With a population of 200,000 and an equal number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), Manbij is one of the largest cities in the liberated North of Syria. From July 2012 to January 2014, the city was governed by a Revolutionary Council and a Trustee Council but since early 2014, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took it over. Based on three months of ethnographic research and more than two hundred interviews with key players as well as ordinary residents, the paper examines social and political challenges the revolutionaries were facing during the period before ISIS’s takeover. It pays particular attention to the creative ways they use to run the existing institutions and by doing so, the paper suggests, they lay down the first building blocks for the future nation. Staying away from empty and elitist discourses about the nation, the citizens of Manbij redefine the meaning of national identity by exploring practical ways to solve their everyday problems. As a central case, the paper explores the negotiations and deliberative practices surrounding the operation of one of the most important mills in Northern Syria, which produces enough flour to feed one million people. The research analyzes how for almost twenty months, Manbij became an incubator for nation-building and participatory democracy despite the multifaceted challenges it was facing. With its meager resources and despite the regime’s frequent airstrikes, the city was actively transforming its institutions to address the socio-economic, political, and humanitarian problems. Revolutionaries were coming up with innovative solutions to provide bread, water, electricity, and security to the population. More importantly, by making the city livable, and solving everyday challenges, the residents were negotiating a fragile and emergent democracy and as a result they were redefining the meaning of the new nation. Theirs is not an oppositional nationalism that simply rejects the officially sanctioned version propagated by the Ba’ath Party, but an iterative one that is adjusted and transformed myriad times every day through countless micro-encounters among an increasingly diverse population. The research suggests that iterative nationalism, which works best in a democratic environment, will prevent the fragmentation and tensions between the different groups, if nurtured and safeguarded.