Selçuk Balamir

Prior to the Winter Summer School, David Keuning interviewed me about my plans and expectations in regard to my collaboration with spatial designers, the decolonial critique of eco-modernism and the relation between ecological transition and social justice.

Originally published on Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Annual Newspaper 2021-2022.

This year’s Winter School, which took place in the summer due to Covid-19, was organized by artist-in-residence Selçuk Balamir. A self-professed ‘postcapitalist designer’, he challenges the status quo of the design world, which in his view is too dependent on capitalist, and thus exploitative principles. Not just of the natural environment, but also of people. As an alternative, he proposes a design process based on commons, which means that the results of any design process should be accessible and available to all. Rather than seeking answers in technological solutions to climate change and inequality, he wants to make social and political transformation ‘irresistible’. 

Born in Ankara, Turkey, Balamir attended the University of Strasbourg and VU Amsterdam. He then wrote his PhD at the University of Amsterdam about sustainable design and commons-based peer production. He currently teaches New Earth courses about ecosocial design at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Balamir practices what he preaches: over the last decade, he contributed to several climate justice action campaigns across Europe, and he is active in NieuwLand and de Nieuwe Meent projects, two housing cooperatives in Amsterdam, combining social co-housing, affordable workspaces and sociopolitical community spaces. 

Prior to the Summer School, we spoke about Balamir’s plans and expectations in regard to his collaboration with spatial designers, the decolonial critique of ecomodernism and the relation between ecological transition and social justice.

Can you briefly describe your plans for the summer school?

The summer school opens with my introductory lecture entitled From the Shell of the Old, intended to stir up the debate on the ethical-political role of designers in a just ecosocial transition. The following two days are led by eight brilliant women, all of them inspiring grassroots movement leaders based in the Netherlands, who facilitate four workshops to introduce the key concepts and methods of Climate Justice. During these workshops, the students experiment with social movement tools, engage in debates to develop their position, and get to know their group members. These groups are then assigned a piece of Shell infrastructure (such as offices, labs, refineries, pipelines, oil rigs or gas stations), for which they are asked to imagine a rapid, responsible and justice-based decommissioning and repurposing scenario over the next decades. Instead of proposing a singular designerly gesture that is frozen in time, each assignment day is intended to fast-forward five years, capturing various stages of the transition. In this process, the students are supported by design experts and knowledge holders in sustainability. The Summer School culminates in a performative finale that takes place in the former Shell office canteen, where the groups present their work in the form of storytelling from the future. We also intend to compile the results in a ‘Decade Zero’ wall calendar, as a daily reminder that transition is inevitable, but justice is not. Only our intentional collective efforts can make that happen.

The Summer School is called After Shell. Why did you choose Shell as a starting point? Isn’t the problem the extensive use of fossil fuels in all layers of society? There are many companies besides Shell that extract fossil fuels: BP, Chevron, Exxon, to name but a few. And there are many other companies that use them: the aviation industry, car manufacturers, the building materials industry. Why focus on one particular company?

There are several reasons to focus squarely on the company formerly known as Royal Dutch Shell. As complex and widespread as overdeveloped societies’ entanglement with carbon pollution may be, there is absolutely no doubt about the paramount role, responsibility and culpability of the fossil fuel industry. A handful of companies have dominated the energy sector and profited from fossil fuels and their derivatives. They have built corporate empires with geopolitical, infrastructural, financial and ideological underpinnings. They knew about the consequences of their actions for decades and doubled down on this path. They have manufactured dangerous distractions like greenwashing, ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘carbon offsetting’ to divert attention and deny their part. Besides, the recent Milieudefensie court case victory against Shell has made clear that the company is to be held responsible for the emissions of their customers. Now, Shell is certainly not alone, and all Carbon Majors are equally to blame. After all, Shell is not an exceptionally evil company, but the problem is structural; any privately-owned, publicly-traded energy company is going to maximize fossil fuel extraction to maximize profits for their shareholders. So indeed, any carbon-intensive sectors upstream or downstream that are organized as capitalist enterprises are part of the problem. 

