Edgework

Defining the Edge(work): Life in the Zone and the Possibility of Solidarity

In the preceding chapters, we relied heavily on the geologic metaphor of fault lines. This metaphor emphasizes the deep and frictional character of underlying social divisions. The solidarity economy movement, however, is predicated on the idea that what this tectonic metaphor presents as natural and rigid is ultimately a mutable social formation. We turn to the concept of edge zones to illuminate how boundaries are also sites of interaction, conflict, change, and solidarity.

We are particularly attracted to the idea of edges for the complex set of meanings it evokes. We commonly speak of an edge as something that cuts, like a blade. We might think of a “transitional” neighborhood being transformed by the cutting edge of gentrification. More idiomatically, edges signify spaces of indecision between divergent paths. To be on the “knife’s edge” is to be in a tense situation of uncertainty about which outcome will prevail. This connotation focuses our attention on those indeterminate places, moments, and relationships that could go “either way.”

Whereas the term edge refers to the outer limit of an area or entity—the boundary where one thing is separated from another—the term zone invites us to think not of outer lines but of extended space. Combining the terms in the context of our work, we understand edge zones as spaces of transition and contact between otherwise distinct areas or populations. Such zones, we suggest, are often as fertile as they are fraught.

In political contexts, edges and edge zones are commonly conceived in terms of borders and peripheries (both social and spatial). We draw particular inspiration from the rich, interdisciplinary scholarship on borderlands, which illuminates how borders are not merely demarcations between two territories: they are places in and of themselves. Gloria Anzaldúa, for example, characterizes the U.S.–Mexico border as mestiza, a mixed place of distinct communities rich in cultural flows, hybridity, and creation.6 Borders are thereby reconceived as spaces of relationality, liminality, connection, and indeterminacy, instead of merely division and separation.7 Elsewhere, Gargi Bhattacharyya uses the terms edge places and edge populations to describe people who have been expelled or pushed to the spatial and social peripheries of capitalist formations. Such populations might include undocumented migrants, unhoused populations, and domestic workers, among other groups.8 Bhattacharyya suggests that these edge places and the people who inhabit them can illuminate something key about the functioning of capitalism and about the arbitrary distinctions that underlie racial and economic fault lines separating neighborhoods and lives.9 Such peripheries need not be simply passive spaces of oppression. They can also be spaces of radical openness and resistance—what bell hooks calls “radical edges”—where peripheralized populations refigure the terms of their living and give shape to the places in which they live.10 These insights about placemaking practices of peripheries inform our analysis of edge zones.

In other ways, our thinking on edge zones draws on ecology. In ecological usage, the term edge zone or, more technically, ecotone refers to the transitional spaces between distinct biological communities or ecological habitats, such as the marshland between a forest ecosystem and a water one. Such zones are not merely sites of confluence between two distinct habitats; they often have their own idiosyncratic features and species.11 Transitional regions such as grasslands and estuaries, for example, are known to have greater species richness than the adjacent ecosystems.12 This “edge effect,” as it is called, serves as a useful metaphor for depicting how transitional neighborhoods located between otherwise segregated communities can be especially vibrant spaces of cultural intermixing, mutual learning, and social innovation.13 Within such cultural edge zones, knowledge and practices from different cultures mix in ways that enhance the resilience of local communities. The biological terminology also resonates with what we heard from solidarity economy practitioners, many of whom spoke about the creation of a cooperative ecosystem.14 Extending this ecosystem metaphor, the ecotone adds a spatial dimension, identifying where solidarity takes shape along the edges. We do, nonetheless, approach the ecological terms with some caution, given the history of naturalistic language being used to legitimize and naturalize racialized forms of gentrification and displacement.15 A vital question for us is whether, and under what conditions, the edge becomes a space of solidarity.

