Seeing Solidarity Cities

Counter-Mapping for Economic Alternatives

Maps are effective rhetorical devices that communicate volumes in an instant and command attention. Maps are ontologically potent. Adapting Cindi Katz’s words, we might say that maps, like other forms of knowledge production, “ooze with power.”4 They have helped consolidate state, corporate, and other kinds of hegemonic power over the territories and people being mapped. One consequential example is how mapping was a vital part of colonial conquest. The colonial powers deployed maps for the purposes of exploration, conquest, governing, expropriation, slave trade, and extraction.

Although power can be consolidated via mapping, it can also be fiercely contested using the same tools: what is mapped for hegemonic purposes can be disrupted through counter-mapping.5 In many ways, counter-mapping as a practice has a vast spectrum of inspiring possibilities used by people all over the globe.6 Some of the most compelling examples of counter-maps come from Indigenous communities that have deployed mapping as an anticolonial tool. Against the colonial use of maps to exert domination, Indigenous communities worldwide have used counter-mapping to draw attention to land theft and to fight back by documenting places and natural resources that are critical for Indigenous ways of life but disregarded by modern states.7 Moving beyond responses to state actions, Indigenous scholars have also used maps to reconstruct Indigenous lifeworlds that include their own place-names, spiritual practices, languages, and livelihoods that have been entirely excluded by colonial cartographers.8 They have also worked to develop radical mapping epistemologies that originate in Indigenous knowledge systems instead of Western cartography.9 The alternative mappings of land both challenge a settler colonial order and affirm the existence and significance of other ways to be in the world. We find inspiration in this work.

As discussed in the introduction, we aim to apply such counter-mapping strategies to the solidarity economy. We caught a glimpse of such efforts in the book’s opening vignette of Iglesias Garden, which used counter-mapping to defend garden spaces and challenge hegemonic ways of representing garden land as vacant or abandoned. In the remainder of this section, we describe several other examples of counter-mapping initiatives that directly inform our research in this book. These include especially counter-mapping done within diverse economies scholarship, within the solidarity economy movement itself, and in our own prior work.

Many diverse-economies scholars have relied on mapping as a strategy for making communities that participate in noncapitalist economies visible to the world and themselves; they have harnessed the ontological power of mapping to represent noncapitalist economies with the hope of bringing postcapitalist worlds into being.10 As with the cooperators at the Asbury Park initiative, a number of these diverse economies projects have been central to starting new collective initiatives rooted in particular communities.11 To illustrate, we pick up one thread in the work of Kevin St. Martin, whose research with fishing communities in New England usefully illustrates the postcapitalist possibilities inaugurated by mapping. In contrast to conventional fishing maps, which do not reveal the communal dimensions of fisheries, St. Martin and his coauthors use National Marine Fisheries Service data to map spaces in the ocean where particular groups of fishers usually fish. He then worked with fisher communities to understand the significance of these communal uses of the fishing grounds for their livelihoods. Whereas previously there had only been “individual fishers,” the resultant maps depicted potential “communities at sea.”12

This action research project helped give rise not only to a new community identity but also to new forms of collective action. The fishers formed a group called the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association (today known as the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association) that proposed an alternative groundfish management plan to regional authorities. The plan sought to both safeguard their livelihoods and protect oceans from overfishing by ceasing fishing during parts of the year. While their plan was rejected in favor of a private quota system, they did not give up on a vision of community-based, sustainable fisheries, and they created the first community-supported fishery in the country in Maine in 2007, a model that has since spread to multiple states and countries.13 This example illustrates how the act of mapping postcapitalist initiatives, whether on land or at sea, can both bolster existing initiatives and facilitate the emergence of new ones. Once community interest in postcapitalist practices emerges, that interest can performatively seep into other dimensions of life, traveling to other places and people.

