Living within planetary limits: Zurich’s 2,000-watt experiment

Zurich is home to a unique housing cooperative meant to model sustainable living. A decade on, some residents have found changing their habits to be more challenging than expected. Tucked into a neighbourhood on the northern edge of Zurich, the Hunziker Areal looks like an ordinary modern housing complex. But this is a closely watched experiment. And if it succeeds, it could be a model for how hundreds of thousands of people across the country might live in the future. Built a decade ago by the cooperative mehr als wohnen (“more than living”), the complex was inspired by the 2,000-watt society, a framework first proposed by researchers at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich in the late 1990s and later adopted as part of Switzerland’s long-term energy and climate strategy. The idea: that every person should live well using no more than 2,000 watts of continuous energy — the equivalent of roughly 17,500 kilowatt-hours per year, about one-third of what the average Swiss ...