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Housing Studies
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Struggles for the decommodification of housing:
the politics of housing cooperatives in Uruguay
and Switzerland
Jennifer Duyne Barenstein, Philippe Koch, Daniela Sanjines, Carla Assandri,
Cecilia Matonte, Daniela Osorio & Gerardo Sarachu
To cite this article: Jennifer Duyne Barenstein, Philippe Koch, Daniela Sanjines, Carla Assandri,
Cecilia Matonte, Daniela Osorio & Gerardo Sarachu (2021): Struggles for the decommodification
of housing: the politics of housing cooperatives in Uruguay and Switzerland, Housing Studies, DOI:
10.1080/02673037.2021.1966392
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HOUSING STUDIES
Struggles for the decommodification of housing: the
politics of housing cooperatives in Uruguay and
Switzerland
Jennifer Duyne Barensteina, Philippe Kochb, Daniela Sanjinesa, Carla
Assandric, Cecilia Matontec, Daniela Osorioc, and Gerardo Sarachuc
aDepartment of Architecture, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland; bSchool of Architecture, Design and Civic
Engineering, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, Switzerland; cFaculty of Social
Sciences, Area of Cooperative Studies, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay
ABSTRACT
After the Global Financial Crisis, activists and scholars have turned
to collective forms of housing as a strategy to decommodify hous-
ing. We argue that housing cooperatives might take a crucial role
in this strategy. The fact that they are still marginal, however, raises
questions about the conditions for their emergence, growth and
survival. By bringing the trajectories of housing cooperatives in
Switzerland and Uruguay in dialogue, we capture different paths
towards housing policies conducive for cooperatives. In both coun-
tries, housing cooperatives are meaningful policy instruments to
make urbanization governable. To understand their development,
their mutual relations with governments are crucial. We argue that
the organizational form of a cooperative resembles a shell, which
can be repurposed from the inside and the outside. In their ambig-
uous position between self-organization and being entangled with
state practices, the situated stories of housing cooperatives in
Switzerland and Uruguay help to re-describe struggles to live and
dwell in urbanizing spaces around the globe.
Introduction
In a global context characterized by governmental withdrawal from the housing
sector, the commodification of housing, and the inability of the private sector to
cater to the needs of low-income people, housing cooperatives are globally being
rediscovered as a potentially viable strategy to counter the increasing commodifi-
cation of housing (Baiges et al., 2020, Madden & Marcuse, 2016).
Housing cooperatives exist in many countries, but are deeply embedded into
specific historic, political and institutional contexts, which makes them an extremely
heterogeneous sector. As a result of neoliberalism, in several countries they increas-
ingly follow the rules of the market. In Switzerland and Uruguay, however, housing
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Philippe Koch kocp@zhaw.ch
https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2021.1966392
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 27 October 2020
Accepted 26 July 2021
KEYWORDS
Cooperative housing;
housing politics;
Zurich; Montevideo;
FUCVAM
2 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
cooperatives continue to remain key actors in the provision of affordable and
non-commodifiable housing. The international attention that cooperatives gained in
these two countries for their important role in the provision of affordable housing,
architectural innovation, and the development of socially inclusive and sustainable
neighbourhoods makes them instructive cases to study conducive conditions for
housing cooperatives to flourish. In this paper, we study the histories of housing
cooperatives in Switzerland and Uruguay to understand the conditions under which
they are capable of providing decommodified housing.
This paper is based on a review of scientific literature, policy documents, and
empirical research: interviews were held with representatives of housing cooperatives
and their associations and cooperative inhabitants both in Uruguay as well as in
Switzerland. Furthermore we actively participated in some housing cooperatives’
general assembly meetings and other educational, cultural, political and social events
they regularly organize. Finally the paper is the result of an intensive exchange of
knowledge and experience among the authors in the framework of an ongoing
comparative research project1.
The (exacerbating) global housing crisis
In 2017, the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing of the UN Human Rights
Council shed a devastating light on the global housing crisis: “Housing and com-
mercial real estate have become the “commodity of choice” for corporate finance
and the pace at which financial corporations and funds are taking over housing
and real estate in many cities is staggering. […] Housing is at the centre of an
historic structural transformation in global investment and the economies of the
industrialized world with profound consequences for those in need of adequate
housing.” (United Nations (UN), 2017, p. 3). Indeed, globally an increasing share
of the housing stock is owned by corporate finance and subject to quantified return
targets. In other words, the financialization of housing has turned homes into com-
modities that are being traded for profit. As a result, housing is increasingly dis-
connected from its social functions and meanings.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has and will increase housing precarity and
inadequate housing for more people. Yet, the COVID-19 crisis also makes the
use-value of housing as shelter, safe place and nodes for collective engagements of
support ever more evident (Rogers & Power, 2020). Indeed, “[h]ousing came into
immediate focus with shelter-in-place, self-isolation, stay-at-home, and quarantine
as primary global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic” (Vilenica, 2020, p. 10).
In this crisis, nobody could neglect the crucial role of housing in mitigating the
risks of the pandemic, for the social fabric of the city, for the rhythms of everyday
life and for the organization of sociability and urban collectives. The struggle for
decent housing is and was never just about shelter but “about finding ways to enable
what home can do for people in the widest possible sense” (Lancione, 2020, p. 276).
