Dr. Selçuk Balamir is a designer by trade, educator by profession and organiser by inclination. He works at the intersections of commoning practices, postcapitalist politics and climate action. He specialises in creative communications, grassroots community building and developing just transition imaginaries.
He has been active in the European social movements since 2009. He co-founded grassroots disobedient action collectives (codeROOD, Fossil Free Culture NL, Queers4Climate) and co-developed the strategic framework of Climate Games, a transmedia action-adventure platform enabling peer-to-peer disobedience, and of Shell Must Fall, a grassroots campaign targeting shareholder meetings of the carbon major. He co-initiated the social housing projects NieuwLand, a postcapitalist intentional community where he currently lives, and de Nieuwe Meent, a rental cooperative based on patterns of commoning, completed in 2025.
His PhD in Cultural Analysis from University of Amsterdam is about commoning practices in postcapitalist design. He taught eco-social design at the New Earth in Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam and he was the 2022 Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. As part of the PITCH project, he is currently doing a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam on petrocultures and the creative repurposing of fossil energy infrastructure in the just transition.
Critical Heritage Ecologies 