Selçuk Balamir

Two housing cooperatives established in Amsterdam, NieuwLand (2015) and de Nieuwe Meent (2025), prove it is still possible to treat housing as a commons rather than a commodity within a highly pressured housing market. A resident of NieuwLand and co-initiator of de Nieuwe Meent, Selçuk Balamir reflects on the experiences, challenges and lessons behind the development of both projects.

Published on Archined, May 2026.

Welcome to ‘I’ Amsterdam

Amsterdam is often cited as one of Europe’s most expensive housing markets. This is particularly tragic given its history: the city was once a pioneer in social housing, shaped by strong public policy and a vibrant housing movement. I arrived in Amsterdam in 2010, the year squatting was criminalized. This was widely seen as the final nail in the coffin of the city’s counterculture, as the turn towards the ‘smooth city’ was in full swing.

I came with a design diploma in my hand and an aversion to practising design in its conventional, commercial form. I wanted to research what postcapitalist design could be: how creatives might contribute to a future that is not organized around extraction, consumption and exhaustion. The irony of looking for this in Europe’s imperial epicentres of colonial trade, capitalist finance and industrial modernity was not lost on me. But Amsterdam still held another city within: a constellation of urban commons infrastructures – some still squatted, others legalized – which showed it was still possible to live, organize and socialize outside the glossy, individualist branding of ‘I Amsterdam’.

My first lived experience of housing in Amsterdam was in Heesterveld (Amsterdam Zuidoost), a social housing block that had dodged unnecessary demolition thanks to the financial crisis. It was repurposed as a ‘breeding ground’ by the housing corporation Ymere – a top-down process that made clear to me that affordable living was precarious and entirely dependent on institutions you don’t control. I wanted to escape the capitalist treadmill but still lived at the mercy of landlords. I needed a radically different approach to housing. The answer would soon come from social centres that would end up shaping my life.

After some time, I stumbled upon a benefit dinner at Joe’s Garage, one of those nights where a cheap vegan meal quietly subsidizes someone’s legal fees, an action campaign or a family in need. This one was organized for a housing association called Soweto. That day, while helping with the dishes, I met some of my future housemates for the first time. One year later, we moved in together to what would become NieuwLand.

NieuwLand: practising luxury communism

Soweto had its roots in the squatter movement but wanted to develop a more resilient legal and financial model. The association had been set up seven years earlier to legalize a squat, but that effort had not succeeded. Undeterred, they negotiated with the council and a bank to acquire an underused, century-old primary school building in Amsterdam Oost and turn it into the co-housing project now known as NieuwLand. Living as part of a transnational activist community appealed to me, so I started attending the meetings to listen to bureaucratic complications over a beer on Friday nights, which would soon turn into a decade-long adventure.

Soweto had already made preliminary calculations for how much social-level rent could be charged for an 11-person co-living group, five workspaces and a social centre, based on the city’s own regulations. The municipality agreed to sell the building at a social rate, breaking away from market pricing: €400,000 for 778 m² GFA, a cost comparable to a semi-detached house in Amsterdam in 2014. No Dutch bank was willing to finance the project, but GLS Bank, the German social and ecological cooperative lender, which funds similar initiatives, offered a mortgage fit for a non-profit. As a result, a beautiful edifice with a monumental listed façade was taken off the market – forever.

That sweet deal came with a bitter condition: an extremely limited renovation budget. The DIY ethos inherited from the squatter movement was not an idealistic add-on, but an integral part of the business plan. Material costs were crowdfunded, and we made considerable savings by providing the labour ourselves. In theory, we had four months to complete the renovation before moving in. In practice, it took us two years to make it a decent place to live. We bonded as a community through dust, sore muscles and endless meetings – learning not only how to build walls, but how to build trust.

Last year NieuwLand celebrated its tenth anniversary. In the midst of the housing crisis, rents have remained affordable: still half the maximum social rent. Shared living group expenses are proportional to income, so we can all enjoy the collective abundance we call ‘luxury communism’. Over a decade, our co-living group has been home to 25 people, with an age range from 20 to 60, a diversity of migration backgrounds, sexual orientations and gender identities. Our social centre has become an indispensable self-managed urban commons infrastructure for activist networks, hosting affordable vegan meals, political documentary screenings, activist strategy meetings, queer cultural events, emergency homeless shelters and much more. Home became a place to reproduce political life as much as daily life.

Still, this model is by no means workable for everyone. The average length of stay is four years, and the residents remain relatively homogeneous: eleven rooms, eleven people, no couples, no children. These constraints are largely spatial; the building – because of its adaptive reuse layout – is not very family-friendly, nor is it wheelchair accessible. The community is not as self-sufficient as we would like to be. Long-term stewardship entails passing on the institutional memory, but we still rely on the expertise of some of the founders to renegotiate future interest rates and ground lease conditions. Perhaps the first few years were not the hardest after all: the real test begins when the novelty wears off and the building demands long-term caretaking.

