In Switzerland, cooperative housing is more than a niche—it’s a participatory model where future residents collectively decide how they want to live, build, and share space. These (non-profit) cooperatives are based on direct democratic principles, where members actively shape decisions together (see https://www.cooperativeconditions.net). Some cities like Zurich show 18% of the households being cooperatives.
In this session, I’ll share how we (in Biel/Bienne, the largest bilingual city of Switzerland where the german and french speaking parts meet) took a collaborative process in projecting and designing a new building and engineered it using a disguised Moodle as digital platform.
I’ll show how we mapped the structured Scrum-like timed decision process into Moodle, what activities and tools we embodied, and how participation looked in practice.
The building does not yet stand (construction should start 2028 if everything goes well)!