There is something exciting about people that are engaging in collective ventures—like community-supported fisheries, worker cooperatives, or community gardens—directly opposed to the everyday capitalist ways of organizing that same economy. Mapping them can help bring about changes that get at the very architecture of the economic processes connecting people. This is where we, this book’s authors, have also contributed to this tradition of building other worlds through mapmaking. One way maps can lead to action is exemplified by the story of solidarity economy mapping in Asbury Park.14 In a similar way, Stephen Healy’s engagement with a formerly incarcerated persons advocacy group’s efforts to start a worker cooperative in Worcester involved him in the practical exercise of inventory and mapmaking.15 For over a decade, Craig Borowiak has been engaged with cooperatives, urban agriculture communities, and community advocacy groups in Philadelphia to inventory, map, and defend the city’s cooperatives and community gardens.16 Finally, Marianna Pavlovskaya has spent decades engaged in research on alternative and diverse economies and critical GIS scholarship, as well as engaging students in collaborative class mapping projects working with community advocacy groups.17 All of these prior experiences shape our research and mapping work in this book.

Our approach to mapping the solidarity economy has also been influenced by various mapping initiatives coming directly out of the solidarity economy movement itself. These have been situated at various levels. When we first commenced this research a decade ago, activist groups were emerging and explicitly mapping urban solidarity economies in Chicago, Saint Louis, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, New York (apart from us), and elsewhere. Each of these maps is somewhat different from the others. For example, Chicago’s cooperative and solidarity map also includes libraries, community-based organizations, and hackerspaces, along with cooperatives of different kinds. Other city groups came up with their own categories. SolidarityNYC created a user-friendly map that divides organizations by type of goods and services (entertainment, food, etc.).18 On a microlevel, living maps of solidarity economies in cities are helping residents who want to integrate the solidarity economy into their everyday lives. On the level of cities, this sort of mapping is vital for achieving political goals such as defending particular neighborhoods and shared spaces from gentrification, building relationships, or identifying supply chain opportunities like purchasing contracts from other solidarity economy entities.

In addition to these neighborhood and citywide initiatives, solidarity economy movement practitioners around the world have endeavored to create national maps of solidarity economies. These national maps require additional conversations about how to aggregate local information and represent it at a larger scale. They typically involve integrating many different local maps, reconciling differences in categories and cartographic symbols, and working across programming languages. No easy feat. And yet, despite the difficulty, regions and countries in the Global South and North have developed interactive online maps of social economies and solidarity economies.19

Back in 2005, the Brazilian Forum of Solidarity Economy (Fórum Brasileiro de Economia Solidária, FBES) pioneered these efforts. FBES partnered with universities and the federal government to recruit hundreds of interviewers from universities and civil society who visited over twenty-six thousand associations and enterprises countrywide, searching for information regarding their history, management, economic activity, difficulties, and needs (the second national census was conducted in 2013).20 FBES generated a searchable database and map that allowed for policy development, networking among solidarity economy entities, supply chain development, and enhanced public visibility.21

We became directly involved in developing such a map for the United States. At the time, in the early 2000s, the solidarity economy concept had only recently been introduced in the U.S. context and the country lagged behind other countries in terms of building awareness and developing the solidarity economy movement. Seeing that there was no map of the U.S. solidarity economy, we worked with movement leaders to make one. From 2010 onward, we collaborated with the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN), particularly its board members Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei, on the methodology for the national map.22 Its development also became part of our National Science Foundation–funded project “Mapping the Solidarity Economy in the United States” (2013–2016).23 The primary intention was to generate a national-level map usable by activists, practitioners, and researchers to expand the U.S. solidarity economy at the national scale. Another goal was to build awareness that the solidarity economy is already a reality and thereby to help bring a better world into being by representing it. Together with USSEN, we sought to use the power of mapping to show the existence of the U.S. solidarity economy and facilitate its development in a country widely seen as decidedly and fully capitalist.

This work was marked by long deliberations about the solidarity economy’s boundaries, the nature of its organizations, and practices and relationships that count as solidarity economy. Through this collaboration, USSEN developed a typology of solidarity economy initiatives organized by activity in areas of production, consumption, distribution, finance, and governance (see the appendix for how we define each of the typology’s terms). This typology, reworked and adjusted (Figure 1), became the foundation of the mapping epistemology that we use in this book and that will be discussed in the next section of this chapter.

