Misplaced fear

Susannah recently completed her doctorate at ETH Zurich in the Institute for Technology and Architecture, where she researched the effects of new housing construction on neighbourhood change. She is a US licensed architect and has led large-scale urban design and development projects. She holds a BA in architecture history from Princeton University, and a Masters of Architecture from the University of Michigan.

Her thesis was submitted to attain the degree of Doctor of Sciences of ETH Zurich accepted on the recommendation of Professor Sacha Menz and Professor Dr. Patrick Rérat.

This dissertation studies the geographic, economic, and social effects of new housing construction on neighborhood changes in the Zurich residential region. Zurich needs new housing, and has been pursuing its construction, as well as promoting densification, for several decades. Extensive literature documents local concerns about the effects of new housing on neighborhood change, and planners and policy makers encounter frequent opposition to densification. This project seeks to provide a wholistic analysis of new housing’s relationship to population change across the regional, city, and neighborhood scale, and test how this relationship aligns with public perception.

This research contributes to controversial academic and political debates on the effects of new housing construction, overall finding very little relationship between new construction and the population instability and socio-economic changes people fear it will cause. The work also advances novel methodological tools for assessing new construction’s effects, analyzing hyper-local changes comprehensively across the region, and applying network analysis of individual moves to detect hidden residential geographies. Finally, this dissertation provides a body of work documenting recent urban trends to planners and policy makers setting future directions for the Zurich region.

This thesis has five sections. Chapter A: Research Framework provides background context for the Zurich region, presents the research questions guiding the thesis, and outlines the main disciplinary framework for the project.

Chapter B: Methods and Data reviews the insights possible from varied qualitative and quantitative methods, and proposes a mixed approach. It then describes the datasets and geospatial processing tools used in this research.

In the four research chapters, Chapter C-1: Regional definition proposes a new method for defining the Zurich region, based on clustering analysis of residential moves, and describes the resulting new entity, the Zurich Residential Region (ZRR). Chapter C-2: Regional trends measures changes in population stability, composition, and homogeneity across the region, and correlates these metrics to structural, economic and new construction factors. Chapter C-3: City trends maps city-wide resident perceptions of neighborhood change, new construction, and rent, and compares these perceptions to statistical analysis of building level population fluctuation, rents, demographic change, and new construction across the city. Network analysis of internal city moves reveals discrete sub-areas with Zurich, with distinct housing stock and socio-economic profiles. Chapter C-4: Neighborhood trends describes three examples of new housing construction, in three very different neighborhoods. Each case presents a distinct financial agenda, with evident ramifications for the siting, design, type of new housing, sense of neighborhood belonging, and socio-economic profile of the occupants the new housing attracts.

© Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum

© Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum

These chapters describe the social, economic, and geographic effects of new housing construction at the regional, city, and local scale. Although new housing’s impact is messy and multi-faceted, the findings indicate that the pervasive fear and political opposition to new housing construction is perhaps misplaced. The region is undergoing significant socio-economic and demographic change, but that change is widespread, and not locally tied to new housing developments.

Outlook: Future speculation

The political debate over density in Zurich will continue, as popular perceptions and political agendas collide with federal and local planning aims. The goals of planned densification are worthy and widely lauded; increasing urban density will alleviate untenable vacancy rates, limit future urban sprawl, preserve agricultural land and enable greater energy efficiency within the urban areas. The long-term effect might be denser, more stable, socially richer neighborhoods still benefiting from the dynamism of urban life, and offering the urban lifestyle many people desire.

There are also several warning signs on the horizon. As Swiss housing becomes an increasingly attractive financial tool for Swiss and foreign investment, financial incentives might outcompete the limited controls on rent and weak controls on evictions, mimicking progress toward urban unaffordability well underway in many other cities. Zurich is already trending toward a more homogenously well-educated and well-heeled population, and the trajectory of increasing housing financialization and levels of replacement housing construction would only accelerate this path.

Zurich has one asset available that is rare among global cities. The substantial percentage of cooperative housing, although not without its own challenges, offers an existing alternative housing infrastructure and a working model for future construction. Whether this will be enough to stabilize neighborhoods in a city moving toward increased housing financialization remains to be seen.

Assessing the impact of new housing is messy and multi-faceted. While Zurich is well positioned to build housing and continue to accommodate and attract a socio-economically diverse population, this is by no means guaranteed. Policy decisions assessing what type of housing to build, and how it will be funded, will greatly affect what type of city Zurich will become, and who it will serve in the future.