Selçuk Balamir

In response to a 2018 city tender, Amsterdam designer and postdoc researcher Selçuk Balamir had a crazy/brilliant idea – to develop an affordable housing cooperative based on commoning and the principles of “private sufficiency and communal luxury.” The building would require cutting-edge eco-friendly materials; prioritize non-traditional families, queer-feminists, eco-socialists, immigrants, and seniors as future residents; and pioneer innovations in finance, building design, construction, and residential governance. Hailed by ‘The Architectural Review’ as “a beacon of hope in the gloomy Dutch housing landscape,” De Nieuwe Meent [the New Commons] is inspiring other cities and town to re-imagine affordable housing.

Interview with David Bollier on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast, and episode summary on his blog, both published in October 2026. Lightly edited transcript below.

David

What does it take to develop one of the first housing cooperatives in Amsterdam, a world city with sky-high real estate prices and a scarcity of social housing? Let’s take the bar higher. What if you tried to build new housing that was ecologically conscientious and relied on commoning practices to do the job with members co-developing, co-designing, and co-financing the building before finally becoming self-governing tenants?

And what if you prioritized affordability and diversity so that the more eco-minded, queer-feminist, and immigrant families with modest incomes could afford to live there? Well, let’s just say that 51 such people moved into such an apartment building last year. My guest today is Selçuk Balamir, who helped lead a six-year odyssey to build de Nieuwe Meent, also known as dNM, a 40-unit housing co-op in the east of Amsterdam.

Balamir is a designer, postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and organizer for eco-social justice. He isn’t an architect, contractor, or finance expert, but he quickly picked up those skills in the course of building dNM. Now that the seven-story building is virtually finished and fully occupied, The Architectural Review has called the project, “a beacon of hope in the gloomy Dutch housing landscape”.

Another group awarded the project its Amsterdam Architecture Prize 2026. I’ve been eager to talk with Selçuk to learn more about this amazing experiment in housing as a commons. What’s so special about the building and its people? What lessons has everyone learned? And what changes has it catalyzed? Selçuk, it’s so great to have you with me today.

Selçuk

Wow, what a generous introduction, David. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

David

Maybe we should start with the modest origins, which seems so improbable, in which the city government had a tender for a plot of land in the east of the city, and you, not a professional in the housing world in any fashion, had the audacity to submit a bid to try to build on this land.

Selçuk

Exactly; there are some accidental encounters that led us to this point I guess. So I’ve been living in Amsterdam for now 15 years and since I came I was very much aware that this is a very expensive city to live in and there was something euphemistically called a “housing crisis”. Now, I don’t like the term housing crisis it’s as if houses are having a fit and are not wanting to host people. It’s a financialization of the city that is overwhelming. That if I wanted to live in the city and survive in the city, I needed other ways of inhabiting it. I was very lucky in my early years to get involved in a smaller scale project, an old primary school building that we renovated ourselves and turned into a mini-cooperative of sorts, which really made it possible for me to live here.

I could live cheap, I could have more than a roof, but the community around me, I could have space to organize. And that really unlocked the city and its potentials for me. And I was very much aware that this is a very important way to intervene politically in your surroundings, in your city.

Now, accidentally, one day I see on the municipality’s website that they have some plots that are being tendered for the first series of pilot projects for a new generation of housing cooperatives. And one of these plots was just five minutes biking distance from where I was living. And curiously enough, the city was citing us, this original project, NieuwLand, as a good example, which situated me suddenly thinking, oh, maybe we are the right people doing the right thing in the right time, in the right place, which motivated me to bring people together to apply to this tender.

But most notably, it wasn’t necessarily bringing people together so that we live together. Because I was already living in a commune, right? And I was very happy where I was.

But seizing this strategic opportunity to be able to shape the housing policy for years to come seemed like an unmissable opportunity. So a bunch of activists, housing rights organizers, academics, designers, creative professionals, cultural workers, and so on joined in this journey. Not necessarily to live together, as I said, but to push a little bit the boundaries and try to imagine what a postcapitalist urban commune would look like.

David

You bought the land from the city at a below market price in 2019. That must have been a formidable challenge in itself because even below market price had to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. How did you scrape that money together and how did the city recognize you as a worthy applicant when I’m sure there were many other applicants who had a lot more money in standing in the construction world?

