Alles wird besetzt

Michele Crestani

In his long term project, photographer Michele Crestani has been documenting the life of a small community lodged in vans and trucks that seeks an alternative path against the housing crisis in Zurich, Switzerland.

“We ask you to leave the Koch Areal and have your ID cards ready. We will give you two minutes to do this. The deadline is at 8am,” says a metallic voice from a police loudhailer. It’s the 16th of February 2023. In the shimmering cold of Zurich, a hundred constables closed off the block surrounding the Koch Areal, a former train factory that, after being left derelict, has been abusively occupied for ten years by a community of 150 people. The last squatters left before sunrise. A pale morning revealed burnt dumpsters and a wooden boat, shoved in the icy street in a blaze of violence during the last night of the occupant’s left-wing autonomous dream. Throughout the morning, police officers searched the 30,000 square meters premise and found only one person. The 150 residents had been notified as the city administration planned the eviction in advance.

Roughly 40 of these residents had been living in vans and trucks that were parked in the courtyard of the Koch Areal. They moved to Hardturmplatz and that’s when I started documenting their story. The place is nicknamed La Rotonda, which has been lying fallow since the demolition of The Hardturm, an old football stadium, in 2008.

In February 2023, La Rotonda was a bleak bunch of wagons eclipsed by February’s fog. Soon after the connection to the mains electricity, music was playing loud. Like tireless ants, people from la rotonda scraped up fridge and freezers, embellished the place with gardens and plants, set up some wagons as a laboratory for tattoo and music artists. Like a faithful companion, music now runs 24/7 in some corners with outdoor speakers. It’s part of the squat ideology: taking over a sterile building or piece of land and trying to make it productive again. Today, there are a shared shower and washing machines, a fully-equipped common kitchen and a 300-square-meters tent used as a shared space and concert venue.

This small, maverick and coordinated community is a sombre example of people who deliberately choose an alternative lifestyle. Nobody wants to pay rent: the majority of them squat in places since their late teens or early twenties. That’s why everyone bought a wagon and arranged it as their semi-nomadic home. What unites the members of this colony is a strong rejection of living in a flat and a genuine need for cohesion with others. “Outside here I have to work, everything costs money and the Police hate me,” Ramon, 42, former soldier and now truck driver, told me. He bought his 7.5 ton lorry six years ago, when he moved to Zurich. It’s been his home since then.

Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest countries, the demand for affordable housing in Switzerland is increasing at unprecedented speed. A recent analysis laid out the country as a post-home-ownership society. This situation is exacerbated in big cities and, In Zurich, La Rotonda is probably the most extreme outburst of the housing crisis. According to the 2023 Global Real Estate Bubble Index, Zurich stands out in the first place as the city with the highest housing bubble risk worldwide. Private companies are gobbling up the ownership of properties and, since 2023, they own the largest proportion of apartments in the municipality, which then are rented to privates. Rents are squeezed up to 11,700 CHF for one-room apartments and plans to evict hundreds of residents from their 50-or-more-years-old settlements cover the news on a regular basis.

All the plans for the urban development of La Rotonda are stalled. In 2005, the city administration released the first project for a new stadium. The latest version includes an 18,000 seats venue and two high-rise buildings with more than 700 apartments, but nothing has happened. That’s why, after the refugee crisis for the Ukraine-Russia war, a new idea to build a refugee camp came up. However, it was constantly vetoed by neighbourhood’s associations. The new squatter’s settlement is considered illegal by the city, but tolerated. Squatters were officially granted 3000 square meters to park their vans: the permissions last only a few months and undergo renewal three or four times per year. For the community of La Rotonda it feels like a Damocles sword, which one day will necessarily fall and shatter their new dream.

Today, entering La Rotonda feels like being in a tiny cosmopolitan village populated by construction site workers, drivers, barmen, students, street artists, tattoo artists, punk musicians, teachers, former Buddhist monks, SeaEye rescuers. Everyone works. Perhaps they have part-time or seasonal jobs, as a lot of conscious effort goes in some personal projects or in building the village.

The motto of the Zurich squatters is “alles wird ~~gut~~ besetzt”, “everything will be ~~good~~ squatted”. Despite the hardship of living in a wagon – it’s easier to get depressed or sick during wintertime -, squatters will keep squatting in places, as this is their ideal that they will follow throughout their lifetime.