The world is our home, not your property

Join KSU’s 7th reading group about the commons – community organised resources for the future! As current crises are making abundantly clear, government and business have not turned out to be the best guardians our natural or cultural resources. More and more communities are looking to the commons – not private nor public, but something in between – for better solutions.

But what exactly are the commons? Traditionally they refer to natural resources, such as air, water or forests, not publicly or privately owned, but held in common. Now they have come to include the cultural sphere as well, like language, knowledge, our cities and the Internet. We can consider them shared gifts, which we receive as members of a community and govern in common: a self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the market or the state.

Community gardens, collective childcare, communal living and other commoning practices are becoming more and more visible and popularised, but can these commons provide a viable alternative, or a real challenge to our current economic system?

This reading group is participatory, self-organised and free of charge. We collectively decide which subtopics to cover and literature to read by splitting up into groups, which will each organize one of the sessions. The reading group will be in English, held from Oct. 8 to Dec. 17, bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings from 19:30 until 22:00 in political bookshop de Rooie Rat at Oudegracht 65 in Utrecht.

This reading group is organised within the framework of (Un)usual Business, a collaboration between Kritische Studenten Utrecht and Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory

Programme for this Wednesday
In the first session, in a short kick-off presentation we will introduce the concept of the commons. Traditionally they refer to natural resources, such as air, water or forests, not publicly or privately owned, but held in common. Now they have come to include the cultural sphere as well, like language, knowledge, our cities and the Internet. If you want to read up on the commons we suggest this short article as an introduction: https://www.kritischestudenten.nl/app/uploads/2014/10/Commons-Iceberg.pdf

This reading group is participatory. That means that we’ll split into groups, and each think of a topic, find literature, and prepare a presentation & discussions for one of the upcoming sessions. To facilitate this, in the second half of the session we’ll split up into groups which will each think about a topic about which to prepare a session in the coming months.