Thus, the coronavirus not only exacerbated the global housing crisis but revealed
its multiple effects. First, the crisis makes it more difficult to find a decent home;
second, the lack of affordable housing disrupts the conditions for social reproduction
that rely on having a stable and adequate home (Madden, 2020); and third, having
HOUSING STUDIES 3
a specific place to live in the city - which includes a home - is a precondition for
the organization of communities and to establish social infrastructures sustaining
collective life (Bhan et al., 2020).
Against this backdrop we reflect on whether housing cooperatives may be agents
of decommodified alternatives and based on two in-depth case studies we examine
the conditions under which housing cooperatives can maintain this role.
The role of housing cooperatives in tackling the housing crisis
The International Cooperative Alliance defines housing cooperatives as a housing
model of mutual ownership and democratic control by a group of members, pooling
resources and lowering individual costs of all services related to the provision of
housing (ICA (International Cooperative Alliance), 2012). The housing cooperative
movements in Europe emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the
desperate housing conditions of the working classes in a context of rapid industri-
alization and urbanization. Their role in the provision of decent and affordable
housing gradually expanded and by the early 20th century they became common
throughout Europe. In particular after World War I and World War II, they assumed
a key role in rebuilding the damaged housing stock. About the same period housing
cooperatives also emerged in the United States, South Asia and Latin America
(Duyne Barenstein & Sanjinés, 2018).
The recent rediscovery of housing cooperatives is supported by several publications
emphasizing that they have the capacity to provide housing at a cost below similar
homes in the open market, that they are a useful instrument to limit speculation,
and also to lower the prices of the private rental housing in general (Saegert &
Benítez, 2005, Kemeny et al., 2005; Thalmann, 2019). Wijburg (2020) sees housing
cooperatives as both potential policy instrument and as preferred partners for an
alternative mode of urban governance in the domain of housing. In several European
countries housing cooperatives also gained recognition for their bottom-up culture
and for their innovative housing projects (Czischke, 2018).
Housing cooperatives are further considered particularly appropriate to achieve
additional social goals, such as reaching out to different categories of people with
special needs, including the elderly, single parents, migrants and refugees (Lang
et al., 2020). While they have the potential to foster social cohesion and wellbeing
by engaging in community initiatives and make a major contribution to the pro-
duction of socially cohesive neighbourhoods, empirical evidence in this regard is
still scarce (Tummers, 2016). Nevertheless, housing cooperatives may have a positive
socio-economic impact not only on their tenants but on the whole community
(Brandsen & Helderman, 2012).
In developing countries, where low-income groups often have no access to
formal credit, membership in cooperatives helps pool resources and may be a
stepping stone towards community development (Ganapati, 2014). The democratic
values of cooperatives lend themselves to mutual self-help approaches and for
bringing together state subsidies and individual responsibility through equity par-
ticipation and may offer an innovative alternative to property rental (Lang &
Roessl, 2013).
4 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
However, housing cooperatives are a heterogeneous category of housing providers
and are embedded in institutional contexts that influence their scope of action
(Ganapati, 2010). Most studies on the subject are based on a limited number of
single country case studies and are not necessarily representative. For example, a
core value of housing cooperatives is collective ownership but in several countries
liberalization of housing regulations and changing market conditions led to hollowing
this value. This is the case of Sweden and Norway, two countries that stand out for
their significant share of cooperatives housing, but where they gradually changed
from being civil society organizations committed to the values of self-help, democ-
racy, non-profit and solidarity, towards becoming more market oriented (Sørvoll &
Bengtsson, 2018).
The fact that despite their numerous advantages housing cooperatives presently
do not play a major role in the global housing supply raises questions about the
factors determining their emergence, growth and survival. Indeed, globally only in
few countries, or more precisely in a few cities, could housing cooperatives keep
their important role and, in some cases, without any longer adhering to some of
their core values and principles. The question raised by Elster (1989) thus remains
pertinent: if cooperative ownership is so desirable, why are there so few cooperatives?
In what follows we address Elster’s question from a slightly different angle, by
focussing on the conditions and struggles that foster housing cooperatives as agents
and/or policy instrument to provide for decommodified housing: if housing coop-
eratives are such an attractive and desirable policy instrument for the provision of
affordable and decommodified housing under what conditions do they emerge and
maintain their importance?
Before we delve into our case studies we need to address a few conceptual issues.
Based on recent research in the field, we understand housing cooperatives as hybrid
organizational forms (Mullins et al., 2018; Blessing, 2012) blending features of dif-
ferent organizational fields such as the state, the market and civil society. As such,
hybrid organizations blur the state/market dualism as they are being subject to often
conflicting institutional contexts. Housing cooperatives are thus entangled in complex
stakeholder relations which make them prone for adaptive change (Czischke, 2018).
Transformation of housing cooperatives means a change in their scope of action,
that is their ability to realize their purpose and interests or in their purpose of
action, that is the collectively shared core values of the housing cooperation (Sørvoll
& Bengtsson, 2018; 2020) – or both. To be sure, a transformation of housing coop-
eratives might derive from within the organization or from changes in their insti-
tutional environment (Mullins & Moore, 2018). For instance, Sørvoll and Bengtsson
(2018; 2020) show that conflicting interests among members of housing cooperatives
(i.e. from within the organization) can lead to a change in the core values of the
cooperatives. Mullins (2018) on the other hand demonstrates the enabling effect of
policy recognition on the scope of action for community-based housing solutions.
As organizations housing cooperatives depend in part on their environment but at
the same time they are actors capable of influencing their intra-organizational life
as well as their organizational environment in which they are positioned.
