D66: ‘TU Delft may grow, outside the city’

D66 party candidate Sivan Maruf grew up in the Delft residential neighbourhood of Buitenhof and believes that too many cutbacks on local amenities and public space have been made since 2008. “My friends and I used to go to the community centre a lot, but it has now disappeared with the cutbacks.” To Maruf this meant that a lot of young people in his neighbourhood became invisible. “I wanted to avoid political decisons being taken that would have negative effects.” After a ‘yes, I want to be in the municipal council’ course, he joined the D66 Delft party in 2018.

You have ideas for all sorts of types of housing. What would you do about the shortage of student rooms?
“Work on a combination of more housing in adjoining municipalities and on campus. Rijswijk and Schiedam are already being considered for more student housing. In the future we will need to look for more of these types of locations. We should not only build housing there, but also amenities such as sports facilities, cafes and restaurants, and print shops. On campus itself we should consider temporary housing, such as circular designs for example which you can lift and move to another location after 10 years or so.”

 The land belongs to TU Delft, so they would need to cooperate. How will you convince TU Delft to build more than the current houses and possibly even temporary housing?  
“The Municipality needs to be actively involved and start discussions with TU Delft more often. We need to look at TU Delft’s planning in greater detail. We need to think about things like whether TU Delft needs certain parts of the land for educational buildings and whether the adjoining land needs to be vibration free. This is all fine, but then they need to point to a place that will not be needed in the next 10 or 15 years. This could then be used for temporary modular housing. As soon as TU Delft would need the land, you can put the houses somewhere else in the Netherlands.”

‘The motion is intended to help vulnurable young people find a room’

Many of the election programmes centre around the growth of TU Delft. How do you envision the future of TU Delft?
“The D66 party stands for education. Everyone should have the chance to study at university. But here in Delft we are reaching the limit. We do not have the space anymore to help students find housing and other amenities. TU Delft may continue to grow, but then in locations outside the city. This has already started with The Hague campus. We believe that there should be more places like this that support education, such as spaces where students and companies can work under one roof.”

Tell us one thing that you managed to do for students or young people last year.
“We submitted the ‘Kamers met aandacht‘ (thinking about rooms, in Dutch) motion with other political parties. Some young people in Delft are vulnerable or do not really have a network to speak of. The motion is intended to help them find a room. We believe it is important that this often forgotten group gets help.”

If you had a big pot of money, what would you spend it on?
“A bottomless pot? Then I would quickly insulate all the existing houses as the climate crisis is a real problem that we need to solve as quickly as possible. Furthermore, people with low incomes – who often live in poorly insulated homes – have the right of a low energy bill.”

• For this interview series, the editors of Delta approached all participating Delft political parties by email, sms, phone, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. Despite repeated contact attempts, we did not succeed in scheduling interviews with Bij1Delft, Onafhankelijk Delft and Volt. Read the election programmes of all participating political parties in Delft via this link (in Dutch).