Working on the national map with USSEN, we assembled a national spatial database of the solidarity economy, built from disparate datasets (no single national dataset of solidarity economy initiatives existed previously) by working with umbrella organizations such as the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Credit Union National Association, among numerous others. With the help of student research assistants, we cleaned and merged the national data while book coauthor Craig Borowiak took the lead on working with tech cooperatives to create and maintain the mapping platform.24 A snapshot of this platform is presented in Plate 2. This interactive and searchable map includes over twenty-five thousand entries and provides a user-friendly way to search for and find solidarity economy organizations across the country by location, organization type (e.g., food co-ops, credit unions), function (entries are tagged as finance/exchange, food, housing, learn and play, goods and services, and governance), or keywords. The map is also zoomable to examine geographic patterns at different scales. Crucially, the map establishes breadth, scalability, and diversity in one stroke, adding heft to an anticapitalist ordering of all those spheres of consumption, production, finance, and governance. Rather than offering a single alternative, this map represents a combination of initiatives engaged in crafting an alternative world in the country. In short, the map acts as a pragmatic organizing tool and a research tool for everyone who wants to become familiar with the solidarity economy in the United States.

Although this map might have been the first of its kind in the United States, today a number of national mapping projects nourish strategic thinking about solidarity economy at macroscales. The New Economy Coalition, a membership-based network supporting the U.S. solidarity economy, and Symbiosis, a confederation of grassroots organizations, have both produced searchable directories and maps for strengthening solidarity economy ecosystems at different scales.25 Another example comes from Black Socialists in America, an organization formed in 2018. They created what they call a U.S. “Dual Power Map” that makes visible projects advancing Black empowerment that use the tools of the solidarity economy movement and are united under “larger groups committed to global, directly democratic, and decentralized eco-socialism.”26

National maps are powerful because their construction connects different groups of people across different parts of the country. Ideally, national maps continue to evolve and strengthen the solidarity economy movement. There is, however, a cost to these national-scale and other grassroots mapping efforts. They are frequently driven by time-consuming volunteer work that goes into the creation, updates, and maintenance of datasets and maps. Some projects stall when volunteers burn out, and when this happens, the map data become static and outdated. Although this has been the experience of many national mapping efforts both in the United States and abroad, many continue and are now joined by solidarity economy mapping at the global scale.27 Despite having difficulty keeping their maps updated, these mapping projects continue to have reverberating social impacts just by showing that this other world of solidarity economies that many of us have been desperately seeking is around us, including on the city streets we walk.

Our project in this book aligns with many of those mapping efforts to make economic alternatives visible, but it also differs in that our focus is equally on analysis of the solidarity economy as a social phenomenon that is understudied but that can potentially have a profound impact on U.S. cities and beyond. This leads us to discuss our methodology and how we made choices on how to research solidarity economies at the urban level.

Epistemological Approach Taken in This Book

Maps, like other forms of representation, only work on the basis of map authors deciding what to include and what to leave out. This determination is key to understanding mapping epistemologies and, by extension, the ontological power of maps to make worlds. As academics involved in mapping the solidarity economy, we share the same pragmatic interest that guides people within the solidarity economy movement in creating maps that show the location, composition, and distribution of solidarity economy institutions, practices, and relationships. But our mapping epistemology also drives the scientific inquiry into the solidarity economy as an understudied but important social phenomenon. We are conscious of the theoretical frameworks and ideologies that shape choices about what is ultimately represented on a map.

As a primary aim, the book seeks to show where solidarity economies are located and explain why they are located in specific places. Stated differently, it seeks to answer the “why of where” question: Why do the dots representing solidarity economy initiatives on the maps cluster in some neighborhoods and not elsewhere? We want to get at the story behind the dots on a screen or paper—the efforts at building and defending the solidarity economy and Solidarity Cities. We explain the patterns that emerge through a combination of place-focused narratives and geospatial analysis. Histories of particular institutions and stories about their neighborhoods enrich surveys and qualitative work with solidarity economy participants in every sector. We also map and analyze the socioeconomic contexts in which solidarity economy initiatives have developed in all three cities. These many methods and layers of analysis constitute our research and mapping epistemology.

At the center of our research is a typology of the solidarity economy. It determines what we inventory, map, and analyze. As described above, our efforts at the city scale grew out of our national-scale efforts in collaboration with USSEN. In creating the typology for the book, we began with the national-level categorizations developed with USSEN. We then adapted these after numerous discussions with local movement leaders and theoretical deliberations about definitions, categories, inclusions, and exclusions. This modified typology is presented in Figure 1 (see appendix for a glossary of solidarity economy types, along with select resources for further information).

