Meyrin builds in cooperatives
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In Meyrin, the Geneva municipality that hosts CERN, sixteen hectares of fields have become a neighbourhood of 1,360 homes in ten years. The town handed its land to seven housing cooperatives and asked future residents to decide the rest. They chose a farm, a participatory supermarket, vegetable gardens and streets left to pedestrians.
Meyrin has been a testing ground before. In the 1960s this village of 3,200 people, next to the airport and CERN, became Switzerland’s first satellite town. When the farmland of Les Vergers was opened to building, under a district plan adopted by the canton in 2011, the town owned 47% of it. It granted its building rights to seven cooperatives, including Codha, Équilibre and La Ciguë, and to its own Fondation Nouveau Meyrin.
Before any digging began, the town held an open forum on 4 and 5 April 2014. Its 171 participants proposed an urban farm, a supermarket, a henhouse and vegetable plots. Twelve working groups came out of it, then four cooperatives. “The aim is to give residents the power to act while giving it meaning,” writes Melissa Rebetez, who led the process for the town from 2013 to 2017.
With the big retailers showing no interest in the district, residents opened their own shop. La Fève, a participatory farmers’ supermarket, started in 2018 in 50 m² and moved to the Esplanade des Récréations at the end of 2019. Next door, the Ferme des Vergers cooperative, set up in 2018, maintains 13 hectares of public space, grows vegetables on 5,600 m² with two donkeys and, since 2024, prepares vegetables for Meyrin’s school canteens.
The 30 buildings meet the Minergie-A energy standard, a first in Switzerland at this scale according to the town, and carry 10,533 m² of solar panels. A renewable heating network warms them, partly with waste heat from neighbouring businesses. Cars stay in three underground car parks with 1,245 spaces.
In October 2025 the State of Geneva and EPFL’s urban sociology laboratory published a survey of 516 people: 92% say they are proud to live in Les Vergers. Yet 30% find the district too dense and 29% of tenants say they had little choice, in a canton where fewer than 0.5% of homes stand empty. A larger building planned for La Fève ran into an appeal from about ten neighbours.
The district is open to everyone. The farm holds a market on Mondays from 3 pm to 6.30 pm, and La Fève explains how it works on the first Tuesday of each month, from 6 pm to 7 pm.
On 16 hectares of former farmland, Les Vergers has 1,360 homes, 468 of them in cooperatives, and nearly 4,000 residents according to the cantonal survey published in October 2025. Its roofs carry 10,533 m² of photovoltaic panels and the buildings meet the Minergie-A standard. In 2025 the farming cooperative employed 7.2 full-time equivalents, maintained about 130,000 m² of outdoor space and grew crops on 5,600 m², 870 m² of them under polytunnels. In 2018 the town counted 7,830 m² of orchards and 6,857 m² of vegetable plots on 12 sites. Of the 516 people surveyed, 92% say they are proud to live in the district.
Photos: MHM55, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0: 1 2 3 5) ; Guilhem Vellut, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0: 4).
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