That said, I believe there is merit in focusing on a concrete case study instead of talking about an abstract ‘energy transition’. Also consider that Shell, with its colonial history and intimate ties with the Dutch state, still benefits from social acceptance and national pride in the Netherlands. This is an obstacle to debating the kind of energy transition we are going for: do we want green capitalist monopolies on renewables or a decommodified, cooperative energy democracy? This is why the Summer School takes the comprehensive decommissioning of Shell as a non-negotiable, inevitable starting point for imagining the just transition, as well as a Dutch-specific case study on taking responsibility for colonial and ecological reparations.

Your background is in sustainable design. What would you like to get out of your collaboration with architects, urbanists and landscape architects?

My expectations are twofold. On the one hand, it will be a challenge for the activist-trainers who will facilitate the two-day crash-course. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are met with a degree of pushback, as I anticipate a degree of ecomodernist, solutionist, techno-fix ideologies to be deeply seated in these disciplines. It certainly takes more than two days to unlearn the colonial worldview, so it will be at best an experiment to see how much common ground we already have. On the other hand, the assignment itself is a provocation and an invitation to spatial designers: Do we have what it takes to be a designer of the just transition ahead? Are we capable of letting go of our creative ego and putting our skills and privileges into the service of most impacted communities? Can we simultaneously prefigure commoning practices in the present and speculate postcapitalist futures? Ultimately, we will be staging an encounter between two worlds, between climate justice organizers and spatial design professionals, with the hope that new bridges will be built that can take us towards a just transition.

By ecomodernism, you mean the belief that climate change can be tackled by technological solutions. You’re making a connection between this ecomodernism and a colonial worldview. How are these two related in your opinion?

There are many labels to describe the Western worldview: it is a patriarchal, racist, colonial, capitalist, individualist, extractivist and militarist civilization. It is defined by immutable hierarchies and separations: humans over other species, straight men over women and queers, white skin over racialized people, personal independence over mutual interdependence, utilitarian exploitation over the protection of the sacred, aggression over cohabitation, just to name a few. Design disciplines have inherited a good deal of these assumptions. From individual genius to mechanistic thinking, from productivist efficiency to simplistic universalism, there is plenty of complacency we have to unlearn. There are supposedly no limits, no mistakes, no detours in the march towards progress, and certainly no tolerance for alternatives: over centuries, the main reflex of Western civilization has been to erase other ways of being, to the point of either assimilating or eradicating them. The climate change and ecological breakdown are the logical consequence of this one-way street, one that indigenous cosmologies and peoples have been warning against and resisting all along. Just when we need to question the foundations of our way of life and drastically change course, ecomodernists tell an all too convenient lullaby: we can outsmart our destiny, some tweaks will be enough, there is a silver bullet, we need to accelerate modernization, a breakthrough is just around the corner, and so on. Seen from an apocalyptic lens, they appear as false prophets of the end times, a cult of mutually assured destruction.

What you call ecomodernism is basically a positivist way of looking at the world. Science has brought a lot of progress in the past. Especially in the Netherlands, it plays a big role in the mitigation of the negative consequences of sea-level rise, in a very practical sense. It has resulted in storm surge barriers, large-scale water drainage systems, windmills, etcetera. The Netherlands is a living example of technology making land inhabitable that’s not naturally suited for that. However, it’s clear that you think ecomodernism will not save the world. Can you explain why?

Ecomodernism is the last-ditch attempt of a dying and discredited free-market worldview, to make itself relevant so that a technocratic elite can still cling to power. It is steeped in Western bias and white-supremacist bent. Positivism, science, technology and progress are not an inseparable and coherent whole. At best, it has been an inconsistent and contested terrain of struggle. Can we claim a civilization is organized around ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ when it undermines its very foundations? Can we call it ‘progress’ when it benefits the few by means of the misery of the many, the depletion of diversity and the exhaustion of life? Can we trust the same entrenched extractivist mindset that brought us to the precipice to suddenly change course and save us? Why make an overconfident leap of faith and have blind trust in geoengineering, carbon capture, nuclear and genetic modifications, when there are social, cultural, political solutions based on justice, equality and emancipation that are already within our reach? 