Selçuk

Correction: land isn’t bought but leased. All lands in Amsterdam are actually municipal lands that you pay a yearly lease. So this was one of the conditions that shaped this plot, which is quite an inner-city plot. So it was already quite exceptional to have an empty plot without necessarily demolishing a building that was available. But in these early tender applications, what the city was looking for was a vision, was a set of principles or organizational models that would be viable enough, but maybe experimental enough, so that the city proves to itself or the civil servants prove to funding bodies that this is a viable format. It was also setting up multiple criteria, like it had to be 40 units, it had to have a particular shape of the envelope.

So it is also a bit of a puzzle that they are proposing to citizens to solve. How do you make a building of this size, of this capacity, with these conditions? And indeed, curiously enough, we were maybe one of the most reckless and naive people to apply to this, but also the ones that were able to solve this riddle. One of the criteria that made our business model work where our competitors failed was to include co-living groups. So coming from the squatter heritage of the city, there’s a great number of co-living groups in the city. And I was living in one for the last 10 years.

So we were confident that level of intimate, intentional living would be a key component of this project. What I hadn’t realized at first was that it would also be an advantage for the business case because it means building cheaper, building more compact, and building more convivial.

David

Wow. I was astonished to learn in this history that you were billing yourself, at least internally, as a “postcapitalist urban commune” that you wanted to build. But you put it in terms that maybe a bureaucrat could appreciate that you wanted to do “commoning, diversity, sustainability, and care”, which sometimes translates into less attractive terms in practice. But tell me how a city bureaucracy and political structure could welcome that kind of approach.

Selçuk

Indeed, I want to bring us back to 2018, where I guess we were also very inspired and encouraged by the new municipalist movements elsewhere in Europe. There were signs of interest here in Amsterdam as well. We thought that, okay, is there a common ground? Is there a common language we can understand each other between civil servants, bureaucrats, institutions around the city and beyond, and radical movements, social movements we come from. It was always this two-sided communication practice, if you like, towards the organizers, towards our base. We were promoting this as a “postcapitalist urban commune”. Many of us were from social movements that were anti-capitalist, anti-racist, eco-socialist and queer-feminist. But we were also aware that we could not promote the project in these terms to the city.

Meanwhile, I was doing this research, a PhD on commoning practices in design. Very much inspired by you, David, and all the other scholars around commoning. That was inspiring me not only to research and analyze these practices, but how do we integrate them into the discourse and claim space for these terms? Of course, eight years ago when I was saying commoning, people were looking at me weirdly saying, what is this academic term you are throwing here?

Which meant a little bit of collective learning and reshaping our worldviews perhaps. But indeed, by both softening the kind of radical core or, let’s say, expressing them in less dogmatic sounding ways with “sustainability, diversity, care”, which are, let’s face it, quite fuzzy and liberal terms that the city was able to kind of accommodate, let’s say. But most importantly, commoning struck a chord among us, first of all, because we felt that, as you and Silke call it, patterns around this is a great both compass to practice on a daily basis, but also to establish the foundations and the big axes of this project. For a long time we called it principles, but patterns are definitely more suitable.

And we wanted to honor this tradition and this insight by calling the project de Nieuwe Meent, The New Commons. “Meent” actually is not used as a word in Dutch anymore. It’s like the common pasture lands of the past. But it is, as an etymological root, exists in every word like “gemeente”, which means the municipality. So the commonness of the term is both everywhere and yet forgotten. So you want to honor it and give it a new life.

David

Give us some context. Tell me a little bit about the state of housing in Amsterdam. I mean, I read somewhere that the average rent is €2,500 a month, which in dollars would be $2,700, $2,800. What’s the situation there? And why was this seen as a solution to the problem?

Selçuk

Maybe I can start with a historical backdrop where more than 100 years ago, this city has been one of the pioneering places on self-built housing of the working class, by the working class, for the working class, which was later incorporated into a much more state-led housing law, which led to the creation of these housing corporations, which were highly regulated, non-profit entities that would produce the housing. Now, until the 70s, this worked. After the Second World War, there was a big construction boom in the city.

But at the same time, there was lots of abandoned buildings, neglected buildings, which led to much more grassroots efforts of the squatter movement in the 70s, 80s and early 90s to re-energize how to build the city and how to center housing as a right. Unfortunately, in the last 40 neoliberal years, these housing corporations really turned into unaccountable, very corporate entities shaped by the whole profit-seeking mechanics of neoliberal states, who are no longer providing as much social housing as they should.

