Zurich’s Housing Cooperatives – Scaling up Non-Speculative Housing

As multiple Belgian cities and regions are witnessing an increase in the number of people who cannot afford to buy or rent quality housing, they look for inspiration. In four days, we visited over 20 older and newer housing cooperatives going from the iconic Kalkbreite and Kraftwerk to the cooperative neighborhood Mehr Als Wohnen gathering more than 30 housing cooperatives. Together with the pioneers, the management teams and inhabitants, we unravelled the ‘cooperative conditions’ that support these cooperatives - from active public land policies to loan systems and cooperative financial models and innovative contracts between cities and cooperatives. Also, we dug deeper into the effects on daily lives of inhabitants of collective housing going from new modes of care, dealing with loneliness, providing services for a neighborhood, anti-gentrification, … . The trip was prepared by Architectuurwijzer and Cera and was part of a larger research coordinated by Jan on the potential of housing cooperatives in Flanders.

The trip had multiple outcomes. First of all, it informed a detailed publication on the potential of cooperative housing in facing housing crises as well as concrete tools for policy makers and housing cooperatives in scaling up this practice. This report serves as a groundwork for further research on housing cooperatives, where Jan was part of. Secondly, it motivated a large group of high-level edelman and professionals in implementing principles of this concept in their policies and practices. Thirdly, it supported the development of a pilot-programme to support municipalities and starting housing cooperatives in Flanders to develop first cases, learn from their experiences and translate this to more specific urban and regional policy and funding transitions.