Niches for informal communities in Zurich

To a recently arrived South African, Zurich’s airport epitomises the international image of the city. The planes arriving from every continent are a testament to its global centrality and connectedness. The immaculate arrival halls and capable airport staff provide a foretaste of the clean, orderly and highly efficient “clockwork city” that lies beyond passport control. The trains that ferry passengers between terminals to a soundtrack of cowbells and yodelling set the stage for the Alpine vistas that serve as a backdrop to the city and remind the traveller that they cannot afford to leave this banking capital without a weighty bar of Swiss chocolate, or to sample some of Switzerland’s excellent cheese. Every aspect of the experience of arrival in Zurich confirms its stability. Zurich offers an economically successful, safe and clean urban environment, highly accessible through its dense and varied public transportation system and public spaces, and closely connected to the natural areas that surround the city in the form of Lake Zurich, the Limmat River and the encircling green hills.

While Zurich certainly appears to be (and to some extent is) a model for the 21st Century city, the very mechanisms used to achieve this high level of liveability in Zurich require that, from an urban planning perspective, it is a city that is highly planned, highly zoned and extremely controlled. While the system of city making may be democratic in the legal sense, it does not necessarily result in a democratic physical experience of the city. The downside to Zurich’s highly controlled urban democratic system is that it can lead to over-determination, creating urban environments that become (in Richard Sennett’s words) “brittle cities”, where the uses of city spaces become too singular. The process of pre-empting urban change through zoning controls fails to provide citizens with the space and time needed to adapt and evolve the city to best respond to their own situations.

Surely the culture of planning and predetermination practiced in this city actually contribute to its image of high stability, which is befitting of a city that is located at the very centre of the global financial network and is host to a transnational professional workforce. However, one need only look at the recently completed Prime Tower to understand the potential pitfalls of creating a city in this image. Visible from all areas of the central city, Prime Tower stands as a sleek new landmark to Zurich’s status as a global financial centre. The fact that the tallest structure in the city has been realised during a global financial crisis makes it a powerful symbol of the financial stability of the city. Over the past twelve years, Zurich has absorbed over twenty thousand new inhabitants, taking its population to over 383 000 citizens. The globalisation of cities has always been accompanied by the attraction of the ambitious to the wider range of opportunities and choices that they are able to offer. Yet not all of these newcomers form part of the international professional workforce rooted in Zurich’s global financial industry. As Saskia Sassen has highlighted, the globalisation of cities is also association with increased informalisation, which reintroduces the individual as an important economic player within the global cities of highly developed countries. Informalisation in this manifestation is an important mechanism for producing flexibility and dynamism and for lowering the “burden” of regularisation in these highly controlled, over-determined urban environments. It offers a wider range of economic, artistic and professional opportunities to citizens and allows for greater levels of creativity, experimentation and entrepreneurship.

While this type of informality might not look like the sprawling urban environments of sub-continental Asia, Africa and South America, it nevertheless operates outside that which is official and planned without transgressing the boundaries of what is legal. It uses flexible and in-between positions to improvise and adapt to a given situation in order to create new opportunities. When informality is embedded in the city, it allows those mono-functional spaces of the overly planned, 20th Century city to offer a more mixed-use, fine-grained and dense urban environment. It creates a more agile and flexible layer of urbanism within the city. And because it requires visibility in order to maximise access to opportunities, it contributes to the articulation of the public realm, even though it is often not part of that zoning category called “public space”.

In Zurich, this type of informality is clearly present in those districts of the city that are undergoing change – particularly to the west of the historic core. It is also central in the shaping of a new creative and “trendy” identity for the city. This creative identity is not associated with the officially endorsed and therefore “zoned” events such as the Street Parade and Ironman Triathlon, but rather with the collective creativity of small groups of people situated in all kinds of informal “edge conditions” in the city. For example, the New York Times, rather than focussing on Zurich’s opera, museums or parades, mentions in its “must-do” list for the city several restaurants, shops and businesses located in a small urban block at the Geroldstrasse set against the elevated Hardbrücke and Prime Tower. Wedged between a road, the railway lines and the newly-developed Viadukt, this block is described as being “poised between industrial use and hip urban renovation”. It houses a wide range of businesses and uses: from the Zurich Freitag store of stacked shipping containers to a large badminton hall complete with a bar, and a stranded sailboat serving as part of an outdoor kitchen. Each different use arises out of the individual and complex adaptation of the old warehouse structures arranged in a series of linear plots across the site.

It would appear that most of these structures owe their existence within Zurich’s strict planning codes to their “temporariness”. Yet, despite the (deliberately) temporary look of these spaces, it is clear that they are quite embedded within this particular urban block. Creative start-up businesses and microenterprises typically operate in neighbourhoods that have low rents, and cluster in buildings such as old warehouse factories because of the flexibility they offer for informal co-operation and networking. It is clear that the area at the Geroldstrasse, with its fine grained landownership patterns, left-over warehouse fabric and transitional nature are attractive to these small creative industries. While gentrification will eventually push many of them out of this area, they have already set the tone for future more formal uses, such as the “trendy” redevelopment of the adjacent Viadukt. Just on the western side of Prime Tower, another informal “edge use” operating within the city is revealed. Throughout Zurich, small Schrebergarten plots cluster in the left over urban land between railway lines, alongside the river and on the hillside slopes above the city. They create an urban pattern one would expect to see in much poorer and denser cities such as Mumbai or Bangkok. With their lightweight garden sheds, these green areas certainly resemble “garden ghettos” when contrasted with the highly ordered city surrounding them. While urban planners will insist that these green plots are strictly regulated, they nevertheless show a higher level of flexibility of use when compared to the rest of the city. Here, the action of the individual on the city is apparent, as gardeners will often fly the flag of their home country over their garden plot or will grow plants particular to their places of origin. The structures built within these areas are clearly not subject to fire regulations or planning controls. The different articulation of each of the gardens is perhaps the most visible example of spaces in which individual citizens are able to control and adapt pieces of the city.

