In collaboration with:
Chair of Architecture and Design, Prof. Jan De Vylder
Chair of History and Theory of Architecture, Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke, Linda Stagni

ABSTRACT

COMMON GROUND

Soil, water and air are essential for life. The liberalisation of land in our capitalist society led to land becoming property and thus being left to the free market. According to philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe, the financialisation of the city is a recent evil. Gentrification and the housing question are closely related to the topic mentioned above.

CONTEXT

The car can be understood as a symbol of liberalisation and capitalism. It enabled absolute freedom and flexibility in terms of human mobility. Moreover, the car industry is one of the largest industries in the world economy and is largely responsible for economic progress. As a result, our cities were overrun by cars and took up their space.

The commonality of parking spaces with the land issue is that there are publicly accessible parking spaces as well as completely privatised ones. This is again a recent evil, as the following findings demonstrate.

It's a fact that use of public land by p arked cars is a repetition of 49’000 times in Zurich. As a result, public land is privatized almost for free by individuals for short or long periods. Tn principle, there is nothing wrong with not leaving these parking spaces to the free market.

OPSERVATION

From my home in Kreis 4 to my daily used bus station I passed by 130 parked cars. This is the same amount of people who fit the bus I use. This shows me the efficiency of public transport and the importance of owning a personal car for 39% of the Zurich population. On the same way I pass by 12 camping cars. Due to the fact, that this campers are not used daily, it is somehow paradoxical to encounter 12 empty beds in a city where there is a housing shortage.

The analysis of the neighbourhood around the Bäckeranlage, based on data sets from Zurich and the observation of private parking spaces on the ground and underground level, allowed a more precise overview of the utilization of the 2’532 parking spaces in this area.

In the first analysis, private parking spaces on the ground and garages are inefficient. The occupation of them is around 550 lots, means 50% unused. Therefore, the demand for parking spaces is probably pushed to the 822 lots on public ground. This results 10’091m3 empty volume in urban space which could potentially be living space for 120 people.

Due to the underused underground parking, we have to understand them as part of the public ground. Means that a new regulation would open private underground parking to public.

QUESTION

The question arises of what potential lies in the public parking spaces on ground to serve the local population in a new way?

The densification of the neighbourhood would take place on public land and thus interventions suffer less from the capitalist constraints discussed at the beginning. Temporal interventions would serve the acute crisis of the city. Like the demand of housing and overpriced rents.