The typology (or, simply, table) divides the solidarity economy into five principal domains of activity that reflect major economic spheres: consumption, production, finance, exchange, and governance. Under these domains, the typology encompasses a diversity of forms. Some, like consumer cooperatives and credit unions, are formal organizations with a paid staff and legal incorporation status. Others, such as rotating savings and credit associations, are more informal. Some, like unpaid household labor, are practices rather than formal organizations. Still others, such as fair trade and barter networks, are diffuse networks without a distinct location. Overall, the typology gathers a rich heterogeneity of initiatives cast in opposition to capitalist organization of these spheres of the economy. The variety broadens and deepens a counterhegemonic framing of the economy. It also introduces the question of what we should call them. There are important conceptual differences between organizations, networks, and practices that we believe should be respected.28 For the sake of convenience, however, we have adopted the term initiative as a general category to signify diverse solidarity economy forms. This term is used in the movement too, together with the term model, which designates a particular organizational type of the solidarity economy (e.g., worker cooperative or community garden). In doing so, we also recognize that the concept initiative itself has a distinct meaning referring to a conscious effort to create a particular solidarity economy form. We nevertheless find it to be a suitably flexible and encompassing concept—after all, cooperatives, networks, and practices all need to be initiated. Initiative also conveys a sense of bringing something new into the world, a connotation that resonates with our idea of solidarity cities. Stepping back from these terminological considerations, what is immediately on display and worth highlighting in our typology is that there will be no single magical solution to problems in all of the many economic domains; rather, we see it as a deployable toolbox of different strategies and organizational types that suit a complex economy and a diverse urban citizenry.

In determining what to include in the typology, several considerations are paramount. These entail both normative and organizational elements. We aimed to identify organizational forms that are substantially aligned with key solidarity economy values, including values of social equity, environmental sustainability, solidarity, pluralism, and democracy.29 We recognized that no initiative or initiative type is perfect on all counts, but we also did not want to include initiatives that are structured in ways that inherently violate any particular solidarity economy norm, even if they perform well on the others. For this, we regarded commitment to collective self-management and democratic decision-making as ethical nonnegotiables. For example, even though social enterprises seek to combine environmental and social concerns with their financial bottom lines, they are not part of the typology because most are structured in undemocratic ways around the private appropriation of surplus and the exclusion of workers from this process. We also chose to exclude initiative types for which solidarity economy values are merely incidental to the organizational structure. For example, there are countless nonprofit organizations doing good work to improve the quality of urban life, but there is nothing inherent to the structure of nonprofits that makes them conducive to solidarity economy norms. Indeed, only a small fraction of them embrace democratic norms and are directly oriented to enhancing economic self-management.

Importantly, the typology is by no means a rigid classification. It is instead a way to organize thinking about how solidarity economy initiatives differ from capitalist enterprises. Nor is it meant to be universal. It has been developed in and for the U.S. context with roots in the U.S. solidarity economy movement. We harbor no pretense of it being comprehensive. Ultimately, this typology is an ongoing endeavor that can easily be added to and amended by others. Certain boundaries are drawn around ethical commitments, but there remains open the possibility to include more initiatives as they are identified by movement activists and scholars.30 For instance we added the category of “mutual aid networks” into our typology after the importance such networks visibly assumed during the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic.31 While there have been efforts to harmonize definitions used to describe the solidarity economy, what has carried the day is the movement’s principled commitment to pluralism.32 There are many paths to tread, many ways to build and live in solidarity, and many ways to count them. As we noted in the introduction, one of the most interesting things about the notion of the solidarity economy is the manner in which participants have embraced both the loose normative generalities and the variations in meaning across places. Indeed, this accommodative stance is part of the movement’s strength as a counterhegemonic project.33 This is also what allows it to keep transforming and changing. We think of the expandable typology as an invitation to stimulate social imagination and creativity rather than a final blueprint or conceptual closure.

Our typology provides a working set of organizational types to guide an inventory of solidarity economy initiatives in our cities. Conducting the actual inventories, though, meant grappling with complicated real-world conditions. This required judgment as we encountered many hybrid initiatives and numerous exceptional cases. When deciding on individual cases, we adopted the following criteria:

• Individual initiatives that fit within our typology are to be included by default unless there is demonstrable evidence that they are not aligned with solidarity economy norms in practice. For example, while consumer cooperatives are generally included, we make exceptions for individual cooperatives known to operate in undemocratic and discriminatory ways.
• Conversely, for organizational types not in our typology, individual initiatives are by default excluded from our inventory unless there is demonstrable evidence that their practices align significantly with solidarity economy norms, such as for nonprofit organizations that explicitly define themselves around supporting the solidarity economy.

