midterm report
The new commons thinking, fuelled after the civic disobedience movements of 21st century, right to the city movements and dispossession of the 99%, incontrovertible climate, finance and social crises, offers a new structure of social production and reproduction. Among many other disciplines it is also architecture’s liability to transform or interpret this thinking into spatial practices as a form of post-capitalist living. So how will architects position themselves within this framework? We are already witnessing that a big portion of the professionals are trying to keep the facade with the “business-as-usual” attitude while others are experimenting through projects of urban guerrilla tactics, co-housing, squatting, etc. Going beyond the already existing patterns of property (for so long defined as either public or private) commons architecture is a playground where critical spatial practices are tested and experimented. Setting the framework of commons architecture and how its implications can be shared in the form of knowledge commons are the main objectives of my research.

In this scope, the main research questions are as follows:
What is commons architecture, what are its main characteristics?
How can we activate knowledge commons for commons architecture? What are our resources, community and rules of appropriation to generate this commoning process? 
How can we make this knowledge commons sustainable in terms of governance, finance and innovation?

Formulating my research in two main tracks as content and form in the first oral presentation I kept my work structured under these two titles. For the content part (related to the first research question), we have written a paper with Burak Pak to communicate well what we mean by “commons architecture”. This document is also open for co-ideation on the collective pad +What is Commons Architecture? 

For the form part (the second research question), with Burak we have written another paper focusing on the short-comings on the conventional architecture media. It is also on pad +Post-truth in Architecture Media. And I have been collaborating with intentional communities, architecture networks to see how the form of collective work can be generated and sustained as commons (the third research question). The labs below are all considered as test grounds not only for finding tools for knowledge commons but also for understanding the interpersonal relationships and their impact within the community and/or network. I have spent a lot of time in attending conferences and workshops as I considered them as the best places to meet like-minded researchers who in time might be involved in the community I want to build for the platform.

Below is the ecosystemic map of my activities, how they connect to knowledge commons and form & content structure of the research.

Labs

PhD as knowledge commons 
November 2017-… | Global  
Considering my own research as an open-source to be shared with interested researchers or practitioners working on similar topics makes it coherent with the principles I carry out in my PhD. All my work related to my Phd is on +commons architecture, a collaborative pad where anyone with the link can edit and comment. While sharing the link with my fellows I also encourage them to share it with people who are working on these issues as well. Until now more than 30 people have roamed the pad by signing in to Paper by Dropbox and more than a dozen others that I cannot track. The structure consists of my action plans, questions, fragments, list of initiatives working on commons, events calendar and articles, etc. We, with Burak Pak also collectively write our articles on the pad, openly even in its very draft state. The main idea is to test the knowledge commons while working on the research. (Appendix 1: the whole layout of the pad)

Alt_Shift* 
October 2018-… | Brussels | with research collective
We, approximately 15 researchers working on similar topics such as social inclusion, co-creation, critical mapping, commons etc are forming a new research collective. For this research collective to be compatible with the ideas inherent in each of our researches we are building knowledge commons within and around the research collective through collective writing, network mapping and peer to peer sharing. For me, this is a good test ground for self-governance for accumulative knowledge generation in an intentional community. We are discussing and experimenting with digital tools for an efficient collaborative work. 

Ortaklasa
June 2018-… | Turkey | with Duygu Toprak and Selcuk Balamir
Duygu Toprak (lead), master student in urban planning at METU, Ankara, Selcuk Balamir, PhD Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and me have applied for European Cultural Foundation’s Europe’s Courageous Citizens call and received a fund to map the commons initiatives in Turkey. During a two-days of intense workshop in October 2018 we have set the timelines and the operative framework and we are developing the project accordingly. This collaboration provides me in-depth understanding on the commoning practices in Turkey through a critical lens. 

Digitautonomy
April 2018-… | Global | with CivicWise (Alfonso Sanchez Uzábal, Pascual Perez, Matteo Di Cristofaro, Jorge Toledo, Iona Valero, Jonathan Reyes Gonzales et al) 
A group of us in CivicWise (network of people working on civic innovation for territtory making) are trying to generate a repository of free open sofwares for collaborative work. We aim to propose an alternative to existing commercial sofwares for collective initiatives so their digital tools are coherent with their ideals. I consider this lab as an important learning ground for my understanding on knowledge commons.  

Lost in Translation
July 2017-… | Global | with CivicWise (Alfonso Sanchez Uzábal, Pascual Perez, et al)
Another group of us in CivicWise started working on communication of the group both internally and externally. As a first step we rewrote the texts on the website and opened it to feedbacks from the whole network which is more than 600 people on the Slack channel with approximately 100 active members. In the last big gathering we decided to rename our work from communication to caretaking of the community and decided to invent new tools for our non-hierarchical network. For me the Lost in Translation is a good place to experience the interpersonal relationships in horizontal communities and to seek facilitation tools for better engagement within the network. 

Master Dissertation Studio: Activating Urban Commons through Architecture(s)/Sint-Lucas KU Leuven
September 2018-June 2019 | Brussels | with Burak Pak, Isabelle Tjampens, François Maindiaux, Yannick Sluyts, Julie Charlot
The studio aims to investigate architecture’s capacity in generating sharing spaces for (re)production of socio-spatial interaction. The studio itself is also being co-designed as a common space where the traditional boundaries between the tutors and students are also challenged for a peer-to-peer learning environment. Working more likely as a group of six commoners we consider our personal knowledge as shared resources and write and rewrite our protocols to collaborate more fruitfully. The studio also has a collective pad +activating urban commons studio (Appendix 2)

Publications

What is Commons Architecture?
18-22 June 2018 | TICYUrb: Third International Conference of Young Urban Researchers, ISCTE-IUL. Lisbon | with Burak Pak 
Paper presented in the conference, past through peer-review with no major revisions waiting to be published in the conference proceedings (Appendix 3)
Extract from the abstract: “In this paper we introduce a manifesto of commons architecture as provocation to rethink architecture and its practitioners. We frame commons architecture as the critical practice of social (re)production of space.  We propose three ends and two means for an operative framework for commons architecture, and move on to elaborate on the concepts and practices of the common good, the critical spatial practice and post-capitalism as ends and the agency of hacking and feminism the relevant means.”  

Post-truth in Architecture Media
28-30 November 2018 | After post-truth: 2nd Interface Politics International Conference, BAU Design College of Barcelona | with Burak Pak
Paper submitted to conference after abstract accepted through a double blind peer-review process (Appendix 4)
Extract from the abstract: “…the main aim of this paper is to initiate a critical discussion on the forms of post-truth such as manipulation of knowledge; censorship, self-censoring and blackout; commercialization of knowledge and poor journalism within the mainstream architecture media. The paper starts with a visit to three scenes experienced by the authors, revealing different forms of post-truth in this domain. Afterwards, we discuss the emergence and evolution of post-truth in relation to the architecture media. Following the presentation of a theoretical framework for the future of a post-truth-proof architecture media, we introduce the idea of a knowledge commons...”

New Forms of Conviviality
Interview with Cristina Gamboa of LaCol
19 September 2018, XXI

No Worries! 
Review on Venice Architecture Biennale 2018
20 July 2018, XXI

Collaborative Work Through Community Building and the Other Way Around
Review on Glocal Camp 2018 
26 April 2018, XXI

An(other) Emergency Call
Review on the exhibition After the End of the World at CCCB
19 April 2018, XXI

Architecture vs Hacker Culture
Essay on open-source architecture
March 2018, Design Unlimited Year 2 Issue 4 

Practice of Practices
Interview with Joachim Declerck of Architecture Workroom Brussels
19 January 2018, XXI

Activating Urban Tactics for Self-management
Interview with Constantin Petcou of Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée
5 September 2017, XXI

