at the Arsenale, May 2021
Photos: Kristin Sasama / Rebekka Hirschberg

The wall at the Arsenale, May 2021
Photos: Kristin Sasama / Rebekka Hirschberg

The wall at the Arsenale, May 2021
Photos: Kristin Sasama / Rebekka Hirschberg

The research project is on view at the Venice Architecture Biennale— in the
Arsenale in the section “As New Households”— until November 26. On the wall,
measuring 5.70 x 5.70 meters, Biennale visitors are able to see connections
between the eight dossiers, each dedicated to explaining one financial, legal or
regulatory instrument and its interplay with architecture and social space.
Visitors can learn from Zurich’s Cooperative Conditions for other, and very
different, settings around the world. The results are also accessible on this
website and will be published in book form.

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slide 1 of 6

Set-up impressions, May 2021
Photos: Clara Neumann / Kristin Sasama

Set-up impressions, May 2021
Photos: Clara Neumann / Kristin Sasama

Set-up impressions, May 2021
Photos: Clara Neumann / Kristin Sasama

Set-up impressions, May 2021
Photos: Clara Neumann / Kristin Sasama

Set-up impressions, May 2021
Photos: Clara Neumann / Kristin Sasama

Set-up impressions, May 2021
Photos: Clara Neumann / Kristin Sasama

Set-up impressions, May 2021
Photos: Clara Neumann / Kristin Sasama


BK-EXPO DELFT

Cooperative Condition contributes to the exhibition Together! The Future of
Living at the Oostserre, TU Delft, 7.10.–31.10.2021.

©MAS GTA ETH, May 2021 and TU Delft, October 2021



ABOUT

Research Project, invited to Stations, section out of competition at Biennale
Architettura 2021 curated by Hashim Sarkis. #HowWillWeLiveTogether

Anne Kockelkorn and Susanne Schindler with the students of the MAS GTA, ETH
Zurich, 2020–2021



The project is based on a seminar taught in the spring semester 2020 by Anne
Kockelkorn, Susanne Schindler and Marie-Anne Lerjen




STUDENT TEAM

Research: Kadir Asani, Nina Baisch, Hanae Balissat, Anna Derriks, Sébastien El
Idrissi, Armin Fuchs, Lale Geyer, Rebekka Hirschberg, Sarah Hummel, Sanna
Kattenbeck, Abbas Mansouri, Bianca Matzek, Olga Rausch, Gina Rauschtenberger,
Kristin Sasama, Kana Ueda, Alexia Zeller

Photography: Kadir Asani, Anna Derriks, Hanae Balissat, Sanna Kattenbeck,
Kristin Sasama

Film: Rebekka Hirschberg, Kristin Sasama, Sanna Kattenbeck




INTERVIEW PARTNERS

Cooperatives: Philipp Klaus (Executive, Kraftwerk1), Thomas Lohmann (Chairman,
BGZ), Hans Rupp (Management, ABZ), Kathrin Schriber (Finance Department, WBG
Schweiz), Kurt Williner (Building Department, BGZ), Andreas Wirz (Archipel / WBG
Zürich), Sabine Wolf (Thiesen & Wolf / Kalkbreite)

Institutions: Walter Angst (Communication, Swiss Tenants’ Association), Patrick
Bühlmann (Key Account Manager, Zurich Cantonal Bank), Peter Ess (former Head,
City of Zürich Department of Buildings), Jeremy Hoskyn (Group Leader, City of
Zürich Department of Buildings), Jürg Tobler (Head Asset Investments, Pension
Fund City of Zürich)

Architects: Philipp Fischer (Enzmann Fischer Architekten), Rafael Frei and
Andreas Sonderegger (pool Architekten), Anne Kaestle (Duplex Architekten),
Michael Meier and Marius Hug (Michael Meier and Marius Hug Architekten), Elli
Mosayebi and Christian Inderbitzin (EMI Architekten), Pascal Müller (Müller
Sigrist Architekten), Urs Primas and Ivo Hasler (Schneider Studer Primas),
Adrian Streich (Adrian Streich Architekten)




TEXT

Editing and Translation: Anne Kockelkorn, Susanne Schindler

Research assistance: Rebekka Hirschberg, Sanna Kattenbeck

Copy editing: Christopher Davey




PRODUCTION

Project management: Rebekka Hirschberg

Artistic direction: Dorothée Billard

Graphic design: Monobloque Berlin (Dorothée Billard & Clemens Helmke) with Clara
Neumann

Website concept: Rebekka Hirschberg, Clara Neumann

Website programming: Mario Jahn - Black Kiwi

Exhibition: Rebekka Hirschberg, Clara Neumann, Kristin Sasama




SPONSORS

gta Institute, Department of Architecture (D-ARCH), Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Pro
Helvetia, Allgemeine Baugenossenschaft Zürich (ABZ), Wohnbaugenossenschaften
Schweiz (WBG), TU Delft

Special thanks for expertise and feedback: Michelle Bianchi, Sébastien El
Idrissi, Andreas Hofer, Anja Krasselt, Florian Müller, Kristin Sasama, Daniel
Weiss, Andreas Wirz

Special thanks for material and logistic support: Bogen33, Elisabetta Giordano,
horgenglarus, Elisabet Jönsson Steiner, Lennart Laberenz, Eva Zurkirchen




© MAS GTA ETH, MAY 2021



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