De Nieuwe Meent: postcapitalist urban commune

While I was impatiently wondering how to replicate the NieuwLand model and improve on its shortcomings, the centre-left coalition on Amsterdam City Council announced an ambitious plan in 2018: to convert 10% of all housing into cooperatives within 25 years, a total of 40,000 units by 2045. To test the policy, the municipality tendered a vacant 1,127 m² plot of land for a 40-unit pilot cooperative. It was next to Science Park train station, just 1.5 km from NieuwLand. When I saw NieuwLand mentioned as an example in one of the annexes, this municipal stamp of approval sparked my imagination. It seemed an unmissable opportunity, so I decided to share a call for collaborators.

The initial digital flyer featured the iconic photo of children playing on the rooftop of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, calling for collaborators to ‘build a postcapitalist urban commune’. Three young architects responded to the call, introducing themselves as ‘postcapitalist architects’. Andrea, Mira and Roel (now Time to Access and Office Raumplan) were working in the same commercial design agency, but itching for a more socially oriented practice. It was remarkably serendipitous that our first encounter turned into a field trip to the construction site of La Borda by Lacol in Barcelona. Seeing a cooperative of similar scale and ambitions already realized, we looked at each other and said: we’re doing this. They joined as volunteers and took on the lead in project management, working pro bono for far longer than anyone should reasonably expect. We started meeting every Sunday for brunch, followed by workshops on the financial, legal, design and community aspects of the project.

The foundations of our governance model were laid first: decisions taken by consensus in open assemblies, tasks carried out through thematic working groups. The board is responsible only for legal and financial administration and continuity with official partners. For critical, legally binding decisions, a general assembly limited to official members is convened. The intent of the structure was to combine accountability with autonomy, allowing initiative-taking while preventing the concentration of power or responsibilities in too few hands.

We translated our anti-capitalist, queer-feminist, eco-socialist and anti-racist politics into four core values – commoning, care, sustainability and diversity – not as slogans, but as a practical decision-making compass each time we faced a challenge or an oversight. We called the project ‘de Nieuwe Meent’ (the New Commons), reviving the pre-capitalist term for communal lands and aligning ourselves with the new municipalist hope that radical grassroots movements and progressive public policy can converge around the patterns of commoning.

Many cultural workers, urban researchers and housing activists joined the initiative, not because they needed a place to live, but because they believed we could influence housing policy through an exemplary project. If squats were the city’s underground welfare system, cooperatives would be our attempt to move urban commons infrastructure above ground, hopefully without losing its radical edge. We won the tender in 2019 and the first delivery date was projected for 2022. Little did I know it would take us another three years.

Designing and building the commons

From the start, we tried to design against the default logic of housing as an individual consumer good. Our co-design process was open to anyone: it was not meant to tailor spaces to the private desires of a final set of residents, but to ask participants what would serve the collective interest. We wanted an energy-positive and carbon-negative CLT construction – such buildings were still uncommon in Amsterdam at that time. We aspired for all communal spaces to be fully accessible to wheelchair users. We envisioned the community reflecting the demographic makeup of the multicultural, multigenerational city we live in. We imagined a cooperative workplace and a public venue open to our neighbours. We hoped to finance all this entirely with public, social and ethical funds.

We were not only co-designing a building; we were making our values legible through spatial choices. Out of this process came the principle of ‘private sufficiency, communal luxury’ – minimizing private quarters and maximizing shared spaces, with 45% of built area dedicated to communal functions. We kept the whole project under social-level rents, combining 15 social housing units (eligible for rent subsidies and reduced ground rents) with five co-living groups, each with five rooms. We distributed the independent units around a courtyard, and stacked living groups on the tower, each with their custom layouts. It was the most cost-effective way to optimize the restrictive envelope, bringing together multiple traditions of public housing, co-living groups and intentional communities under one roof.

The development phase coincided with the pandemic, which slowed community building to a crawl. Online meetings are hard for anyone; imagine choosing your future neighbours without meeting them in person. Still, the biggest obstacle by far was financing. As a high-stakes pilot under close scrutiny, we were navigating uncharted legal terrain with strict conditions and very little precedent. We had to secure a massive private bank loan to cover more than half of the investment, pressure the city to extend public loans, and raise €450,000 through crowdfunding so that the membership fee could be limited to €4,000 per person. When we needed additional securities for the construction phase, a network of community-run buildings – those legalized squats that made me stay in Amsterdam – acted as guarantors, offering an innovative form of solidarity-based risk management. Throughout it all, our financial advisor kept finding creative ways to qualify for subsidies, justify our choices to funders, and keep the whole thing from collapsing into a spreadsheet graveyard.

