Zurich is Switzerland's largest city, where the challenges of urban planning, infrastructure and housing policy are particularly evident. An early Ciné-Journal suisse, photographs and commissioned films from the 1930s to the 1970s provide insight into the challenges of urban development during this period. Two critical short films from the early 1970s by directors of the New Swiss Cinema examine the social and spatial consequences of car-centric urban planning and capitalist housing policy. In the years that followed, illegal squatting increased. Those involved documented their struggles on film themselves, as exemplified by a video from 1991.

Zürich. Tempo, tempo!... Zeit ist Geld (Zurich. Hurry, hurry!... Time is money) accelerates with time-lapse street scenes of Zurich. People, trams, carriages and cars hurry across Bellevue and Paradeplatz. The dynamism and rapid rhythm of this Ciné-Journal suisse newsreel, produced in Lausanne in the 1920s, recall images of metropolises such as Berlin and Paris. In the course of industrialisation, workers moved to the cities, transport networks were expanded, and housing estates were built. The consequences of urbanisation – transport planning, housing shortages, social inequality, but also reform and protest movements – also affected the smaller city of Zurich, which grew to become Switzerland's largest city during the first incorporation in 1893.

The influx of workers exacerbated the housing problem. Affordable housing became a key social demand. In response to this, the first building cooperatives emerged in the 1890s, focusing on collective self-help and thus establishing a new model of urban housing policy. Workers' housing estates still characterise Zurich's cityscape today. Historical photographs from the archives of trade unions, associations and the Zurich Food Cooperative show the facades of housing estates and interiors.

On the occasion of the first Swiss Housing Exhibition, Woba, held in Basel in 1930, the German artist and avant-gardist Hans Richter created the film Die neue Wohnung (The new apartment). In sharp contrast to existing, outdated housing forms and construction methods, Die neue Wohnung advocated functional floor plans and furnishings, light and air, cleanliness, a connection to nature, and affordable housing for all. Like the Woba exhibition, the film was shaped by the architectural movement of Neues Bauen. It saw housing as part of a comprehensive social reform and called for new housing and construction concepts in view of the pressing social challenges of the time. Richter's work shows Swiss as well as international buildings that are not identified by name. From Zurich, for example, we see the Rotach houses on the Limmat in Kreis 5, which were built by architect Max Ernst Haefeli.

The film was commissioned by the Swiss Werkbund (SWB). After the end of the Woba exhibition, Richter produced a second version of the film for screenings in Germany — the version shown here is titled Atelier Richter.

“When designing a modern transport system for the Zurich region, one of the major challenges is that many different authorities are involved. It is not at all easy to bring all these bodies and people together under one roof. This is why the delegation of authorities was created, in which representatives of the Federal Railways, the City of Zurich and the Canton work together to develop a transport concept and achieve coordination.”

State Council Brugger in the Zürich Richtung Zukunft, 1969

The film Zürich Richtung Zukunft (Zurich Towards the Future, 1969) was also shown in an exhibition and reflects urban planning that was strongly influenced by the belief in progress that prevailed at the time. Hans Stürm and Gody Suter made the film on behalf of the Zurich Regional Transport Authority. Both the film and the exhibition of the same name were intended to convince the population to approve the expansion of the transport infrastructure in the Greater Zurich Area. At its heart was the ‘underground railway as the transport system of the future’. However, the project met with resistance and was rejected in a referendum in 1973.

By foregoing voice-overs in favour of interviews with city residents and planners, and through its expressive images of densely populated urban areas, Zürich Richtung Zukunft clearly differs from earlier commissioned films.

Such large-scale construction projects were characteristic of the post-war euphoria of growth. A few years later, protests against the expansion of private transport in the spirit of the ‘car-friendly city’ became even more intense than in the 1960s. The Zurich Expressstrassen-Y was a motorway project that was supposed to run through the middle of the city, but only parts of it were ever realised. With Beton-Fluss (Beton-River, 1974), Hans-Ulrich Schlumpf created one of the most famous films of the urban protest movements of those years. Beton-Fluss denounces the destructive consequences of traffic-oriented urban planning and became an important reference point for similarly oriented citizens' movements.

“The Zurich City Council expects that such clearly biased and factually incorrect programmes about Zurich will not be broadcast in future.”

Excerpt from the minutes of the Zurich City Council, 26 March 1975

As an excerpt from the minutes of the Zurich City Council shows, the film produced by Television DRS on the occasion of the European Architectural Heritage Year met with little approval there. A note remarks: “It speaks for the carelessness of this report that not even the title of the film is correctly reproduced!”

A similarly accusatory rhetoric and aesthetic can be found in Zur Wohnungsfrage 1972 (The Housing Question 1972), a film made two years earlier by Hans and Nina Stürm. Using Zurich and other cities in Germany as examples, it criticises the capitalist housing market from a Marxist perspective – the title refers to Friedrich Engels's essay of the same name published a hundred years earlier. The film intercuts extended tracking shots of monotonous housing developments, images of satellite towns, apartment blocks and large construction sites, as well as interviews with residents. They lament hostile living environments, high rents, the lack of communal infrastructure and displacement. Through statements by urban planners, architects and representatives of housing associations, who shed light on the social, political and economic causes, the film condenses into a sharp analysis and a class-conscious manifesto against exploitation and profit-driven housing policy.

The film also quotes Zurich-based entrepreneur Ernst Göhner, whose “Göhner housing development” Sunnebüel in Volketswil briefly appears in the film. The construction company Ernst Göhner AG – whose owner died before the film was completed – felt attacked by its portrayal. In a specially compiled dossier, which today serves as a revealing document of the film’s circulation and reception, the company accused it of agitation and distortion.

Zur Wohnungsfrage 1972 already included images of protests against demolition, new construction and displacement. Over the 1970s and 1980s, deindustrialisation and gentrification reshaped the cityscape and the demographic composition of urban neighbourhoods, particularly in areas such as Seefeld or the former industrial and working-class districts of Aussersihl and the Industriequartier. As a radical form of resistance, many vacant buildings in the city were occupied by young people.

The video Bäcki bleibt (Bäcki stays) combines agitation and documentation. The focal point of the nearly hour-long video is a celebration surrounding the squatted property on Bäckerstrasse in District 4. The film addresses the issues of real estate speculation and investments by private and institutional property owners who profit from buying and selling houses and driving up rents. The collective ‘“FreundInnen von Punst und Kolitik” gathers opinions from pedestrians about the occupation, offers insights into the building and accompanies the squatters in their often-creative resistance against eviction – culminating in the occupation of the office of mayor Sepp Estermann.

Bäcki bleibt situates the struggle in its historical context and concludes by looking back at the long history of tenants' struggles, going as far back as the 1930s.

Jacqueline Maurer wrote an article on on the subject of film and urban development for the publication Nützliche Filme: Zürcher Stadt-, Land-, Filmgeschichten, to be found online in Repérages – Journal of the Cinémathèque suisse.