Opposing ecomodernism is not anti-science or anti-technology, but it is about politicizing and aligning science and technology with the pursuit of justice. The ‘Dutch’ innovations in land management can certainly have a role to play in creating resilient ecosystems. But can we really be proud of a ‘technology’ if it is only invested for the benefit of a few million affluent Europeans in the Rhine-Meuse delta, surrounded by militarized borders to keep out climate refugees, while letting a hundred million impoverished Bangladeshis drown in or be displaced from the Ganges delta? In other words, whose worlds are to be valorised, protected and saved? Ecomodernists will never openly admit that only their world is worthy of investing in, safeguarding and reproducing, while the rest may perish. Instead they will provide some cost-benefit analysis of death tolls.

I agree with you that technological advance currently mainly benefits rich nations, and that this is not a good thing. However, shouldn’t the goal then be to make sure that the fruits of technological innovations be made available to all those who are struggling with climate change, rather than rejecting the benefits altogether?

Green technologies are currently organized alongside neo-colonial patterns. Lithium and other rare earth minerals are violently extracted at the source for renewable technologies. In toxic techno-sweatshops elsewhere in the world, the processing of these minerals leads to repressive exploitation. All this happens to allow some liberal affluent elite to drive their personal electric cars, powered by a coal plant nearby. This configuration is far from what needs to be ‘made available to all’. Instead, technology transfers, notably by abolishing both intellectual property regimes and neoliberal trade deals, have to be part of the solution. Anyone in the world should be able to deploy carbon-negative or carbon-neutral technologies without worrying about patent trolls or corporate courts. We can only win the fight against climate breakdown with spontaneous cooperation and distributed action, as opposed to competition and protectionism.

Still, the most pressing solutions remain low-tech. Returning land to Indigenous peoples and landless peasants, giving full sovereignty to local communities over their resources, enshrining mobility and settlement rights to displaced communities are fundamental, and don’t require any technological innovations. Coming back to the previous example: guaranteeing free, prior and informed consent for lithium mining, value-adding by local cooperatives for fair trade supply chains, and ultimately producing free, public electrified transport in order to take cars off the road while enabling equitable access to mobility, are first and foremost political challenges, where technology only plays an auxiliary role. We certainly don’t need any Gates, Bezos or Musk to achieve any of those. We just need to expropriate their wealth.

Your PhD is about product design, creative commons and modularity, among other things. To what extent do you think that these principles can be applied to architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture, considering the fact that many buildings are one-offs or built in very small series? 

In my thesis, I look at design practices from a political economy lens, rather than their materiality or scale. I identify several instances of value production that determine which kinds of social relations are reproduced through design. There are emerging practices at the level of design labour, circulation of blueprints and making of artefacts that avoid conventional exchange relations in favour of commoning. By this I mean doing or making in common, producing or practicing commons, and being or becoming a commoner. This ethos of commoning is certainly applicable to all design practices. I would also question the assumption that product design is meant for mass replication, while spatial design implies singular outcomes; the wholesale ecosocial redesign of the world for a just transition compels us to overcome these binary oppositions. If anything, product design calls for more localized, adaptive, contextual expressions, while spatial design needs highly replicable solutions that answer to climate mitigation and adaptation as well as biodiversity reparation and regeneration. 

You were born in Ankara and studied in Strasbourg. You did your PhD in Amsterdam. That’s an impressive trajectory. How does your personal history influence your motivation for the work that you do and the PhD that you wrote?

I am blessed to have benefitted from a series of privileges and sheer luck that brought me on this journey. I had the opportunity to go to a French high school in Ankara, which allowed me to go to France for my studies. My second year coincided with the anti-CPE movement. This was a youth mobilization against precarious first-employment contracts. We occupied the university campus for a whole semester. To be honest, I learned more that term than in all my years of higher education combined. That politicization also made me question my interest in design: I certainly didn’t want to be a cog in the capitalist wheel, and yet I wasn’t taught how to practice design outside capitalist relations, either. This led me to temporarily retreat into academia and question exactly how to do that. At the same time, I knew this couldn’t be purely theoretical research; I learned more about commoning through my involvement in housing cooperatives, and about the role of design in the just transition through my involvement in climate justice organizing. 

That being said, I believe my personal journey and motivations matter less than what this epoch-defining moment compels all of us to do: the previous generations didn’t know enough about climate breakdown, and the next generations won’t be able to do much about it. This narrow window of opportunity coincides with our generation, and our actions this decade will reverberate through centuries. This is history calling us. Are we going to answer?