Focus on: Mehr als wohnen Cooperative, Switzerland
UpdatedA vision becomes reality
Every week, the CoHabitat Network introduces you to a collaborative housing project documented on the cohabitat.io database.
Mehr als wohnen is a housing cooperative located in the city of Zurich, in Switzerland. In the Swiss context, housing cooperatives are private organisations, co-owned and self-managed, with the aim of securing land and property from speculation.
Organised democratically, every resident has the right to one vote (one member = one vote), regardless of initial investment or equity brought into the housing cooperative.
Particularly in the city of Zurich, housing cooperatives and non-profit housing associations have a long history and tradition. Currently, 25% of the city’s housing stock is owned by cooperatives and non-profit organisations. In 2011, a city-scale referendum was held in which the population voted in favour of a law to have ⅓ of non-profit housing in the city by 2050. Through this law, the city of Zurich is required to support a framework and instruments to support non-profit housing.
With civil society and government support, housing cooperatives in the city have, therefore, an important role of providing affordable housing. In 2007, together with the municipality, Zurich’s housing cooperatives celebrated the 100th anniversary of the cooperative movement. More than celebrating their history and achievements, this celebration was marked by a question: how can we tackle the pressing housing needs and urgent issues of the 21st century?
To answer this question, over 50 different local housing co-ops came together and formed a new cooperative with the aim of establishing a learning and innovation hub that would benefit the entire housing cooperative sector. That was the beginning of mehr als wohnen (“more than housing”, in English).
As its name suggests, “more than a housing” established a new level for cooperative housing at the scale of a whole neighbourhood, with 370 housing units, 1 300 residents and 150 jobs through its various facilities and shops.
Mehr als wohnen, a case study in our publication on access to land and finance for community-led housing
This short publication reviews some of the winning projects of the regional CLH Award by focusing on how they managed to secure land and accessed funding to plan and build, refurbish or improve, their living environment. It is our belief that, despite the diversity of their local contexts and particularities, these practices can inspire other people who are trying to conceive or strengthen CLH projects, especially given that access to affordable finance and land tend to be some of the main obstacles for developing CLH all over the world.
▶ Download here (PDF, 8.3 MB)