And also let’s consider the spatial characteristics of the city, which is very dense, squeezed by sea and water on multiple sides. So it is a city that cannot necessarily grow, except that they build these entire islands of sand to grow. So in a city which has very compact housing, very expensive housing, the acknowledgement that there is a “housing crisis” was not met with a bold, confident, massive public housing policy and still isn’t really met to its full capacity.

But meanwhile, there were all these civil servants from progressive parties that were pushing slowly internally at the municipal level to create this third form beyond the public and the private, knowing that private sector, the real estate sector is not going to do anything about it. If anything, it’s the source of the problem and the public sector is very slow to transform. I guess they got the sense that diversity is a solution to our wicked problems. Introducing housing cooperatives was not necessarily seen as a solution per se, but as a way to create different forms that can meet different people in the city. As a pilot project, of course, we did not have all the legal forms, the financial support and so on. So whenever we would go to certain subsidy applications or banks, they would still try to put us in one of the two categories. Well, are you a public entity or are you a for-profit market entity? And we had to explain over and over again. We are neither.

David

So let’s flash forward to you have access to the land. That’s the beginning of a whole new set of challenges in terms of what does the building look like? How do we finance it? Who’s going to participate in this process? Who’s going to be the residents? Tell me about getting going and your finding of the architect who was critical to this whole process in terms of sharing your vision and building it out with the proper design and construction.

Selçuk

Indeed, probably one of our biggest sparks of luck was receiving one day an email, responding to our call saying, “hey, we are postcapitalist architects and we want to collaborate with you for your postcapitalist commune”. These were three young architects, Andrea, Mira, and Roel, who were at that time working for a more commercial architecture studio and were rather disillusioned by the commercial nature of their work. And they really wanted to reinvent their practice and get back to their ideals.

So for that first year or more than a year, they just joined us as volunteers for this project or the two levels of the tender application that we had to go through. So it was meeting on Sundays on top of their lives and work, working strictly pro bono, which was for them also a way to acknowledge the complexities of these types of projects. So getting this intimate understanding of how to build a community, what is the financial structure, what are the kind of processes to co-design such a building with, became a research and development opportunity for them.

I do want to flash forward to a few years. After winning the tender, they quit their commercial jobs, started their own practices, and now they are the go-to architecture studio for housing cooperatives or self-built projects in Amsterdam and beyond. They have housing cooperatives in progress as well. So this is also very inspiring for me.

In terms of the co-design process, now this could have been a very superficial process where we would be asked what kind of window frames we want, which color we want. But it went much, much deeper. We basically co-designed the co-design process in a way that was open to anyone. So it wasn’t for members only because it was very early in the process. We haven’t yet established who is in, who is out.

But by keeping it radically open, we in a way eliminated the temptation for bringing private desires into the mix and trying to really get what you as an individual would like to have. Instead, we asked these participants in these radically open workshops, what is good for a community? What good examples have you seen or gotten inspired by what would work for an unknown community in the future?

And one of the key patterns, again, that emerged was this combination of “private sufficiency and communal luxury”. So minimizing as much as possible the private quarters and maximizing shared spaces, facilities, which we were able to hold on to in the many upheavals of the project. And currently, indeed, almost half of the built area is dedicated to communal functions.

We were also very attached to not pouring more concrete onto this planet. Therefore, we really wanted a wooden structure. At that time, in 2018, there was not a single CLT, cross-laminated timber building in Amsterdam. Now it is much more recurrent. And being involved in the architecture, being involved in the whole process meant that even when we had financial troubles, we did not step back from these sustainability goals. We were able to keep to all these essential visions and principles.

David

Well, I want to follow up with two threads here. I want to circle back to Time to Access the practice that the architects were involved in. And I want to get further into the design because that is so critical to having a commons-friendly residential structure. But I think it starts with your co-evolution with the architects themselves as they tried to reinvent themselves in a different practice.

They described their work, Time to Access, as an “Amsterdam-based platform devoted to the development of radical architecture”. And they regard that as “democratization of architecture where the boundaries between commissioning, designing, and developing are blurred due to an intense participation process”, which you briefly described there. It sounds like without this practice, without those three people, you would not have been able to proceed because so much of the industry is in a radically different mindset that’s more corporatist, market-driven, demographic-driven, profitability-driven. Talk a little bit about what sort of practice they have evolved into and what that means for architecture.