Drawing from these different meanings, we use the term edge zones in a polyvalent way that encompasses both spatial and interpersonal senses. Spatially, edge zones are depicted on a map in the form of transitional neighborhoods within a racially and poverty-segregated city. We are interested in the location of cooperatives relative to such spaces and why it is that the cooperatives are where they are. We are interested in how these spaces stimulate the difficult work of “negotiating the conditions of our interdependence,” as J. K. Gibson-Graham put it.16 Interpersonally, edge zones refer to relational spaces that emerge when people with different backgrounds come together. We are interested in how cooperators negotiate the social contradictions and racial, economic, and cultural divisions they encounter in the spaces that they share and operate in. This process of negotiation is how we find our way “out of this capitalist place.”17 Negotiating invites us into adventurous experimentation in thought and action that potentiates postcapitalist futures even as the outcomes remain uncertain. Both the geographies of solidarity economy as a whole and the cooperatives we consider in this chapter are spatial contexts in which such negotiation takes place. Minimally, these geographies are contexts for developing “the capacity to live with difference,” as Gill Valentine, echoing Stuart Hall, describes.18 At their best, these spaces are where we collectively make, extend, and enact solidarity with one another.

The edge zone concept also underscores the importance of participants’ intentions and practices, their commitment to doing edgework. As scholarship on “contact zones” illuminates, mere proximity to people with different racial and class backgrounds does not in itself generate solidarity.19 While cooperation across lines of racial differences, wealth, and poverty may take root in cultural edge zones, such spaces can also be flashpoints of division and intensified conflict. For this reason, edge zones are places where the motivations and normative commitments of both individuals and the solidarity economy movement matter a great deal.

In this regard, cooperatives provide a unique entry point for understanding how intentions and principles can shape the terms of encounter. Cooperatives are frequently seen as the core of the U.S. solidarity economy movement. Normatively, cooperatives around the world are understood to operate according to the International Cooperative Principles (commonly known as the Rochdale Principles), which include core values of inclusion, democratic self-governance, and concern for community.20 These ethical underpinnings ideally position them as spaces that could bridge divided communities. But it does not always happen this way. This is precisely what makes them so intriguing. In the following section, we examine where cooperatives are located, and then we examine the edgework that is happening in those neighborhoods.

Inhabiting Urban Ecotones: Cooperatives in Philadelphia

As the plays at the beginning of the chapter indicated, the social significance of cooperatives is tied not only to what co-ops do but also to where they are. What can the location of cooperatives in Philadelphia teach us about cooperatives’ transformative potential? We focus our attention on worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, artist cooperatives, and a variety of volunteer collectives. We defer analysis of credit unions to the next chapter, where they feature in our discussion of bulwark patterns in New York City.

Mapping cooperatives against race and income variables shows that in Philadelphia they are clustered in mixed neighborhoods sandwiched between more segregated areas of the city, much like ecotones between distinct ecosystems. This edge-zone pattern is not one we deliberately set out to map at the onset of this project. It emerged as a photo negative, only becoming visible to us in relation to the spaces where cooperatives are absent. This becomes evident in Map 18, where we map the distribution of cooperatives against Black, Latinx, and white populations.

Philadelphia’s racial segregation stands out sharply in these maps. Few cooperatives can be found in the large expanses of the city with a three-quarters Black majority. Moreover, almost all of those that are present in such neighborhoods fall along the edges. It is as if the cooperative sector skirts the boundaries but is rarely located in the heart of Black neighborhoods. This is the case in Northwest Philadelphia along Germantown Avenue, in the areas west of the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia, and along the edge between North Philadelphia and Center City.

Similar patterns are found within Latinx neighborhoods, which are about as starkly segregated as the predominantly Black neighborhoods are, though the scale of the Latinx neighborhoods is smaller. The Latinx population is quite visibly concentrated in the Kensington region of North Philadelphia, one of the lowest-income areas of the city. Sometimes described as Philadelphia’s “barrio,” this triangle-shaped area is populated primarily by Puerto Ricans, by far the largest Latinx demographic in the city.21 Strikingly, cooperatives are almost entirely absent from those neighborhoods. Once again, they reside along the edges.

By no means should this be read to imply that Black and Latinx populations are not participating in Philadelphia’s cooperatives. That is emphatically not the case, as is evidenced by the composition of members and missions at co-ops both old and new. As discussed in chapter 2, there is a long history of economic cooperation and mutual aid within Philadelphia’s Black community. And by many measures, Black and Latinx leadership and involvement have been at the dynamic center of the city’s contemporary cooperative movement. For example, Black women constitute the vast majority of the workers at Home Care Associates and Childspace Daycare Centers, the two largest worker cooperatives in the city, together comprising over three hundred jobs.22 Both co-ops explicitly link their support for women of color to the cooperative principles embedded in their business models. Additionally, several of the city’s vibrant start-up cooperatives and collectives—including the Womanist Working Collective, Soil Generation, and, until its recent closure, the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative—are Black-led and explicitly organized around the needs of Black and Latinx communities. Similarly, the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, an umbrella organization (itself a co-op) promoting co-op development in the city, is led by a predominantly Black and Latinx staff and has made support for marginalized communities a top priority. Many cooperatives, like other businesses and agencies, seek to locate their central offices in downtown areas to be readily accessible from everywhere in the city. Outside these central business districts, our maps show that cooperatives, even those led by people of color, are largely absent from the most racially concentrated Black and Latinx neighborhoods.

