Building Culture for Neighbourhoods, City of Zug

With the manual “Building in the Neighbourhood,” the city of Zug aims to establish a high-quality, neighbourhood-specific building culture. The manual is based on findings from a population survey on the city’s built development, which included critical feedback on many recent new constructions.

A central concern is neighbourhood-based development. Currently, the zones in the zoning plan are mainly differentiated by use and density, but lack distinctions based on neighbourhood characteristics. This leads to undifferentiated developments with buildings that look the same everywhere. For example, the standard building type in a W3 zone on the Lorze plain is exactly the same as on the steep slopes of Zugerberg. Therefore, the manual distinguishes 21 small neighbourhoods, each with different characteristics of built structure.

Another significant topic is the integrated approach. Often, architectural design dominates the assessment of a construction project. The manual addresses all essential spatial criteria by simply structuring them under the themes of urban planning, environmental design, and building form. Besides architectural aspects such as roof and façade design, it also considers factors like grain, addressing, greening, and parking. The survey showed that these themes actually play an even more important role in judging a building’s beauty than architectural design alone.