Although many of the initiatives in our inventories openly embrace the solidarity economy framework, we did not require that they self-identify in this way to be included; the solidarist character of their practices matters more to us than their adoption of the specific solidarity economy terminology.

Since the next stage of our work was going to concretely inventory in cities with a purpose of putting them on the map, we focused our attention on formal initiatives with identifiable locations that were amenable to mapping from a cartographic point of view. Working at the urban scale allowed for incorporating many more local initiatives and including categories that were not as comprehensively mapped at the national level (for instance, there was comprehensive national data on credit unions but not on all community gardens in all cities). Whereas we had heavily relied on national umbrella organizations for the national map, for the city maps we also partnered with grassroots local and citywide networks and groups. To the extent possible, we counted, geocoded, and mapped initiatives in each of the categories marked with an ^a in Figure 1.34 The resulting maps offer far more granular representations of urban solidarity economies. The maps nevertheless remain partial in that they represent formal and geolocatable initiatives. Our decision to exclude at this stage the informal initiatives was made for both pragmatic and ethical reasons. Due to their inherent informality, initiatives within the informal solidarity economy pose greater challenges when it comes to systematic identification, tracking, and research. Some, such as mutual aid networks and unpaid domestic work, are hard to identify and locate with conventional cartographic tools. Many informal (as well as certain formal) initiatives are spatially diffused, while others prefer to remain out of the public eye despite having a mappable location. Trust is also an issue for many informal initiatives, especially within marginalized communities that have frequently been betrayed by researchers, businesses, and public authorities. Developing the level of trust needed to map and analyze informal economies would require deep and sustained ethnographies of neighborhoods, beyond the scope of this (multi)citywide scale book project. For these reasons, we restricted ourselves to studying principally formal initiatives that already have a degree of public visibility.35 We see our research as complementary to the groundbreaking work being done by others on informal solidarity economies.36

While the national map of the U.S. solidarity economy was an important achievement from our collaboration with USSEN, most of our research efforts were focused on the cities in which we lived and worked. In the introduction, we already noted the practical and conceptual reasons for focusing on the city (as opposed to rural areas or a national scale) to understand the U.S. solidarity economy, including the concentration of both national population and solidarity economies in cities and the granular detail possible at the urban level. Here we add another important consideration: urban-level analysis of the three cities highlights the differences and similarities among cities, which enriches the understanding of the Solidarity City as simultaneously a place-specific and ubiquitous phenomenon. As we begin comparative analysis of the three particular cities in the next section, we believe that our methods and analysis of solidarity economies can be implemented in any city.

Where Are Solidarity Economies in Cities and What Are They Providing?

In this section, we offer insight into the geographies of solidarity economies in the three cities by mapping their locations and detailing the goods and services they provide. In most city maps in the United States, the solidarity economy is absent. Commercial tourist attractions, wayfinding for private automobiles, properties for sale, and private banks are all easy to find on the map because they are what is deemed to be important. Maps and apps show us what their creators want us to see, and their thinking is guided by what is commonly considered important. They might, for instance, show a church, but not that a faith-based credit union is founded in that same space. Household and community spaces where day-to-day mutuality unfolds do not ever appear. Capitalist urban space looks like the norm—maps show cities as sites for maximizing corporate profit and middle- and upper-class consumption, while the noncapitalist spaces and ways of life remain invisible. It becomes hard to even imagine that other kinds of livelihoods and ways to make a place exist.

This is something we are endeavoring to challenge by making counter-maps of the solidarity economy and solidarity cities. Map 1 contains what we call the “spatial footprints” of the three solidarity cities.37 On these maps, solidarity economy locations within city borders are depicted with variously colored dots. Each dot represents one initiative, while the color corresponds to its organization type (see Figure 1 for conceptual categories and Table 2 for the specific city inventories). The map legend includes details of the categories used. What emerges on those maps is that Philadelphia, New York City, and Worcester all contain a large and highly diverse set of solidarity economy initiatives. We can think of those colored dots as representing thousands of flowers of human solidarity already in bloom within the streets of our cities. Together they constitute a footprint of each place’s Solidarity City.