What might be going on here? Such absences can be attributed in part to the tremendous hurdles presented by adverse economic conditions. For reasons having to do with racial capitalist development, as discussed previously, many of these predominantly Black and Latinx areas of Philadelphia are low income and have been hit hard by deindustrialization and disinvestment since the 1970s. As a result, the overall level of commerce remains relatively low in these neighborhoods, while the lack of disposable income makes it difficult for co-ops to rely on local consumers for revenue. But poverty alone cannot explain this pattern, especially considering that other forms of solidarity economy seem to concentrate in precisely such neighborhoods, as we saw in chapter 2.

In focus groups, Latinx residents of Philadelphia explained to us that a lack of co-ops in their communities is partially due to their currently limited exposure to cooperatives and their limited education about economic alternatives.23 They also frequently described examples of the predatory economic systems their neighborhoods face—from payday lending to drug markets—that reinforce economic precarity and corrode trust. As one Latinx organizer in North Philadelphia describes it:

Trying to bring people together and get to know each other, so that way they can trust each other is real hard. It’s very difficult . . . doing the work of the community and then doing the work of, you know, economic solidarity—a large part of it has to be that all members have to trust each other.24

Where trust is exceedingly low, getting solidarity economy initiatives such as a cooperative off the ground can be immensely challenging, even with dedicated grassroots leadership and the palpable need for these initiatives.25 Trust problems also extend to cooperative initiatives originating from outside. As one Latinx immigrant community leader and businessman in South Philadelphia remarked: “I’m very suspicious of gringos. . . . The white people want us to make a cooperative, but they don’t know us. They don’t know us. . . . We are in a system where we can’t win.”26 Although such strong sentiment was not shared by all focus group participants, it does highlight experiences of adversity, the importance of organic leadership reflective of lived communities, and the perception that cooperatives are a white fixation. Building economic solidarity across communities is a challenge under any circumstances. Doing so is much more difficult when the leadership and strategic visions in the solidarity economy are perceived as racially one-sided and where supportive ecosystems are lacking. Taken together, these circumstances point to some reasons behind sparse locations of cooperatives in Black and Latinx neighborhoods.

Guided by these perceptions, one might expect to find a preponderance of cooperatives in affluent white neighborhoods that typically attract many commercial services. Map 18, which also plots cooperatives and collectives against percent white population, suggests otherwise. The co-ops appear not to cluster heavily in the whitest of neighborhoods outside of the gentrified waterfront in the southeast (see Map 4 for neighborhoods within Philadelphia). In fact, we find that only 26 percent of co-ops have locations in neighborhoods with at least a two-thirds white majority. Where, then, are they located? The majority of co-ops in Philadelphia are located either in Center City (which is generally demographically diverse and enjoys the benefits of a central location) or within mixed-race areas proximate to—within two or three blocks of—racially concentrated neighborhoods.27 What attracts cooperatives to these narrow edge areas where they appear to thrive, and what kind of edgework are they doing there?

Gentrifying Edges?

If we think back to the play Salt Pepper Ketchup, such edge-zone patterns might seem consistent with the thesis that co-ops are agents of gentrification, extending fault lines rather than alleviating them.28 Establishing co-ops in demographically mixed areas might be seen as reflections of the lifestyle choices and consumer preferences (“demand side”) of more affluent and liberal members of society who move into lower-income neighborhoods and want to be part of the cooperative movement. Demographically mixed neighborhoods are precisely what we’d expect to find as one population moves in and another is driven out. Peter Marcuse uses the concept of the “border area” to describe the development in gentrifying cities from a “supply side perspective.”29 Such areas, he suggests, are determinedly fragile spaces waiting to be remolded by gentrification. They are regarded as staging grounds for capitalist penetration and are always already potentially a space of capitalism. From this perspective, cooperatives can become accomplices to gentrification, catering to the demand of the liberal niche market.

