About (Un)usual Business

This website is meant as an accessible knowledge pool of theory and practice regarding the commons and community economies. With this website, we want to inspire, organize and activate people who are interested in self-organization, and those who are already active. This way, we try to help build a world in which economic and social relationships are based on self-organization, care, solidarity and sustainability.

We use this website to provide an overview of our collective research and our relationships, and to support our own research and self-organization process. At the same time, the website can function as an active platform that gives groups opportunities to learn from each other, to meet each other, and to build stronger networks together to support each other.

Research and action go hand in hand in our process: we strive to practice a different economic form of organization, but we can only learn what that form may look like by talking to others and by experimenting. We hope that the stories on this website inspire people to take matters into their own hands and win back control over how they arrange their daily lives.

On the home page, you will find a collection of our activities and publications. The colored buttons in the main menu can be used to filter this collection by color. In our knowledge pool, you will find an overview of content that we arrange by topic.

(Un)usual Business started in 2013 as a research group, emerging from a collaboration between art organization Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory and activist collective Kritische Studenten Utrecht. After the second research group organized the public reading group "Rethinking the Commons - the world is our home, not your property" in the fall of 2014, the group was expanded in early 2015 when designers from Studio Inherent and web developer Linksmith joined (Un)usual Business.

We are a volunteer collective that works without hierarchy, and we make decisions based on consensus. We can organize our activities semi-autonomously by working in different working groups that each have their own focus and interests, supported by a participative budget from Casco.

(Un)usual Business is an ambitious project that runs on volunteers. That means we are always looking for new blood! We need help on the following fronts:

Research

A rotating research group performs case studies about local commoning practices. Do you want to know more about the commons, and are you interested in doing field work? Please have a look at our open call here.

Translation and editing

Since we strive to make our website and publications bilingual, we can always use help with translating and editing texts.

Organizing activities

We would like to attract more people who like running our public program. This could involve helping organize events, and providing help during larger activities like the Gat in de Markt festival.

Keep an eye on our activities page, or send us an email at: info@unusualbusiness.nl