In the next sections we trace the organizational changes (or the resistance to
such changes) of housing cooperatives in Switzerland and Uruguay, two countries
HOUSING STUDIES 5
where they are renowned for their important role in the provision decommodified
housing and their commitment to ensure lower-income people’s right to the city.
Decommodification of housing means the withdrawal of housing supply from
market-based modes of exchange and, thus, an emphasis on the use-value of housing
and its importance in the field of social reproduction and community development
(Holm, 2011). The housing cooperatives we study can be defined as collaborative
civil society housing (Sørvoll & Bengtsson, 2020), i.e. the members are not only
committed to their own community and individual interests but aim at contributing
to the wider civil society. Our focus is on one of their core value, namely the
cooperatives commitment to the de-commodification of housing supply. We describe
how shifts in the environments and in the internal functioning of housing cooper-
atives are related and how they play out with a focus on their purpose of action.
Even though the two cases we study differ in many respects, housing cooperative
share some important similarities. Hence, we propose to understand housing coop-
eratives as organizational shells which provide a form for deliberate collective action.
But this form can be repurposed from within or from the outside.
The case of Switzerland
In Switzerland, a country with a population of approximately 8.5 million, housing
and related policies are geographically uneven due to the country’s federal structure
(Cuennet et al., 2002). Close to 60% of households are living in rented housing,
but tenure patterns differ across the country. Home ownership is widespread in
rural areas, while rental housing and cooperatives are more prominent in cities
(Sotomo, 2017). Out of the approximately 170’200 apartments owned by housing
cooperatives 55% are located in the ten largest Swiss cities and 25% in Zurich alone
(FOH, 2018). Hence, housing cooperatives, while playing an important role in cities,
at a national level only account for 8% of the total rental housing stock.
The emergence of housing cooperatives in Switzerland is associated with the rapid
urbanization in the late 19th century, when industrialization led to a massive influx
of labourers. Highly speculative tenement housing entailed dramatic living conditions
for the impoverished working classes. In the late 19th century, these became the
core of political struggles (Fritzsche & Lemmenmeier, 1997; Thalmann et al., 2015).
In this political juncture, housing cooperatives emerged as an heterogeneous group
of organizations aiming to provide housing for the working class and the poor.
Their shared goal was to counter the speculative housing market by producing
dignified homes for communities based on solidarity and mutual help. The first
housing cooperatives were experimenting mostly unsuccessfully with different modes
of financing, forms of organization and relations to the local government due to
the absence of a reliable and supportive legal, financial and political framework
(Ruf, 1930).
As shown in Figure 1, over the years the development and role of housing coop-
eratives has been unsteady. With reference to Zurich, in the period between 1895
and 1919 housing cooperatives built around 1000 apartments which made up around
4% percent of the whole housing production. In the following thirty years housing
cooperatives built one out of three apartments, reaching an all-time record in 1948
6 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
with the construction of 1800 apartments. From the late 1970s up the mid-1990s,
however, the cooperative production of apartments rarely exceeded 10% of the total
apartment production. Over the last 25 years they regained traction and currently
account for the construction of 1 out of 4 new apartments.
When we look at the present landscape of housing cooperatives in Zurich, we
find a great variety of organization with different sizes (ranging from less than ten
dwelling to over 5000) historical and political backgrounds, organizational practices,
social bases, values, and ways of collective living. A distinction may be made between
residential housing cooperatives (Wohnbaugenossenschaften) and housing construction
cooperatives (Baugenossenschaften). These two models differ in their membership
base; in the case of residential housing cooperatives, their members are people who
build apartments for themselves, whereas housing construction cooperatives are
building houses to generate revenues for their members.
The vast majority of the housing cooperatives adhere to the principles of decom-
modification and democratic self-government by subscribing to the “Charter of
Non-Profit Housing Providers” 2. Article one of the Charter stats that non-profit
housing providers have to withdraw their housing from financial speculation,
refrain from seeking profits and rent out their apartments based on a cost-rent-
model (i.e. rent covers housing costs calculated based on the rate of interest on
the borrowed capital, the costs of maintenance and administration and the accrual
of reserves for renovations). Through their membership in one of the two umbrella
organizations, housing cooperatives have to act according to these values as they
are mandatory conditions to access state support (Lawson, 2009; Balmer &
Gerber, 2018).
Housing cooperatives and their associations constitute an integral part of the
housing policy in Zurich and operate in close association with the city government.
Their legitimacy is strong and confirmed by numerous regulations and
direct-democratic votes.
Figure 1. Historical overview of housing cooperatives in Zurich (1900-2015).
HOUSING STUDIES 7
Building blocks of a conducive policy framework
Support to housing is codified in the 2003 Federal Housing Support Act, which
provides details on the direct and indirect means of support. The federal govern-
ment, however, supports housing cooperatives only indirectly by granting loans and
advantageous mortgages. The lack of a strong national housing policy may be
attributed to the federal nature of Switzerland. Hence, to understand housing policies
in Switzerland, we need to focus on local policies, where cities and municipalities
have a great leeway on how to address housing issues.
In Zurich, the current housing policy has its legal and political foundation in a
resolution approved in 2011, when 76% of the voters supported the initiative that
the city government would have to develop and implement policies to foster afford-
able housing and that by 2050 one third of the apartments in the city would be
owned by non-profit housing organizations. Housing cooperatives play a crucial role
in the implementation of this policy and became one of the city’s key instruments
in the provision of decommodified housing.