Selçuk

Agreed. It was in many ways such a singular moment that we look back and reflect that this is a little bit like the first child, which gets all the attention, maybe overly protective parents, in the sense that at our difficult moments, especially, but along those years, our architects were also project managers. They were very instrumental in getting our crowdfunding campaigns started.

Again, on one aspect, these are because they did not see themselves only as the professional architects doing a project for a client. They were part of the community. Looking at other housing co-ops that are taking off, some of them have these very rigorous, very professional processes of calling, asking for multiple pitches from multiple practices and immediately starting with a professional relation.

I’m glad that we didn’t have this and we started by building relations first, building trust first. We were lucky. I mean, it is also very risky. If we had any kind of friction that would be unresolvable at some point, the project would definitely get derailed. But perhaps with that sense of building long-term relations instead of professional relations, we were also able to overcome these things.

I also want to again flash forward to today, where in our building there is a non-housing space of two floors, a café and a co-working space, which are mainly rented and led by our architects who created a worker cooperative called Woonruimte, where they are aiming to bring all these skills, all these expertise to build the cooperative sector.

This became the hub of growing their practice together with the financial advisors and other professionals. But our relationship did not end with the delivery of the building. We see each other daily. They are accountable to the community on a daily basis. It’s also great advertisement for future housing cooperatives to come and see it in real scale and talk to people. So it is also very transparent in the sense that it’s not just glossy renders that they rely on in order to promote their practice.

David

So in a sense, they were not just a hired hand or contractor. They were developing a new school of architectural design themselves, which they are proceeding to develop, as you suggest. Is that a fair statement?

Selçuk

Absolutely. So both by building a broader community and bringing together these different experts in the same space. I guess an inspiration in this is in Barcelona, you have a vertically integrated cooperative sector, so to speak. All the skills, all the subcontractors you need in order to establish a building exist in cooperatives. Now, we are maybe a long way from that, but I can really confidently say that these are the seeds that will make such a sector grow.

David

In some ways, I’m tempted to say in a friendly way that this makes a distinction between co-ops and commoning, in the sense that co-ops can become over-professionalized and expert, important as that is or even necessary to a project. And yet, in your instance and some of the sequels, the commoning was an essential aspect of building trust relationships and therefore having the kinds of intimate relationships and discussions that may not have occurred under a more client-professional relationship.

Selçuk

Indeed, there are a million ways a housing cooperative can either fail or maybe not live up to some standards we expect or aspirations we expect from them. One being that housing cooperatives can be a very homogeneous, exclusionary, middle-class hobby, for instance. The way the whole sector is currently at its first steps with little support, these long, unending processes, endless time, volunteer time that is expected to be put in, is self-selective.

It can only be a set of people that have the time, that have the comfort and don’t have the precarity and the urgency. So this is a huge limitation of the sector that needs to be overcome. This is why, for instance, right from the beginning, we said this has to be 100% social housing, because otherwise it’s not an answer to the crisis that we are facing.

But this comes with this unresolved tension. How can we expect people who are the most vulnerable in our society, the most marginalized, to do this huge effort to set up their housing project? I don’t have a solution to it, but by creating these more solidaristic institutions and organizations around it, you might get there.

David

In the American context, I spoke with two architects recently, two episodes ago in this podcast, with Neeraj Bhatia and Antje Steinmüller, a San Francisco architect and the dean of the University of Michigan School of Architecture. They have made a specialty of focusing on various forms of collective living arrangements, co-housing, cooperatives, intentional communities, and so forth. They’ve essentially done a lot of ethnographic research on what people really want, as opposed to the prejudices of architects and designers.

Your building is kind of a case study of trying to elicit those facts and design in a rather radically different way than some corporate developer who says, oh, yeah, put in a big shared space. We’ll call that co-housing. So let’s talk a little bit about the particulars of the design of your building and how you came to embrace some of them, even though some of them were rather more challenging or costly.

Selçuk

So half of the building roughly is independent units, which are eligible for social housing subsidies and so on. And the other half is living groups. The independent units are relatively small, which means that even the largest units, if it’s a family with more than one child, it’s tight. It is not a good fit. Then again, the whole world is almost designed for families with two kids. So we were also realizing that this is maybe not a limitation. This is indeed a redressing structural imbalance that is there in the first place.

At the same time, this isn’t really exclusionary either, because of the spatial flexibility of the living groups that are broadly between like four and six people, allow a multi-generational group, non-normative family forms to inhabit and transform their floor as time and their needs evolve.