This simple mapping exercise transforms the common understanding of U.S. cities as entirely shaped by capitalism and its profit- and competition-centered logics. The maps show that the same cities contain a large array of noncapitalist practices that follow the ethics of solidarity and cooperation. We see hundreds of community gardens, many cooperative enterprises, scores of credit unions, and dozens of community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, among many other initiatives. The maps provide a glimpse into the extent to which solidarity is woven into urban economies. They invite us to consider more fully what role solidarity economy initiatives play in our cities and what they can offer to urban residents, especially in the disinvested neighborhoods where capitalism often falls short to support life needs.

All these little color-coded dots are but the beginning of a much larger story. Lauren Taylor Hudson’s work helps us get at the idea that there are thousands of stories behind the thousands of dots.38 In her PhD dissertation, Hudson examines the solidarity economy movement space in New York City using participatory mapping together with in-depth interviews with movement participants as her major methodology, revealing multiple participant stories at the ground level. The participants, the majority of whom are women of color, literally drew on the map of the city their own vision of solidarity space while also describing their own actions and experiences with the solidarity economy movement in depth.39 Hudson’s findings and insights usefully complement our research of spatial distributions of the solidarity economy initiatives.

Although our maps inaugurate new imaginaries of the three cities as filled with many different and geographically expansive kinds of solidarity economy, our mapping remains partial, as we explained in the previous section of this chapter. What we capture in this project is highly important, but it is just the forms above ground that we were able to make visible, so to speak. As we explained above, all of our maps represent formal initiatives with a defined location rather than informal or spatially diffused practices. One implication of this is that our maps actually underrepresent the solidarity city. If anything, this heartens us: solidarity cities are bigger than what we have been able to make visible so far.

What our maps also convey is that the solidarity economy is unevenly distributed throughout urban space within each of the cities; different kinds of solidarity economy initiatives also have their own geographic distributions. This is evident in the specific clustering of colored dots. In all three cities, for example, community gardens form clustered patterns that differ from those of credit unions. Cooperative housing has a strong presence in New York City but a barely visible one in Philadelphia and Worcester. Artist collectives perforate urban space in all three cities, but their densities are higher in New York and Philadelphia as compared to Worcester. Also, some parts of the cities (e.g., downtown areas and certain neighborhoods, see chapter 2 for analysis of those concentrations) have many solidarity economy initiatives, whereas others have only a few. All of this invites questions about the reasons solidarity economy initiatives cluster in particular locations (something we explore in chapters to come). It also leads us to ask what exactly they provide for their participants and how it is different from the capitalist economy. For the rest of this section, we examine the composition of solidarity economies in the three cities in order to determine what goods and services they actually provide to their participants and other urban residents.

We answer those questions using the inventories of the solidarity economy built according to the processes described earlier. In addition to enabling mapping and spatial analysis, these inventories allow for sketching out the overall differences and similarities in the composition of the solidarity economies of the three cities. Those comparisons identify the numerically important types and point to the relative significance of initiatives in each urban area. While insightful in itself, this analysis also reverberates throughout the book as different chapters examine specific solidarity economy sectors at the scale of the city and individual neighborhoods.

We use inventories to consider solidarity economies in two ways. First, in Table 2, we present the composition of solidarity economies in each city according to the type of organization or model (i.e., community gardens, worker co-ops, and so on) that largely reflects how movement practitioners identify the elements of a solidarity economy. This is the information fed into making the city maps where specific organizational types are reflected visually by color (see Map 1). Second, we explore each city’s solidarity economy in relation to its economic role or what it provides (e.g., food, which encompasses more than one organizational type). This analysis gives us a sense of which community needs the solidarity economy institutions seek to meet and in which sectors of the economy they are most salient.