In the aftermath of the vote, the city government presented an encompassing
housing policy program, established new instruments and codified practices already
in place that would encourage existing or newly established housing cooperatives
to build new housing, make their housing stock available to low-income residents
and, most importantly, ensure that it would sustain as an alternative model for the
provision of decommodified housing.
To promote new housing projects the city is leasing land to cooperatives for 60
to 100 years. This practice is made possible by the fact that the city of Zurich owns
more than one third of all the building land on its territory. It established in the
1920s and has hardly changed over the last century. The city further supports hous-
ing cooperatives financially; while the level of self-financing through the market is
generally high (up to 75%), municipalities and other public agencies invest their
pension funds in second mortgages to housing cooperatives. Furthermore, in many
cases, the city of Zurich buys 10% of the cooperatives’ shares. There are no direct
or indirect subsidies for housing cooperatives except that they do not have to follow
the same accounting standards as for-profit housing companies; in times of rising
market prices this results in lower tax burdens for housing cooperatives.
Housing cooperatives should not be confused with social housing. In general,
they manage the allocation of their apartments autonomously, without interference
from the city government. Accordingly, the composition of residents depends on
the norms and values of the specific housing cooperative. However, if the city pro-
vides the land, housing cooperatives usually have to reserve a specific share of
apartments for social housing subsidized by the city. In such cases housing coop-
eratives often collaborate with organizations that provide housing support to specific
socially disadvantaged groups of people, such large families with low incomes and
as refugees.
Cooperative members pay a rent that only covers the housing costs and that is
calculated based on the rate of interest on the borrowed capital, the costs of main-
tenance and administration and the accrual of reserves for renovations. Accordingly,
in average rents in housing cooperatives are 20-30% lower than in the private rental
8 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
market. The financial operations and the accounts of the housing cooperatives are
reviewed by the city government and in most large housing cooperatives a member
of the city has a seat in the managing board. Further, there are various hurdles for
housing cooperatives to sell their properties and to ensure their durable withdrawal
from speculation; the majority of the members have to agree and the municipality
or the canton has a pre-emption right. Hence the policies in place preserve the
decommodification of cooperative housing.
The case of Zurich shows that there is a tight and interdependent relation between
the city government and housing cooperatives, which are considered a key policy
instrument to maintain and expend the affordable housing sector.
Between progression and stagnation: the politics of housing cooperatives
Understanding the still significant role of housing cooperatives in Zurich, requires
a focus on the political and socio-spatial dynamics shaping the city’s local housing
policies and politics. Zurich’s enabling policy framework has its origin in the years
after WWI. At that time, all levels of governments were committed to establish
the political, legal and financial framework that would support housing cooperatives
to assume an important role in the provision of housing for the lower middle- and
working classes. While the city of Zurich built public dwellings from 1907 onwards,
partly subsidized by the cantonal and the federal government, the public housing
effort was never sufficient to meet the housing shortage (Kurz, 2008; König et al.,
1997). Federal subsidies were cut entirely in 1924. At the same time, Zurich adopted
the Guidelines to support the supply of non-profit housing (Richtlinien zur Förderung
des gemeinnützigen Wohnungsbaus), through which the city facilitates access to land
and finances for housing cooperatives to build new apartments and which remain
valid up to date. From this point onwards cooperatives made a major contribution
to the production of housing. In fact, between 1924 and 1932, they completed the
construction of over one third of all new apartments built in the city. Meanwhile
housing cooperatives developed very close ties to the city government and its ruling
social democratic party. Indeed, Emil Klöti, the then council member responsible
for housing policy made it clear that “cooperative housing can only become a
steady activity … if it is connected tightly to the municipality and the state” (Lindig,
1980, p. 109). The strong ties to the municipality and the ruling social democratic
party, however, also disconnected the housing cooperatives from more radical forces
within the workers movement, increasingly congregated around the communist
party that was founded in 1921 (König et al., 1997). Hence the city government
established a conducive policy framework for housing cooperatives while at the
same time demanded political loyalty to the ruling social democratic party.
After WWII housing construction shifted from the urban centre to a mode of
suburbanization and eventually periurbanization. The private sector started to
dominate housing production as profits from real-estate markets began to hike.
In the city of Zurich the number of newly built dwellings decreases rapidly from
3000 in 1950 to less than 600 in 1990. Thus, the growing demand for new housing
was mainly met outside the core cities. As housing cooperatives and supportive
housing policies were absent in suburban municipalities, the housing boom after
HOUSING STUDIES 9
WWII took place by and large without the participation of housing
cooperatives.
The declining role of the housing cooperatives, however, cannot be fully under-
stood in strictly structural terms. Housing cooperatives as organizations, and as
social and political agents, changed in the aftermath of WWII when they increasingly
detached themselves from political processes and from their foundational aim and
core common value to increase the number of affordable and decommodified flats.
This was partly related to the integration of the (Swiss) working class into the
political consensus dominating Swiss politics until the 1970s/1980s, which was
underscored economically by the (seasonal) employment of migrants for industrial
and other low-income jobs (Linder & Mueller, 2017). Hence, while the working
class became increasingly non-Swiss and excluded from political rights and organi-
zational ties, housing cooperatives remained by and large profoundly Swiss. Insider
solidarity increased at the expense of broader external political solidarity (see also
Sørvoll & Bengtsson, 2020). This bias was reflected in the composition of the res-
idents living in cooperative apartments. In the canton of Zurich, for example, in
the 1970s only 4% of the housing cooperatives’ inhabitants were non-Swiss compared
to 16% of all households. As a result, housing cooperatives have been criticized for
their restrictive membership and rental rules following WWII. The objective of most
housing cooperatives at that time was to provide homes for “average” Swiss families
from which non-swiss residents (but also single mothers/fathers or other
non-conventional households) were often excluded (Banz et al., 2016).