But still, the private quarters are small. The best way to experience abundance of it is by pooling the facilities. Some of them are really obvious ones, like laundry machines are shared. But also a professional kitchen and a lobby and a multifunctional space allow us to bring some activities that we would otherwise do in private into semi-private, communal, not radically open and public, but more convivial scale. We realized that commoning and sharing works best in gradients, that it’s not all or nothing, but there are these different stages of sharing and collectivity that are distributed across space.

So if you are in a living group, for instance, you have your room, then there’s a space you share with the five people. Upstairs or downstairs there’s another such group. If you go all the way down there’s the collective spaces. Then circulations mean that you encounter all your neighbors in these functional circulation spaces. So it gives a sense of togetherness without necessarily forcing intimacy and not forcing a singular way of sharing.

David

It seems that you have such a radical diversity of types of people there, which could often lead to, let’s say, a lack of cohesion, a lack of community. You know, they’re not like I am. Has that proven to be the case? And how do you account for the sense of community if there is one?

Selçuk

This is a complex and beautiful one that we are trying to wrap our heads around, we were very clear, almost to ourselves, that we didn’t exactly know how to uphold diversity and inclusion from the get-go. It was, and it still is, a learning process.

But some of the intuitions that we had was that the more you make a community somewhat homogeneous with a shared call, shared practices, the more differences become maybe problematic. Whereas with a radical diversity, our aspiration has been to reflect the demographic diversity of the city, for instance, meant that we are creating a microcosm of what we are supposed to experience in society in the first place. So we are not trying to get the best, the most community-spirited people in the same place so that we have the best cultish intentional community experience, but just have a sample of society. And the negotiations, the struggles we have in this relatively small scale and a safer environment teaches also a lot about how to navigate society.

So yes, we may have members that we don’t see every day or do not contribute so equitably perhaps, but we don’t make this into a “them” problem, but indeed a reminder of, okay, how does the community resolve these in a way that is not punitive or restrictive? We are aware that usually things just take more time. They take longer, slower processes so that they are more inclusive. And always it is a balance that is hard to maintain.

To what extent care means care of the individual, the most vulnerable ones, and care of the community? Because if too many people are in need of care and in need of time and space away from the obligations of the project, for instance, it means that caring for the community, caring for the project falls into too few hands, which also leads people to burnout. We are really trying to figure out how do we build commons without exhausting the commoners.

David

This leads me naturally to the question of how do you govern yourselves and what needs to be governed as a community?

Selçuk

For the last eight years, we’ve functioned with consent-based practices, the decision-making processes that we have been familiar with in our social movement organizing. Now, we knew that this wouldn’t be convincing enough for the municipality, for the legal structure of the association. But we do have a, let’s say, backup, safety valve type of a mechanism that then relies on “one person, one vote” for the 40 official members of the association.

To our surprise, over the last eight years, we didn’t need to rely on this majority-rule once. It’s consent-based, decision-making is imperfect, it takes a lot of effort, but it turns out it works pretty fine at this scale and with the level of complexity and challenges that we face. The work is being mostly carried out by workgroups, but some of them are more structural, others are more time-based, project-based.

Of course, there are challenges of coordination, like how much do we trust each other instead of controlling or approving everything in meetings? How much space there is for spontaneity and initiative taking? I guess we are in a reinvention phase. After eight years of a more abstract project phase, we are now a living community, which has its own temporality, rhythm and intimacies. So we are also trying to let go of the ways we have been doing things over the last eight years and take a bit of distance and reimagine how we can function in the coming times.

David

Wow, a work in progress, but it makes perfect sense. Well, I want to pivot to the ecological features of the building and then to the finance, because those strike me as two very important dimensions. I’m astonished that you’re a so-called carbon-[negative] building, actually generating more energy than you consume. And I’ll just mention some of the features, such as the prefab timber framing, which you mentioned earlier, a roof terrace with a solar farm and food growing, a geothermal system connected to heat pumps to make heating and cooling more efficient, and then all sorts of little touches like facades that have high insulation values and triple glazed windows. And even in the brick facade of the building, spaces for bat, bird, and insect nests. I mean, it seems like you were taking things to some really conscientious extremes. But tell me about the process. And did this impose new costs? Did you have to develop the innovations yourself? How did this all work?