One way of assessing the absolute and relative importance of different forms of the solidarity economy is reflected in Table 2. For each organization type, it shows the number of initiatives in this category and their share in the total number of initiatives of each city. As with the colored dot maps, the diversity of initiatives on display is impressive, although size and proportion require further unpacking. We can see that in absolute terms, the solidarity economy is the largest in New York City, followed by Philadelphia and then Worcester. This corresponds to the population and area size of the cities, as well as the overall size of their economies. Yet, if considering the size of the solidarity economy relative to each city’s population size, it is Worcester that has the largest number of initiatives per one hundred thousand of population, while New York City has the smallest.40 This suggests that smaller cities may generate more solidarity-based initiatives in relative terms, making it such that more people in those cities have an opportunity to engage with and experience the benefit of noncapitalist economies. All this is to say that the comparative analysis that we have undertaken in the book is important because it draws out the modalities of the solidarity-based place-making that are common in all three cities (e.g., community gardens and credit unions) and also those that are unique (e.g., housing in larger cities and CSA pickup sites in rural areas surrounding smaller cities). This means that many findings that we have arrived at in the book would be relevant to other urban contexts and differently sized cities.

To this end, Table 2 shows that Philadelphia, New York City, and Worcester have distinct solidarity economy profiles. In particular, community gardens define in major ways the solidarity economy in Philadelphia and Worcester (73.9 percent and 56.9 percent, respectively, of the number of citywide initiatives), while New York City stands out in terms of housing cooperatives (roughly 53.2 percent of its solidarity economy). Those significant differences in the composition of the initiatives between the cities will be explored in the chapters that follow.

Finally, we turn to graphs in Plate 3 to draw out the major industrial sectors of solidarity economies in the cities by the type of goods and services provided.41 The relative importance of those sectors is shown by pie charts. In some instances, the relationship between the organization type found in Table 2 and the industrial sectors listed in Plate 3 is obvious. Food co-ops, for example, obviously relate to the provisioning of food. But the need for food is met by other types as well (community gardens, community-supported agriculture, and food-related worker cooperatives). Thus, multiple forms can contribute to a particular sector and need. We thought it important to slice the data by what is provided in order to display the proportion of the initiatives producing a particular good or service. Because most solidarity economy organizations are driven by ethical considerations as opposed to profit maximization, our qualitative evidence in later chapters shows that they are producing goods and services in response to some kind of social need that is prominent in a particular location and in the specific context of each city. This underscores the ability of these economic practices to make place in the spirit of solidarity with lasting impacts on urban space and urban life.

In all three cities, solidarity economy initiatives are geared toward meeting the very basic needs of urban residents. We can see that the solidarity economy responds most prominently to three such needs—food, shelter (especially in New York City), and finance—followed by a range of professional services, including art making. Care work is prominent in the larger cities of New York and Philadelphia. Thus, we can see that the solidarity economy helps sustain cities in those sectors where private markets frequently fail to provide viable and affordable food, housing, finance, and care work. As the chapters that follow explain, those initiatives often play the role of bulwarks for those people who need them the most. We take each sector (solidarity forms of food, housing, finance, and professional services) in turn to unpack their overall role in shouldering community needs.

Fresh food in particular is out of reach in many neighborhoods, and food insecurity is pervasive. The fact that meeting food needs through alternative modes of production and distribution constitutes a major part of the solidarity economy in all three cities (an astonishing 80 percent of the solidarity economy institutions in Philadelphia and 78 percent in Worcester, and a sizable chunk at 33 percent in New York) brings into focus its role as a key community survival strategy. Also of note is that the solidarity food sector includes a very wide range of initiatives that all play their role in increasing urban food security: community gardens, CSAs, grocery food cooperatives, cooperative farms, and worker cooperatives specializing in catering, restaurant services, and food delivery. Many explicitly identify with food justice and food sovereignty movements that provide fresh produce and culturally important foods to low-income neighborhoods and communities of color excluded from mainstream commercial food systems. In chapter 4 we explore the detailed patterns in the distribution of food solidarity economy activities more closely, with an eye to their role in allowing neighborhoods to collectively resist food insecurity and hold the ground.

The basic need for affordable housing is widespread in many global cities, and that is the need being filled through the solidarity housing sector. The housing sector includes several solidarity economy models: affordable housing co-ops, land trusts, community land trusts, and intentional communities. This sector is the largest in New York City where it makes up half of all initiatives (a topic we examine in chapter 6). Limited-equity housing cooperatives constitute the backbone of this sector, precisely because of intense housing pressure, where the majority of people rent and most are subject to gentrification pressure. Especially in the last five years, community land trust initiatives have increased in both New York City and Philadelphia as part of an active movement to reassert land rights for communities for the sake of securing a place to both live and garden.