As a result numerous housing cooperatives slowly turned into private clubs more
concerned with maintaining their (perceived) homogenous community than with
including new members and engaging in new housing projects (Banz et al., 2016;
Thalmann et al., 2015). In this inward-looking and depoliticizing development, the
umbrella associations confined themselves to the implementation of policies, the
provision of support to their members, and hardly ever engaged in politics. This
means that in the formative years of a federal housing policy, the umbrella associ-
ations of housing cooperatives played a minor role in the political struggles. Initiatives
or referendums focussing on housing mainly came from labour unions or other
associations directly connected to tenant protection.
A rejuvenation of the cooperative movement began when the urban housing
question re-emerged in the 1980s. After 30 years of suburbanization cities became
again the focal point of economic investment and political struggles (Hitz et al.,
1995). Deindustrialization led to new investment opportunities but also to experi-
menting with new forms of co-living. The lack of affordable housing resulting
-among others- from the conversion of apartments into offices unleashed political
protest by new social/urban movements. Squatting emerged as a new phenomenon
in Zurich and several other cities (Stahel, 2006). In this context housing cooperatives
were rediscovered as a viable organizational form to establish collective ways of
living, new forms of family life and social reproduction. The opportunity to rely
on already established legal frameworks for financial support facilitated the emer-
gence of a new generation of housing cooperatives with progressive political values
in relation to everyday urban life and to the broader socio-political horizon to which
cooperatives should contribute (Kurz, 2017). These new cooperatives redefined their
10 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
content, values and practices and re-established themselves as political agents strug-
gling for the right the city and the right to housing became once again part of the
political agenda. The new housing cooperatives furthermore challenged the estab-
lished, older housing cooperatives and their umbrella associations. As a response,
many of the older cooperatives introduced new venues for member participation
and more open rental policies. In fact, the new housing cooperatives initiated a
process of transformation in the whole cooperative housing sector. In the wake of
these social movements, housing cooperatives re-gained importance also for their
qualitative contribution to housing and neighbourhoods in the city.
The case of Uruguay
Uruguay, with a population of approximately 3.5 million people is a highly urbanized
country with over 50% of the inhabitants residing in its capital Montevideo. 57%
of households own the dwelling in which they reside, making home ownership the
prevalent form of tenure. About 20% are formal renters and the remaining 22% rely
on other forms of tenure, including permitted or illegal squatting of land and prop-
erties (INE Uruguay, 2018). While the average proportion of people living in informal
settlements in Latin America is about 20% the percentage in Uruguay is only five
(Duyne Barenstein & Pfister, 2019). Uruguay’s housing policies, which include several
instruments to foster housing cooperatives played a significant role in achieving
these results.
The first housing cooperatives in Uruguay emerged in the late 1960s. They were
initiated in the framework of a large-scale national housing programme funded by
the Inter-American Development Bank. The program aimed at addressing the coun-
try’s housing deficit with the construction of 4100 housing units through various
projects involving both the private and the public sector. In this context the Centro
Cooperativista Uruguayo (CCU) was able to start the first three self-help mutual aid
housing cooperatives that jointly built ninety-five dwellings. These stood out for
their superior quality, lower cost, and most rapid completion (González, 2013). Their
success had a strong influence on the Ley de Vivienda, the Housing Act, which was
approved by the Uruguayan parliament in December 1968. Experts from the CCU
and other representatives from civil society organizations were actively involved in
drafting the Act, which paved the ground for the rapid expansion of housing coop-
eratives (Grande & de Melo, 2018).
There are different types of housing cooperatives in Uruguay. A distinction can
be made between ‘owners cooperatives’ (cooperativas de propietarios) in which the
dwellings upon completion become their members’ private property, and ‘users
cooperatives’ (cooperativas de usuarios) in which the land and housing complex are
collectively owned by their members. In both cases the Act foresees measures and
restrictions to prevent their commodification. A further important distinction can
be made between cooperatives whose members contribute to the project with their
own savings, the so-called ‘previous savings cooperatives’ (ahorro previo) and those
who adopt a mutual aid (ayuda mutua) approach. Currently about 30,000 households
reside in one of the country’s 2,158 housing cooperatives, of which 963 are located
in Montevideo (INE Uruguay, 2018; INACOOP, 2017). The majority of the
HOUSING STUDIES 11
cooperatives are collectively owned and more specifically belong to the ayuda mutua
type. At a national level only about 3% of the housing stock belongs to housing
cooperatives, but their high concentration in urban areas underlines their importance
to ensure the right to housing in cities.
The institutional framework of housing cooperatives
Housing cooperatives in Uruguay are regulated by the Housing Act, which recognizes
them as legal entities, defines their organizational structure, and their role as pro-
viders of non-profit housing. The Act recognizing that their role is contingent on
financial, material and technical support. Accordingly, it sanctioned the creation of
the Fondo Nacional de Vivienda, a fund to provide loans to the different type of
housing cooperatives. Currently these loans have a duration of 25 years and a 5%
interest rate, as opposed to the 9.25% interest rate charged by commercial banks
(BCU, 2018). To access loans from this fund previous savings cooperatives have to
come up with an equity equivalent to 15% of the total capital investment required
to purchase the land and which by law should never cost more. Mutual aid coop-
eratives can access loans without by contributing with their own labour as a form
of equity by working as labourers on the construction site for an average of 21 hours
a week until the project is completed. This allows to reduce significantly the con-
struction costs, making this type of cooperatives particularly attractive to low-income
people. Moreover, closely working together leads to a high level of social cohesion,
which may be one of the reasons why mutual aid cooperatives are socially and
politically much more active than the ahorro previo cooperatives (Nahoum, 2013a).