As easy as it may be to read cooperatives into such gentrification narratives, we believe the story is significantly more complicated than what Salt Pepper Ketchup and Marcuse would have us believe. For us, edge zones are shifting terrains—spaces of uncertainty open to possibility and resistant to “neat plots or decisive conclusions.”30 They are also social ecosystems in their own right—cultural ecotones with distinct neighborhood identities, social dynamics, and unique natural and made environments. In such settings, gentrification may be part of the story, but it is far from the only dynamic at work. Moreover, even when gentrification is a defining force in ecotone neighborhoods, its relation to cooperatives is far from uniform. In some cases, cooperatives predate gentrification by decades and actually provide a basis for resisting displacement, a point we explore in greater detail in chapter 6 in the context of New York City.

In the remainder of this chapter, we more closely examine the dynamics of cooperatives in three edge-zone neighborhoods in Philadelphia: Germantown/Mount Airy, West Philadelphia, and Kensington. All three of these neighborhoods are also located within the hot spots identified in chapter 2. Maps 19, 20, and 21 provide zoomed-in views of the neighborhoods, focusing on the demographic variable that best reveals the edge-zone phenomenon: percent Black population for Germantown/Mount Airy and West Philadelphia and percent Latinx population for Kensington. These maps also show the locations of cooperatives. We explain these geographies and edgework dynamics in place with insights drawn from the neighborhoods’ histories and from qualitative interviews and focus groups we conducted with local community leaders and representatives of neighborhood cooperatives.

Ecologists would consider both a mangrove forest and an estuary as examples of transitional ecotones, while also recognizing that such areas differ from one another. By analogy, while we can observe that co-ops cluster in edge zones, we should not assume that all edge zones are the same. Indeed, what emerges from our research are three very distinct neighborhoods with different edge-zone dynamics. In one case (Germantown/Mount Airy), we find a remarkably stable neighborhood that has intentionally sustained itself as a racially diverse, middle-class community over several decades. In a second case (West Philadelphia), we find a more demographically fluid activist neighborhood that has undergone multiple reversals in its racial and economic trend lines over the last half century. There, recent gentrification is only one part of a tumultuous history of demographic change. Only in our third case (Kensington), do we find a more classic model of gentrification at work where rising rents and prices are driving former residents out and where there is a very sharp divide between gentrified and nongentrified spaces. In the following sections, we elaborate how these neighborhood differences result in locally specific cooperative dynamics.

Edge Zones as Place of Origin

For many cooperatives, edge-zone neighborhoods are a place of origin. By this we mean the co-ops originate from the initiative of local residents seeking to address various needs of their edge-zone community. The character of the individual edge zones helps give shape to homegrown cooperatives.

We found this origin dynamic to be especially present in Germantown/Mount Airy, where most of the cooperatives were born as community-based organizations. We already mentioned Weavers Way, which started as a local buying club, became a successful food co-op, and then propagated additional cooperatives in the neighborhood. Consider also the Big Backyard, a cooperative preschool in Mount Airy that has run its operations out of the same church for close to thirty years. Founded in the 1950s, around the time of the neighborhood’s first racial integration initiatives, the Big Backyard was spun out of an existing daycare by a group of parents who believed the neighborhood needed a preschool in addition to conventional daycares.42 Similarly, Childspace, a worker cooperative childcare center, was founded in 1988 by a multiracial group of mothers who had met through an infant playgroup. At the time, they all wished to return to the formal workforce but were frustrated by the limited number of affordable high-quality infant care centers in the area.43 Drawing on their prior experience with cooperatives, they decided to design Childspace as a worker co-op. After some years of success, the co-op subsequently expanded to Germantown and West Philadelphia and is currently the second largest worker co-op in the city, employing predominantly women of color. The interracial character of Childspace’s founding is a reflection of the neighborhood’s diversity, and the fact that the creation of Childspace was informed by the mothers’ prior cooperative experience suggests that the neighborhood’s cooperative culture is self-reinforcing, inviting further economic experimentation.

