Could Zurich’s housing cooperatives be the solution to the rest of Europe’s housing crisis? | Peter Apps

One in every five citizens in the city has bought a share in the company that built and owns their apartment block

• Peter Apps is a contributing editor at Inside Housing

Children zoom down a tunnel slide, as their parents watch on, sipping coffees and chatting amicably on the long benches in the middle of the courtyard.

They are surrounded by modern-looking housing developments – architecturally smart, medium-rise, expensive-looking in their design. This appears to be just another 21st-century development in a major city, a development that a builder has made a tidy profit out of, and flats that will have inevitably been snapped up by landlords and rented out at the highest market rate.

Peter Apps is a contributing editor at Inside Housing and the author of Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen