Experimental Co-Becoming:Post-Commoning Practices in ACTA

This paper analyses ACTA, a former dentistry school in Amsterdam’s Nieuw-West repurposed into affordable student housing. The building embodies the ambivalence of urban life: it offers a communal refuge amidst a deepening housing crisis, while simultaneously commodifying bohemian aesthetics to legit­imise substandard living conditions. We argue that ACTA exemplifies a mode of existence that catalyses commoning practices in conditions otherwise hostile to collectivity. Our analysis is concept­ualised through ‘post-commoning’ – the practices of adaptation that appropriate both material and social structures in response to precarity. Repurposed classrooms and salvaged materials give ACTA its visual and ideological character, reflecting the efforts of early residents to create a self-managed, world-making space in the context of late capitalism. Metho­ do­ logically, this paper draws on interviews with residents and photo­ graphs of its interiors. It puts into conversation the theoretical frameworks of Lauren Berlant’s commons, Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘social space’ to unpack ACTA’s physical, social, and aesthetic complexities.