Anne Kockelkorn & Susanne Schindler

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?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.