After food and shelter, we see a large percentage of the solidarity economy oriented toward the provision of credit and other financial services. This fact highlights a considerable need for solidarity-based finance in contemporary urban settings, especially in the context of ongoing predatory financialization.42 Solidarity finance includes consumer cooperatives called credit unions, alternative currencies, time banks, and participatory budgeting (currently active only in New York City) that give urban communities direct democratic control over a share of the city budget. Credit unions (which we examine closely in chapter 6) are the dominant players in the financial sector across all three cities, where we see collective forms of finance defending against predatory lending and financial exclusion.

While care work and professional services are smaller separate sectors in comparison to the previous three, they cannot be overlooked particularly because of their recent growth rates.43 Care work, like food, shelter, and financial resources, is essential for shared survival. It encompasses those initiatives that offer care for older adults, disabled people, children, and young people and provide education and cleaning. Among the worker cooperatives owned by caregivers are two of the largest worker co-ops in the nation: Cooperative Home Care Associates in New York City and Philadelphia Home Care Associates. In both these cases, worker-owners are primarily women of color, as are the growing group of worker cooperatives in cleaning. In chapter 6 we show how worker cooperatives act as bulwarks by protecting workers from the highly exploitative labor conditions that particularly affect care work.

Collectively, food, housing, finance, and care work sectors seem to be more generative of the solidarity economy than others because they shoulder the most vital needs of urban communities. Together, they help communities that are among the most vulnerable to secure livelihoods and sustain life. But even more so, they do so by affirming once and again, as done across the world and throughout the centuries, that vital needs are best met through solidarity-based economies. The role of those economies is not limited to survival, however. They always played a major role in building the solidarity city, expanding its contours, and making it part of the urban present and future.

This chapter started with a discussion of how counter-mapping matters a great deal for creating postcapitalist worlds. Counter-mapping works to identify solidarity economies already in existence, which can also help bring new ones into existence. This explains why there have been so many academic and grassroots mapping projects that harness mapping’s ontological powers to advance progressive social transformation.

Since so much is at stake, we also laid out the ways we made decisions about how to define solidarity economies across domains of consumption, production, finance, exchange, and governance in the mapping epistemologies section. Then we undertook detailed urban inventories using select categories in order to map the spatial footprint of solidarity economies in New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester.

The urban maps in this chapter offer a partial image of the solidarity cities, because a wide range of solidarity-based social practices simply cannot be mapped. Some evade cartographic representation because they are informal, while others have a spatially diffused character and no crisp boundaries. In other words, if it were possible to visualize the Solidarity City as composed of all forms of the solidarity economy and those who work to support it, its spatial contours would be even more expansive and diverse and extend beyond our maps.

But these maps do serve to open our eyes and say new and meaningful things about those solidarity economy initiatives that are on the map, while also connecting them to other solidarity realms and practices through stories and qualitative data. They serve to locate other postcapitalist ways to organize urban living in our contemporary society. “Where” is an important first question, and in the last section we also examined “what” solidarity economies produce. And it turns out that in all three cities, they are meeting core human needs, by design and with intention. Food, housing, caring labor, and fair finance all top the lists in all three cities, even if there are differing relative proportions.

Where and what are crucially linked to the questions of who and why. This is what we turn to in chapter 2. Who participates in the solidarity economy? How does the spatial distribution of solidarity economy institutions—for example, credit unions or community gardens—correspond to participation by major racial groups? Our aim in subsequent chapters is to understand not only how external forces, including racial capitalist dynamics, shape the solidarity economy but also how the movement’s various histories, trajectories, and commitments shape its spatial distribution. Especially in chapter 2, we examine what it means for solidarity economies to have arisen in areas that have been subject to systematic disinvestment and organized abandonment, from redlining to other ongoing forms of racial and class exclusion. Solidarity economies exist both in relation to racial capitalism and in ways defined and shaped by internal resources of solidarity inside historical communities. What hangs in the balance for us is the possibility for people in different neighborhoods to be in solidarity with one another, contesting harmful racial capitalist processes, and in the process realizing the Solidarity City through everyday routines, practices, and economies. We pick at these questions in the chapters to come, particularly the next one, where we examine racial and income characteristics of such neighborhoods throughout urban space.