ZURICH, SWITZERLAND The Distributed Cooperative

One-third of Zurich’s rental housing must operate on a non-profit basis by the year 2050. But new affordable projects are not being developed fast enough. At the same time, the emergence of smartphones, an on-demand economy, and platform technologies has reshaped understandings of home and ideas of ownership, while digital services increasingly mediate the collective practices that underpin urban life. Housing cooperatives, which already represent twenty percent of Zurich’s rental market, are at the forefront of attempts to rethink housing typologies in line with evolving social realities, as more people live outside nuclear family structures. But they are yet to fully embrace the possibilities of digital technologies to build community, share resources, and generate vibrant environments at the neighborhood level. Throughout Zurich, centrally located ‘odd lots’ represent an unrealized opportunity for smart densification amid the existing urban fabric. Bypassing the need for the kinds of large consolidated sites favored by speculative developers, the exhibition explores a new strategy to identify, build out, and digitally network a series of small-scale mixed-use architectural interventions into a ‘distributed cooperative’, proposing an updated model of sustainable shared living for the citizen-centered ‘smart city’ of the future