New Housing Cooperatives - Zurich, Switzerland
Discussion
Anitra Nelson:
"Kraftwerk 1 is one of Zurich's innovative ‘New Cooperatives’ that emerged in the last few decades within a cooperative housing model established in Zurich a century ago delivering, by the mid-2010s, more than 120 housing cooperatives managing 40,000 apartments and set by referendum to represent one-third of Zurich's apartments by 2050 (Boudet, 2017: 9, 245, 247).
Referred to by Hofer (2017) as ‘typologies for a post-industrial society’, they are model examples of resident-led eco-collaborative living expanding in many other European capitals, such as Berlin (Nelson, 2018). In the Zurich case, residents self-govern their housing cooperatives as share-holding tenants with rents pegged at affordable levels. Residents drive the building and living of the housing cooperatives – typically vertical, environmentally-sound, building blocks with hundreds of residents, approaching the size of Widmer's autonomous neighbourhood.
Some New Cooperative members have produced a tract with draft principles for a radical future to work towards in their urban communities based on a ‘rational household economy’ with the Marxian descriptor: ‘Everybody contributes what they can, everybody gets what they need’ (New Alliance, 2019: 3). This household economy is self-governed, its product is neither subject to trade nor marketed but, instead, shared on the basis of need. Cooperation rules, not competition. The majority of necessary and unpaid work is food-provisioning and caring, within households or neighbourhoods. There are public services, industries, and small collective, cooperative, and individual initiatives that comprise ‘non-vital’ activities.
Swiss sustainability data informs the New Alliance proposal based on statistics and calculations provided by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The proposed aliquot shares aim to use Earth in ways such that every person in the world might have a similar one-planet standard of living yet diversity and choice in the ways that they produce and consume. The tract offers a ‘typical lifestyle menu’ that assumes eco-collaborative living with 1000-watt of energy and 20–30 m2 per person for private residential space along with free access to various communal spaces and facilities; bike riding unlimited but no car rides, 6 km train/tram travel per day and 1000 km each of boat and train travel in lieu of any plane flights; a strongly plant-based diet still allowing 15 kg of meat and 20 litres of milk per annum; just 70 litres of water daily; 180 min Internet use weekly and printed newspapers shared on the basis of one daily per 50 residents (New Alliance, 2019: 2; o500 (undated)).
New Cooperatives approximate prefigurative hybrids. They are precarious, betwixt this world and an imagined postcapitalist other, meaning that:
- Cooperatives had and still have a double obligation, firstly towards the well-being of their residents and secondly towards their own survival as legal and commercial entities. As businesses, they have to mediate between utopian principles of equality and common property on the one hand and, on the other, the persistence of the market culture. This dual principle makes the cooperative model possible but is also the source of its inner contradictions. (Davidovici, 2017: 203)
Addressing such contradictions requires multiple and broad spread changes. Chattopadhyay (2016: 6) contends that for Marx, in an epoch-long transformation, both classes evaporate ‘and the Association is inaugurated with no private ownership in the means of production and communication, no wage/ salary system, no commodity-money relation and no state’. This logic follows that in Bernes, aforementioned, and highlights Cleaver's point of the necessity of ‘rupturing the dynamics of money’, which explodes any relationship of waged labour, freeing unpaid work in a liberating form of praxis."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19427786241237434)