Selçuk

What we aimed was also to set an example where we try to prove that sustainability doesn’t come at a premium. that wooden construction isn’t for the most rich segments of the housing sector. But there can be a mass housing, social housing built sustainably. Now, I am not necessarily an expert on whether or not and in which conditions the building’s environmental performances are compelling. We were a little bit following our intuitions.

David

Tell me about your conversations with the architects, Because you were probably pushing them, and they might say, ah, that’s way too expensive, or its performance hasn’t been proven. Yet, you were trying to get, for example, upcycled materials and local materials. And a lot of contractors would say, you know, “forget it. Bring it from 500 miles away” rather than this kind of niche or non-existent market.

Selçuk

Our approach to sustainability was indeed more than just the material performance. but what is sustainable as a business model, as a way to build houses that are both affordable and healthy for us and healthy for the world. This meant that we avoided high-tech solutions as much as possible. We took some relatively conservative material choices as well, like brick wouldn’t have been the first choice if you are trying to do the most cutting-edge sustainable building in the facade. There’s leaving all the construction exposed, making it adaptable in time. So these are the more socially engaged forms of sustainability that we try to bring to prioritize here.

Energy has been also one of the key points. We knew we would have a lot of rooftop and while it’s all statistics, right, the fact that a building is qualified as “carbon neutral” is because of the embodied carbon in the woods. Or if a building is rated as “energy positive”, it’s based on the yearly solar production versus the estimated yearly consumption of its inhabitants.

So actually these kinds of lived experience of how a building will perform is yet to be seen. It also depends on the social relations, the behaviors, the decisions we will take. Same goes for all the green spaces as you named them. It is first and foremost a work of love and care that will turn such spaces into diverse ecosystems, more than human ecosystems.

David

Let’s talk a little bit about the finance, because immersed within a capitalist finance world, developing something like this, that it’s not going to be generating the huge revenue or profits that a commercial building would, would be seen as not so attractive, particularly if the tenants are going to be a lot of lower income, socially diverse, if not questionable categories of demographic identity. How did you find the financing to make this all work, and how did you supplement it with your own fundraising?

Selçuk

Initially, we were partnering with a credit union from Germany that had already financed our previous housing project. So we thought we have a very like-minded partner that has a whole array of similar projects and therefore very much understanding the mechanics of what works in terms of liquidity and so on in the long run. And for a long time, this was going smooth.

After the pandemic, which was in itself a huge blow for the project; as a side, imagine trying to finish a professional project and choose your housemates and so on during a pandemic behind Zoom! When we were just thinking, “okay, this has been the greatest obstacle ever, we are now going out of the pandemic, nothing can stop us”, is when the invasion of Ukraine by Russia made the interest rates skyrocket and the post-pandemic construction boom made the wood prices again jump.

Suddenly our project was unfinanceable. Suddenly, there were no tweaks possible that can be made through our banking partner that would allow the project to go ahead. Now, almost half of the loan would come from the city and almost half of it from this private partner. On top of which, we tried to minimize as much as possible individual contributions because it does not make sense to us low-income people to contribute more than a rent. For which we did a €500K crowdfunding campaign during the pandemic as well.

David

Just to clarify, people are not buying their apartments, they’re renting, and the building is not going to be put on the market in the future. So there’s a whole different premise to the whole financing.

Selçuk

Ultimately, this is a building that will be owned by an association, no individuals own any parts of it. Which meant that what is most maybe important factor for the bank is, will it be viable for the next 50 years? Perhaps we have the advantage of the housing crisis on our side in the sense that the banks might be saying, “well, there is no way this building will be empty.” So this is the kind of ironies of living in such a dire housing sector that they were possibly receptive to living groups, for instance, instead of independent units, knowing that, “okay, in Amsterdam, people are desperate. They will live whichever way.”

Now, maybe I’m exaggerating, but there is something to be said about how much social engineering is being imposed through law and financing that is meant to shape how we live, who we live with. And these kind of entanglements with law and capital are the maybe reasons that make us individualized, neoliberalized subjects. So the people who have been patiently year over year negotiating with the municipality, pushing back on certain expectations, reasoning with these banks in order to protect the shared spaces, for instance, was the greatest challenge and the greatest common practice, if you like. We came out of this financial deadlock by reaching an agreement with another bank, which I’m glad that we got through. I’m glad that this building exists, no questions about it.