The Housing Act recognized access to affordable and centrally located land as a
challenge, in particular for mutual aid cooperatives. To address this issue, and in
particular to ensure that also low-income people can access cooperative housing,
the Act sanctioned the establishment of a Public Land Bank consisting of plots of
land earmarked for housing development that are allotted to cooperatives on a
leasehold or grant basis. The Land Bank was not only conceived as an effective
instrument to overcome the country’s housing deficit, but also a crucial tool for
urban planning (Mendive, 2013).
Technical support was identified as a further requirement to enable people with
no previous building and construction management capacity to cooperatively engage
in the construction of their houses. To this aim the Act sanctioned the creation of
the Institutos de Asistencia Técnica (IAT), which were conceived as interdisciplinary,
independent, non-profit private organizations. The IATs role is clearly defined by the
National Housing Act and covers four crucial domains: social organization, account-
ing, legal assistance, and architectural and technical planning. IATs have to be staffed
with an interdisciplinary team of at least four professionals pertaining to the
above-mentioned domains. The IATs support cooperatives in the development of
their entire housing project. For their mandatory services IATs receive a fixed pay-
ment calculated as a ratio of the total investment. (Duyne Barenstein & Pfister, 2019).
With the aim of planning, promoting, financing, monitoring and evaluating
all public and private actors involved in the implementation of its housing policy,
12 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
the government founded the Dirección Nacional de Vivienda (DINAVI/National
Housing Department). The DINAVI plays a key role in ensuring the quality of
housing produced by cooperatives. It is responsible for the detailed analysis of
the proposed projects from a technical, financial and legal points of view, for
overseeing the granting of loans, and monitoring the quality of construction.
Further, it is in charge of monitoring the internal operation of cooperatives to
ensure their compliance with the regulations, regarding, for example, democratic
decision-making, the regular holding of meetings and elections for crucial posi-
tions such as the director or the accountant. Formal registration and compliance
with all rules and regulations are imperatives to be eligible for a loan. Before
obtaining a loan they also have to take a training course in all management and
building tasks involved in construction. The institutions that the government of
Uruguay set in place to enable housing cooperatives to flourish reflect a deep
understanding that housing cooperatives cannot emerge without state support
(Nahoum, 2013b).
The ups and downs of housing cooperatives in Uruguay
The institutional framework that enabled housing cooperatives to emerge in Uruguay
was established in a fragile political context as a response to the housing deficit
and to a deep economic crisis. Similar to what happened in Europe in the 1930s,
the government’s housing policy aimed not only at addressing the housing deficit,
but also at reactivating the economy by giving a boost to the building industry. In
fact, in less than three years after the approval of the Act over 200 housing coop-
eratives were founded and engaged in the construction of 6,700 dwellings
(Moreno, 2018).
In 1973, however, following a military coup and the establishment of a right-wing
dictatorship, the institutions created to foster housing cooperatives were dismantled
and, as shown in Figure 2, their activities came to an almost complete halt. The
military regime was particularly hostile towards the mutual aid cooperatives which
mobilized, politicized and unionized the working classes and were thus subjected
to all sorts of harassments (González, 2013). In 1980 the military regime was about
to abolish the legal basis of collective ownership, a step that would have led to the
demise of non-commodifiable housing. Although the already ongoing pollical tran-
sition prevented this from happening, the neoliberal government that came into
power upon the return to democracy was not supportive to cooperative hous-
ing either.
The situation changed when the progressive Frente Amplio came into power in
1990 in the capital city Montevideo and in 2005 nationally. The Frente Amplio
municipal government of Montevideo officially recognized poor people’s right to
the city. With the aim of making land available for low-income housing, it created
the Cartera Municipal de Tierras para Vivienda (CMTV), the Municipal Land
Portfolio for Housing. This instrument was also intended to legalise and upgrade
informal settlements. Between 1990 and 2012, out of 263 CMTV plots 212 were
allotted to mutual aid housing cooperatives, which indicates the important role of
this instrument for their re-emergence (Mendive, 2013). The Frente Amplio
HOUSING STUDIES 13
government further reintroduced cooperative housing finance mechanisms. Loans
are given to eligible cooperatives through an official lottery that is held twice a
year, in which the available loans are allocated to the winners. If a cooperative does
not succeed for three consecutive times, it is given the loan directly. Thus, provided
enough government funding is available, all applying cooperatives eventually obtain
a loan. The budget allocated by the government to housing cooperatives is approved
in its five-year plans. Since the first Frente Amplio government came into power in
2005, it enabled cooperatives to build about 1,800 dwellings during the first five-year
plan and 3,700 during the second (Moreno, 2018). For the third five-year plan
(2015-2020) the government approved a budget for 10,000 dwellings. As this budget
was already completely spent by the beginning of 2018 it was further topped up
with funding for an additional 3,000 cooperative housing units (Vignali, 2018). The
enabling instruments reintroduced by the Frente Amplio government allowed an
increase in the number of housing cooperatives from 508 in 2008 to 2158 in 2019
(INACOOP, 2017).
