Cooperative housing and living in Zurich, Switzerland
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
How does the citizens' right to the city, particularly the right to difference, manifest in the European cities? Is community building a precondition for the sustainability of collective housing? Or rather is the mere supply of multiple housing units clustered together sufficient for the manifestation of community over time, probably also if targeting specific categories of residents? In context what political actors play today critical roles in building urban sustainability? We propose a first step in answering these questions through current grass-roots initiatives that work in parallel on both the social and material provision of collective housing and cooperative living.
In this paper thus we present political processes regarding the conception and implementation of collective forms of housing, workspace and living in Zurich, Switzerland. Nevertheless, these grass-roots processes imply social innovation, while following the cooperative housing tradition developed in Zurich during the industrialization age, and the new movement of cooperatives for sustainable lifestyle in cities that started in the 1990s inspired by p.m.'s utopia bolo'bolo. Of these latter political constructs Kraftwerk1 Genossenschaft was the first material consequence. As a pilot-project it created a place where various forms of housing, work and public services can coexist and benefit from this cohabitation, leaving room for experimentation with new ways of making a living between waged work and the mostly unpaid housework. It was seen as a solution to a societal crisis generated by increased difficulties to provide waged work, through a new type of extended home economy and the recreation of local communities in the form of intentional communities.
Description
Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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