Cooperative-based governance for sufficiency and wellbeing in the Swiss built environment

Housing and urban governance sits at the intersection of important challenges facing contemporary societies: sustainability, social equity, democratic participation, and human wellbeing. In Switzerland, the dominant market-based model has proven structurally ill-suited to address these challenges simultaneously, while public housing provision has remained historically marginal. This thesis explores whether a governance model centred on neighbourhood-scale housing cooperatives could contribute to enabling a transition of the Swiss built environment towards sufficiency and wellbeing. Drawing on polycentric governance, commons design principles, human needs, and Swiss cooperative housing literature, the thesis develops an exploratory model distributing responsibilities across residents, cooperatives, and communes, and operating within four interconnected domains: housing renovation, neighbourhood planning, housing stock management, and wellbeing and inclusivity. The model was informed by semi-structured interviews with cooperative practitioners and evaluated through a stakeholder workshop. Workshop participants broadly validated the model's normative orientation, recognising its capacity to foster collective life, democratic participation, and a socially attractive vision of neighbourhood-scale sustainability. At the same time, they identified significant structural barriers-land ownership, housing financialisation, and political will-whose resolution would require institutional and legislative changes well beyond the scope of any single cooperative initiative.