What is interesting about the Schrebergarten in Zurich West is that, unlike the gardens circling the residential areas on the upper reaches of the surrounding hills (and which are permitted to occur on land directly abutting some of the most valuable residential real estate in the city), these gardens and the families tending their plots in a kind of micro-subsistence agriculture are seen against a backdrop of cranes and ascending high-rise towers. While this is not a juxtaposition of uses one would expect to see in Zurich, the gardeners are holding out against redevelopment. Clearly another piece of garden somewhere else would not serve them as well as their current one. The situation throws into stark contrast the difference between the highly regulated and zoned city and those spaces where less control has allowed for informality and the individual adaptation and personalisation of urban space over time. A related situation is occurring on farms at the edge of the metropolis, which have become part of community-based agriculture programmes in which inner-city citizens contribute their time in order to help grow organic fruit and vegetables. In return they receive fresh fruit and vegetables from the farm throughout the year. These programmes – like Ortoloco, which is situated at the western outskirks within the Limmat Valley – exist because of direct negotiations with a farmer and happen independently of the authorities. While still agricultural (and therefore appropriately zoned), these uses introduce a new kind of informal edge urbanism into the city. They are highly adaptable and flexible, as the community and the chief gardener are free to experiment with different types of plants each season. These negotiations occur in an Annual General Meeting, but as each member of the group contributes at least 5.5 days of labour per year, they no doubt occur in the fields too. Ortoloco has become involved in another urban “edge space” which has recently started to offer further opportunities for informal uses within Zurich. Brotoloco is a sister organisation which has established an outdoor, clay oven in the abandoned grounds of the Hardturm Football Stadium to the west of the city. Instead of growing fruit and vegetables, Brotoloco bakes bread in a similar community system to that practiced at Ortoloco. The abandoned stadium site, which came under pressure for community use as redevelopment had been stalled, was handed over to the citizens of Zurich (with a few established ground rules) in July 2011. A skate park and outdoor yoga classes are earmarked to join Brotoloco, but the possibilities for the space in the near future are still largely undefined.

While the type of informal community use currently allowed here is seen by all to be temporary, what is interesting is that the community demanded that this temporary and informal use be allowed while the planners and owners are busy determining the future of the site. The citizens of Zurich see the value of having such spaces in their otherwise highly regulated city, and their use of the space during the next few months could begin to influence the spaces and programmes that are eventually designed into and around the new soccer stadium when it is realised, hopefully resulting in a more mixed-use, humanly-scaled and community-embedded structure.

The perception of the space as “between” formal uses is significant. In Zurich, informality occurs where the use of space is postponed. The temporariness with which the city authorities view the “intermediate” operations that may occur within that space allows for the regulations to be less strictly applied. And yet, some of these temporary and in-between spaces, such as those in Zurich West, have produced lively cultural nodes within the city, making the surrounding areas more attractive and richly layered. They have been important in the re-drawing of Zurich’s “cultural map”, and have brought attention to parts of the city that were previously seen only as “left over spaces”. Other informal uses of urban space, such as the Schrebergarten, were originally located in spaces along the railway lines that were undesirable to developers. The gardens were seen to be unthreatening to future urban planning because they posed no large-scale structural changes to the city. Yet these light and “temporary” spaces are now “fighting back”, laying claim to their right to exist side by side with new, large-scale and expensive developments in the area, and further embedding an informal urban pattern – a literal armature for growth – that has existed in the city for a century. The liveability of Zurich cannot only be attributed to its orderliness and high levels of control. It is also the less formal use of spaces that give citizens the ability to adapt to changing needs and situations, to create opportunities for cultural innovation, to allow citizens to rub shoulders in a meaningful way with one another and to bring a human scale and complexity to the otherwise highly zoned and mono-functional districts of the city. Of course, being Zurich, this variety of informality has a tighter framework of control within which to act, but the few sites and locations in which it is able to flourish remain disproportionately important to the everyday experience of citizens and the changing cultural scene within the city. The challenge to Zurich’s planners, then, is to somehow keep spaces for informality open within the tight zoning schemes and regulations that overlay the city. It could be that more spaces are “delayed”, always allowing informality a temporary home in the city. After all, informality will find niches in which to occur despite the regulatory framework. In Zurich, the hyper-dynamic nature of informality seen in other cities seems to have adapted and evolved in order to take advantage of the slower processes of “bottom-up” democracy and ambiguous political procedures that so often form the context for change within the city.

It is this symbiotic situation that might see informality survive into the next of the city’s building booms. And while it might not score any points for the city on the “most liveable” indexes, it will certainly contribute to the ability for citizens to meaningfully engage with their urban environment and with one another in the future.