Then came 2022. After obtaining the land lease, and while waiting for some technicalities to be sorted out, the war in Ukraine caused timber prices and interest rates to skyrocket. Suddenly our business case was no longer viable and revising material choices and income streams was not enough. We had to start negotiating all over again with another bank. We were stuck for over a year, testing the patience of the municipality and our own trust in the project. Many members left because of the uncertainty during this time. Five years in, I had my doubts too: I had underestimated how being a pilot meant increased complexity, unpredictability and imperfection.

Bankruptcy was on the table. Not all coalition partners in the city council believed in cooperatives, so we were certainly not the kind of prestige project deemed ‘too big to fail’. But our mission was too good to betray. Thanks to the perseverance of members, advisors and supporters, and through countless rounds of negotiations, lobbying, petitions and protests, the impossible was made possible. We secured funding with no major compromises: all units stayed at social level, and the timber structure was not downgraded. dNM became the first cooperative financed by a Dutch bank.

Commoning the future

Only once the seven-digit numbers appeared in our accounts did the story shift from speculation to construction. With a total budget of €8 million and costs of €2,150 per m², building works began in early 2024 – exactly six years after I first visited the site. After months of power-connection delays and ​​Do-It-Together finishing works (pouring concrete floors, lacquering the wooden structure, plastering clay walls), dNM was delivered in summer 2025. The six-storey building stands 22 m tall, with a cross laminated timber structure and 2,360 m² GFA. It is equipped with geothermal heat pumps and solar panels producing 67,000 kWh per year – more than our anticipated use. The façade features playfully bonded brickwork, red window frames, mint-green balustrades, and nests for birds and bats. An exception to the envelope turned the fire escape into a distinctive semi-open brick staircase, a quiet nod to the water tower that once stood on our plot. Soon a 40m² mural will be visible from the train station, developed through an open call and participatory process led by cultural institutions.

What started as words, numbers and drawings is now matter, space and finally people. dNM is now home to 51 people aged from 0 to 65, roughly three-quarters of whom come from migration backgrounds. Over the years, we ran multiple admission rounds with deliberate efforts to counter homogeneity and exclusion. The community includes a seniors’ co-living group, a wheelchair user, a refugee family and a range of non-normative household forms. I do not present these as tokenistic achievements in representation, but as our structural commitment to transformative justice. Diversity requires continuous learning and attention to who can join, who feels safe enough to stay and whose needs shape decisions. We still have a long way to go.

We have yet to do a full evaluation, but a few caveats already feel unavoidable. Setting up a cooperative requires a significant amount of free time, expertise and networks – in short, privilege. The daunting scale of the endeavour currently excludes the people most in need of housing from leading such projects. Unless the process is simplified and support structures are put in place, the cooperative sector risks becoming a self-selecting middle-class hobby rather than a response to the housing crisis.

Even when you have privilege and capacity, relying on long-term volunteer labour often leads to burnout and departures. In our case, architects and advisors did the heavy lifting when we could not. We were fortunate to have smooth collaborations, but that also creates risks: under-compensation, dependency and a concentration of power and knowledge. One way to address this would be to resource project management and community building as distinct roles, clearly separated but fully accountable to each other, so that the commons are not built on the exhaustion of the commoners.

And then there is the financial paradox at the heart of this model. We poured an uncountable amount of volunteer labour – especially into fundraising – only for the value created to be extracted by a private bank through 5% interest payments for decades to come. Without public finance instruments, there is no urban commons sector, only a rentier economy with grassroots aesthetics. It remains to be seen whether the upcoming national fund of €60 million will provide better conditions and it is up to organizations like PWA, Cooplink and !Woon to defend the interests of future cooperatives.

I am often asked why I spent so many years working on a new project after already having worked on NieuwLand. In fact, I should have been the last person to do so, as I did not need a new house. So what was my motivation? I benefited from years of legal, administrative and political work by Soweto, and then from the comfort, care and solidarity of my NieuwLand community. It was now my turn to give to others – this time to even more people. That is how commoning works: you pay it forward. The same principle applies not only to individuals, but also to cooperatives. In a few decades, when NieuwLand and dNM have paid off their debts, they will finance the cooperative sector of their postcapitalist city, making them public-interest institutions growing the urban commons ecosystem. As the saying goes: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

I would like to thank Duygu Toprak, Josta van Bockxmeer, Carla Huisman, René Boer, Andrea Verdecchia and Philip Schols for their feedback, and all the unsung heroes of both projects for their work.