Three years ago a group of architects working for several Swiss practices met at a Zürich restaurant, Krokodil, to talk about the sorts of architectural issues their day jobs didn’t cover. How, they asked, could they use their skills to tackle an issue of social or environmental importance, something that might only be addressed at a regional or national level? They decided to look at the problem of sprawl – a product of the Swiss fondness for the suburban single-family house –and Architects Group Krokodil was born.

The group undertook detailed research into the interplay of land use, economics and demography, sharing the results at regular meetings. Observing that the whole Swiss population could live in the canton of Zürich at the density of Greater London, it proposed an alternative to sprawl: Glatt, an urban extension to Zürich incorporating several existing small communities in a coherent master plan.