Glocal Camp 2017: Means and Ends
Review on Glocal Camp 2017 
27 July 2017, XXI

Reframing the Social
Interview with Florian Koehl of Fatkoehl Architekten
25 April 2017, XXI

Participatory Architecture: Opportunities and Traps
Roundtable with Bengi Akbulut, Ferhat Hacialibeyoglu, Merve Akdag Oner, Sait Ali Koknar, Senem Doyduk and Sinan Omacan 
21 March 2017, XXI

Workshops attended

Fearless Cities
Reinventing Local Politics Summit: The New Municipalism
22-23 September, Brussels, Kaaitheater 

AESOP PhD Workshop
Making Space for Hope - exploring its ethical, activist and methodological implications
Aesop PhD workshop / 5-8 July 2018 in Karlskrona Sweden 
Aesop Annual Congress / 10-14 July 2018 in Gothenburg
(notes on the workshop are in Appendix 1

Glocal Camp 2018
Workshops on governance of CivicWise
4-15 April 2018,  Gran Canarias & Tenerife
(review of the event is published as “Collaborative Work Through Community Building and the Other Way Around”)

Hack the Earth 
Workshops on technology and feminisms at Calafou
30 March - 1 April 2018, Vallbona d'Anoia

VIU International PhD Academy
The Global Society: The Importance of Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Tackle Societal Challenges
18-22 September 2017, Venice International University

Glocal Camp 2017
Workshops on governance of CivicWise
8-15 July 2017, L’Hospitalet
(review of the event is published as “Glocal Camp 2017: Means and Ends”)

Conferences attended

Post-Growth 2018 Conference
18-19 September, European Parliament Brussels, Belgium

TICYUrb
Third International Conference of Young Urban Researchers
18-22 June 2018, ISCTE-IUL. Lisbon

AESOP Annual Congress
Making Space for Hope - exploring its ethical, activist and methodological implications
10-14 July 2018, Gothenburg

Urban Struggles
Urban Struggles in Mediterranean Cities: The Right to the City and the Common Space
31 May – 3 June 2018, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens

Saskia Sassen
Who owns the city? 
8 May 2018, Faculty of Architecture Sint-Lucas, Brussels  
(notes on the conference are in Appendix 1)

Mckenzie Wark 
The drunken driver: thoughts on a waning civilisation
19 February 2018, CCCB barcelona 
(notes on the conference are in Appendix 1)

So What About Politics?
International Symposium
3-4 November 2017, iMAL, Brussels
(notes on the event are in Appendix 1)

Talks

Acik Radio talk
Guest at the independent radio station to talk about my PhD research on commons
Host: Yagmur Yildirim
11 October 2018, İstanbul
 
Lecture on Commons 
Sharing my research and crticial visions on commons with MEF University architecture students
31 October 2018, via video-conference

Courses taken

  • Scientific research integrity
  • Introductory seminar
  • Architecture and the History of Ideas (Rajesh Heynickx & Filip Mattens) 
  • ID Kit (Karel Deckers) 
  • Urban Projects and Collective Spaces – Paradigms, Methods, Tools (Kris Scheerlinck) 
  • Action Research (Petra Pferdmenges) 
  • Leadership in Phd (skill course by Stefan Wellens)


Next Steps
After comments on the midterm report by the supervisory committee members, it turned out to be clear that all the activities I am involved in are not clearly communicated in their connections to the final aim of the research -the setting up of an online platform in the form of knowledge commons. So methodology will be discussed deeply. Some ways to approach the phd methodology can be: practice based research, participatory action research, critical theory, etc.

Continuing the +deck log I started at the end of November, to make the research replicable for others as the deck log is a space for daily notes, high hopes and epic failures.

Collaborating more closely with the Wikitribune community, to understand their principles of news-making, internal communication and different roles and to understand whether it is logical to adopt their programming structure for the platform I would like to set up.