The election of a conservative national government in December 2019, however,
may bring an end to this favourable environment. Major adjustments that would
impact the public housing finance system have already been announced. These are
currently fiercely contested by Uruguay’s Federation of Mutual Aid Housing
Cooperatives (FUCVAM), social movements, labour unions, students and feminist
organizations.
The political inuence of housing cooperatives: the role of FUCVAM
Uruguay’s mutual aid housing cooperatives are not just providers of affordable
housing, but a powerful social movement with its roots in a strongly politicized
and unionized working class relying on a tradition of self-help and mutual aid.
FUCVAM, the Federation of Mutual Aid Cooperation was founded in 1970 and
may be defined as “the ideological, organizational, and educational motor of the
Figure 2. Historical overview of housing cooperatives in Uruguay (1968-2019).
14 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
cooperative mutual-help housing movement” (Bredenoord, 2017, p. 3). FUCVAM
counts about 630 member cooperatives representing over 23,500 families, with an
additional 123 waiting for the approval and funding of their housing projects
(Duyne Barenstein & Pfister, 2019). Even during the years of the military dicta-
torship FUCVAM never ceased to be active. For political opponents, after trade
unions were banned, it became one of the few civil society organizations through
which the military dictatorship could be challenged (González, 2013). With the
return to democracy FUCVAM had an important role in calling attention to the
country’s housing deficits and had a strong influence on the articulation of the
progressive government’s housing policies. Even though FUCVAM defines itself as
a politically independent organization, its goals and strategies are historically close
to labour unions and progressive grassroots-level social movements. For example,
FUCVAM collaborates with labour unions and women and student movements,
human rights organizations, and progressive political groups and uses instruments
such squatting on land and vacant buildings as a political instrument to fight for
poor people’s right to the city (Machado, 2020). FUCVAM regularly organizes mass
demonstrations and protest marches to revendicate measures for poor people’s right
to the city and adequate housing, through revendications such as higher mortgages
at lower interest rates and the exemption from value added taxes on building
materials. FUCVAM further fights for issues not directly related to housing such
as gender equality and minimum wages (González, 2013). For FUCVAM, mutual
aid is not only a means to reduce the costs of housing and for cooperatives to
access loans without previous savings, but also a fundamental value to foster social
justice, cohesion and solidarity among the poor (FUCVAM, 2020). To this aim,
FUCVAM regularly organizes solidarity days (jornadas solidarias) during which
members of housing cooperatives with already completed projects help those whose
housing is still under construction. FUCVAM provides to its members and to
groups of citizens interested to form a mutual aid housing cooperative a wide range
of training courses, advisory services and legal support. It is the founder of
ENFORMA, a national training centre offering courses on cooperative management,
but also on other social development issues, such as for example violence against
women. While originally representing the industrial working classes, for the last
decade FUCVAM is responding to the country’s changing socio-economic condi-
tions. The military dictatorship succeeded by years of neo-liberal governments led
to rapid deindustrialization and to a growth of the informal economy. Many people
lost their jobs which led to forced evictions, homelessness, and the growth of
informal settlements (Ghilardi, 2016). FUCVAM reaches out to these impoverished
communities by supporting them in land occupations and to exercise political
pressure on the government to address the problem of increasing housing poverty.
In the early 1990s FUCVAM created the Comisión de Vivienda Alternativa
(Commission for Alternative Housing) to support a pilot cooperative housing project
for people evicted from their houses in the old city of Montevideo, which was
followed by other similar projects, including a housing cooperative for a group of
destitute female-headed households. FUCVAM advocates that people need more
than housing and that quality of life depends on the urban quality in general,
access to livelihoods, infrastructure and services. Since 2001 FUCVAM is also active
HOUSING STUDIES 15
in disseminating the mutual aid housing cooperative approach in the region through
south-south cooperation. For its contribution to the realization of the right to
adequate housing internationally, FUCVAM won the 2012 World Habitat Award
(World Habitat, 2017).
Analytical summary
Housing cooperatives both in Switzerland and Uruguay are primarily an urban
phenomena and in both cases are historically closely associated to strongly unionized
and politicized working classes who valued mutual aid and self-help and strived for
the decommodification of housing in general. Hence the purpose of action of housing
cooperatives in both countries are very similar.
In both countries, rather than being strictly autonomous entities, housing coop-
eratives are policy instruments for the State to expand their reach of government
and to make urbanization processes governable. Municipal governments dominated
by social democratic parties in Zurich and the Frente Amplio in Montevideo, rely
on housing cooperatives to foster decommodified and affordable housing without
having to rely on public funding entirely. This was only possible through the crafting
of innovative policy instruments, in particular to enable access to land and financial
support. Hence, in both cases housing cooperatives depend on being recognized as
legitimate actors in the housing market (Mullins, 2018).
The relations between municipal governments and housing cooperatives in both
cases points to the crucial role of the political context in explaining the emergence
and establishment of cooperative housing. However, housing cooperatives should
not be confined to their instrumental role for public policy. They are organizations
with the power to act upon and to adapt to changes in their environment. In
Uruguay the housing cooperative movement is a vital political agent influencing
electoral politics and public policies that provided crucial support for progressive
governments to get elected. The history of the Uruguayan case also highlights an
interesting conceptual point. Facing a hostile political environment, the cooperative
movement reinforced their political purpose and expended their commitment towards
their members and towards the wider public. Thus the case of Uruguay is an inter-
esting and rare example of resistance against state-led coercive isomorphism. The
political role of Swiss housing cooperatives is less impressive as members of housing
cooperatives are first and foremost reliable constituencies for social democratic
parties and instrumental to establish and maintain ties between governments, political
parties and working and middle-class residents.