But I am also wary and concerned whether a bank benefiting about 5% interest payments for decades to come is really a way to grow the common sector. or is it just rentier finances with grassroots aesthetics? So if you are really serious about turning housing into commons, at the very least it should be publicly financed at this bootstrapping phase. But this is also a long game, right? One of our key foundational principles is that once the loans are paid back in 30, 40 years, the surplus will go into building other housing cooperatives and other commons in our city. So this logic of “paying forward” and not accumulating, but creating more financial commons is still the work to do. And this is not something we can do alone. So all the housing cooperatives that are being developed now, hopefully will bear their actual fruits, more systemic transformative potential in a few decades.

David

There is the example in Germany, of course, of Mietshäuser Syndikat, which has a pay-it-forward fund in its federation of co-housing to self-finance. As I understand it, the city of Amsterdam is more interested in facilitating or helping co-op financing. Is that true? Or are there movements afoot to make this a more viable financial sector for housing?

Selçuk

Currently there’s a lot of movement happening in the Netherlands that I don’t completely have the overview, but Amsterdam has been the testing grounds where other municipalities have been looking to develop their own financial instruments and legal forms. But there is at the same time also a national legal framework that is in the parliament right now that would actually ask every municipality to consult and systematize whether or not they would take cooperatives.

Getting back to the finances, like most of our time over the last eight years, most of our worries, most of our anxiety and disappointments or the reason why many members left the projects over the years, it boils down to the financial insecurity and the insurmountable challenge of raising 8 million euros. All this time we could have better spent in community building, relation building, was spent on financial negotiations. Now, we knew that we were a pilot project so things wouldn’t be easy for us, but I really hope that by creating these public instruments, such a burden will be taken off housing costs in the future and that it will take much less effort, much less stress to make affordable housing.

David

In some ways, dNM could be seen as an aberration, and indeed you ran a gauntlet of very particular idiosyncratic challenges. And yet, in other ways, I think you’ve proven certain patterns of commoning that maybe persist and have some inspirational value. Tell me what general lessons you think your experience might hold for a common sector in housing and some of the challenges that remain to be overcome?

Selçuk

I’d say it’s a mixed bag, and many of it is yet to be seen. For instance, our persistence in having 100% social housing might have freaked the municipality out that the newer projects have a much more limited percentage of social housing allowed. So it is already in the tender criteria that they say it will be 20%, it will be 40% and no wiggle room of negotiation. So by pushing things too far and being too ambitious, maybe some stuff might have backfired.

But jokes aside, it is also not up to a singular pilot project and its evaluation where these kinds of processes will be shaped, right? Like it really takes a movement to demand and to establish these principles. So it is yet to be seen how the emerging social housing cooperative movement becomes a movement, becomes a social movement with a progressive agenda and not just a network of people who happen to have built housing for themselves. And this is going to be the determinant factor whether or not it can have a transformative potential, be indeed a much more accessible and inclusive form of production of housing, or it becomes a niche anecdotal practice.

Our contribution is through setting the example. We cannot shape the policy directly, but for instance, we have about three quarters of our members, of our inhabitants are from migration backgrounds. I can imagine other housing cooperatives seeing this and saying, “it is possible. How can we implement this? Do we establish quotas?” Or maybe indeed people who are in a minority position in a new housing cooperative can show these examples and say, “they can do it, why can’t we? They can manage social housing that is extremely sustainable. Why can’t we? They can make so many shared spaces by keeping private quarters small. Why can’t we?”

So we can’t necessarily transform as a strategic intervention, but we can set an inspiration. And what I would really like to see is not that we are seen as this heroic, exceptional, indeed an aberration almost, but maybe in 10 years, 20 years, there’s nothing special about us. We are just one housing cooperative among many.

David

Well, that’s a lovely sentiment to end on. I mean, I want to congratulate you on your beautiful building. Thank you for the tour you gave me a couple of months ago. It’s a stunning building. The fact that you were able to have so many shared amenities for the social housing context was just amazing. I think much of your achievement has to do with that you made the space, gave yourself the room to experiment, to innovate, and to do this even in an affordable housing context, the ecological dimensions as well. So I just want to, with great admiration, thank you for the model you helped build. It exists, and as you said, you’ve done it. It hopefully will inspire others to devise their own innovations to make it more normal for it to occur. So thank you so much, Selçuk.

Selçuk

Thank you, David. It has been many years you’ve been following our journey, so it was really a delight to show you. What I showed you is still mostly bricks and woods and spaces at most. And I’ve learned with you, through you, that it is mainly the relations that make the commons. I’m looking forward to your next visit so that you can see the community grow.