Utopia and Pragmatism in Zurich’s Co-operative Housing

Abstract

Originally established by progressive middle-class circles at the turn of the twentieth century, housing co-operatives acquired a critical mass after 1918, a few years after being adopted by trade unions and large swathes of the working classes. In alliance with the city’s social-democratic governance, the co-operative movement shaped entire new districts near the main manufacturing centers, developing large perimeter blocks in Aussersihl and Industriequartier and village-like Siedlungen in the neighboring countryside of Wollishofen during the 1920s and 1930s. Following Zurich’s annexation of suburban communes in 1934, co-operative housing mainly took the form of the latter, with low-rise flats with pitch roofs and gardens, as seen in the development of Schwamendingen in the 1940s and 1950s. Most of Zurich’s co-operative housing to date was built at the time, and it still conforms to a decidedly Fordist model for nuclear families of working men and housewives. Currently, the number of co-operative dwellings is the third largest after that of market rental and private ownership, amounting to a fifth of the total housing stock. This proportion is set to grow further in the next decades as the current strategies of densification target the historical co-operatives.