In contrast to the highly politicized housing cooperative movement in Uruguay,
the Swiss case shows that housing cooperatives are not political actors per se. Over
time, their close ties to the public administration and their important role in the
implementation of the city’s housing and urban development policy contributed
to a depoliticization of many housing cooperatives. In fact, until recently, most
housing cooperatives settled for their existing housing stock and residents. This
can be interpreted as a form of state co-optation (see also Sørvoll & Bengtsson,
2020; Coudroy de Lille, 2015) leading to depoliticization and a refusal of broader
political ambitions.
16 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
Based on our comparative case study, we can think of the organizational form
of cooperatives as shell-like, which can be repurposed from the inside and the
outside. In other words, housing cooperatives as an organizational form provide, in
our cases under study, first of all a space for collective action to make decommod-
ified housing available. But this form does not determine the internal and external
relations of housing cooperatives nor does it secure that their purpose of action or
scope of action remains the same over time. To sustain, housing cooperatives have
to rely on recurring collective actions which cannot be assumed from the organi-
zational form alone. This means an existing housing cooperative can be "captured"
or “co-opted” without changing the form as such. On the other hand, new actors
can develop new values and new policy instruments to redirect the cooperative
housing sector as a whole without rejecting the organizational form of a cooperative.
In this regard not only is political support and policy recognition essential, but
recurrent political challenge or provocation seem to be vital to maintain the political
significance of housing cooperatives.
Further, the shell-like features of housing cooperatives makes them also an inter-
esting epistemological object to understand housing policies and everyday housing
struggles across the globe. Their position at the juncture where governmental agen-
cies, urban collectives and everyday residents meet and negotiate the provision and
meaning of housing in different contexts serves as a fruitful entry point into the
empirical field and at the same time a departure point for composing comparisons
across contexts.
Conclusion
As shown in this paper, beyond north-south dichotomies, in Switzerland and Uruguay,
housing cooperatives continue to be important actors in the provision of
de-commodifiable housing. While housing cooperative movements in these two
countries may at the first glance appear to be very different, they have more in
common than with those of several of their neighbouring countries, where neoliberal
policies led to hollowing their core value of non-profit collective ownership or where
they never came to play a significant role. The two cases demonstrate that housing
cooperatives in specific contexts continue to represent viable forms of organization
for the decommodification of housing through their specific way of connecting
modes of urban collective life to state policies and political institutions.
The comparison of the histories and struggles of housing cooperatives in
Switzerland and Uruguay thus points to the complex relations between housing
cooperatives and the State. In order to thrive and maintain a meaningful position
in the provision of de-commodified housing, they need to find an appropriate dis-
tance to the State. If they are too close, they might be jeopardized by political
turmoil or they become an extension of the local administration. But if they are
too distant their everyday operations might be in danger.
In returning to our main research question we argue that there is not one
single condition for housing cooperatives to flourish. However, an established
policy framework defining the guidelines for state support and the relations
between the public administration and housing cooperatives is conducive. It serves
HOUSING STUDIES 17
as a normative principle to which housing cooperatives can refer to in their
everyday operations and which installs barriers to the commodification of housing.
Further it is the political foundation for struggles when the political environment
turns more hostile or when new more ambitious political goals are formulated.
However as other cases have shown, the policy framework is not enough. Another
crucial condition, it seems, is the recurrent actualization and negotiation of the
very purpose of housing cooperatives either induced by external or internal
developments.
This insight is also crucial when we look for challenges ahead. In both cases
there is a threat for housing cooperatives in terms of their accessibility. Housing
cooperatives have a social base on which they were built. This social selectivity can
have detrimental effects with regard to the openness and willingness to provide
adequate housing for new, emerging vulnerable groups. We observe similar dynamics
in Uruguay and Switzerland, where socioeconomic and political transformations call
for the need of housing cooperatives to respond to new challenges, such as changing
sociodemographic structures in Switzerland, and a growing informal economy and
increasing urban poverty in Uruguay.
Housing cooperatives are also bearers of specific social values and traditions. In
both countries, traditional family ideals influence the projects they were and are
developing, but also the members who eventually benefitted from these projects. In
Switzerland, these enshrined social values are an object of recurrent struggle and
triggered an ongoing process of re-politicization. Urban social movements have been
starting to re-conceptualize housing as a right to live in the city, but also as a place
for new forms and modes of social reproduction and community organization.
Housing cooperatives have been rediscovered as an established organizational shell
to experiment with new forms of living. Through this re-politicization and appro-
priation of the organizational model housing cooperatives are currently re-emerging
as political actors and a form of collective urban life.
Notes
1. Funding from the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) for the ongoing research
project “Tackling the global housing challenges: relevance and replicability of
Switzerland’s and the Uruguay’s housing cooperative policies and strategies” is grate-
fully acknowledged.
2. Charta der gemeinnützigen Wohnbauträger der Schweiz (https://www.wbg-schweiz.ch/data/
gemeinsame_Charta_01_01_13_d_2877.pdf ; accessed 4 September 2020) by the
Wohnbaugenossenschaen Schweiz (association of the residential housing cooperatives)
and Wohnen Schweiz (association of the housing costruction cooperatives).
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
is article was funded by Swiss Network For International Studies (SNIS).
18 J. D. BARENSTEIN ETAL.
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