Comparable origin dynamics can also be found in the Cedar Park neighborhood of West Philadelphia. As mentioned, the strong activist culture and demographically mixed character of this edge-zone neighborhood were important factors in the foundation of the area’s older cooperatives. The same is true for today’s newer co-ops. Bindlestiff Books is a good example. Bindlestiff is a cooperatively organized, volunteer-run bookstore specializing in multicultural children’s books serving Black and immigrant populations. Located on the 4500 block of Baltimore Avenue, Bindlestiff was formed in 2005 as a way to serve the surrounding community—the people who live within walking or biking distance to the store. In a way, the location came first. Bindlestiff’s founders already owned the building when they hatched the idea of creating a bookstore. They had acquired the building to provide offices for another organization they worked with. At that time, they looked for spaces elsewhere in the city, but found that other locations didn’t connect with them. As one founder put it, “We weren’t near them, we didn’t see them as vibrant. Many of us lived in West Philadelphia and had for some time, so West Philadelphia had a lot of appeal.”44 They ended up choosing a location a few blocks from where they lived. When that other organization subsequently moved on, the founders consulted community volunteers about how best to make use of the building space. They determined that one thing the neighborhood needed was a multicultural bookstore. From the beginning, Bindlestiff has been rooted in the community. Its founders wanted to grow their project surrounded by the neighborhood’s economic and cultural diversity, which created an especially fertile environment for the bookstore and its progressive mission.

These sorts of origination stories are less common in the Kensington edge zone, where neighborhood communities are under particular distress, the population is in considerable flux, and long-term cooperative culture is less established. To the extent that cooperatives are originating from within the local community, it tends to come from newer residents who have moved into the neighborhood relatively recently. We’ll see an example of this later in the chapter with our discussion of the Kensington Community Food Co-op. In such cases, what we have described as a place of origin begins to look a lot like a place of destination.

Edge Zones as Destination

While many of the city’s most successful cooperatives were founded by local community members responding to neighborhood needs, there are also many cooperatives that deliberately moved into a neighborhood from outside, a pattern we see most pronounced in Kensington and West Philadelphia. As we describe, cooperators expressed a variety of reasons for choosing to locate along edge zones. Pragmatic considerations about cost, space, and safety loomed large for many cooperatives, especially in Kensington. Other cooperators conveyed being drawn to the neighborhood culture. Still others described being motivated by a normative commitment to equity and social justice.

We begin with factors that are pragmatic in nature, primarily cost and space. When making decisions on location, cooperatives, like other organizations, typically need to balance concerns about affordability with the desire for a functional and accessible space. For co-ops with the flexibility to choose among different neighborhoods, edge zones can present something of a sweet spot. In Kensington, for instance, the history of disinvestment has made rent affordable, while recent gentrification brings more disposable income into the neighborhood. This dynamic is well known in urban studies and well understood by the cooperatives we interviewed, as reflected in the following remarks by Benji Harris, a cofounder of the Philadelphia Tattoo Collective, a Kensington-area collective of tattoo artists:

Before you get to these gentrified areas, it’s gonna be a really kind of impoverished space, which is probably more likely to happen on segregated borders, right where people abandoned it for one direction or the other. And so that’s where you get these cheap workspaces, and that’s where artists go to, because we don’t necessarily need shoppers walking down the nice avenue full of storefronts and da da da da. It’s more out of opportunity, I think. And you get a lot more opportunity for cheap real estate and large unoccupied spaces where the neighborhood’s bad.45

The Tattoo Collective had previously been located in a smaller space in the more fashionable Northern Liberties neighborhood but moved to Kensington to access more space and cheaper rent. Harris adds that finding larger low-cost spaces can be especially beneficial for collectives of individual artists who split expenses and profits among members. Having a larger space makes it possible to draw more people into the operation, which can help keep individual costs low and increase the likelihood of long-term success.

The perception of safety is another factor that goes into siting a cooperative. This became clear in our conversation with a representative from Mascher Space, a dance cooperative that was previously based in Kensington (a place known for proximity to other art collectives) until 2019, when they had to move because of rising rents and a degraded dance floor. Our interviewee explains the search process:

We really struggled to find spaces that were affordable because the gentrification had changed so much in the ten years since we had moved in. And then some of these spaces not everybody felt comfortable moving to, because there were some spaces that were kind of beautiful and with a little help basically affordable, but right in the heart of the opioid crisis, or a block away from a methadone clinic.46

While many of the co-op members reported being personally comfortable moving deeper into a distressed neighborhood, others were concerned that audiences wouldn’t attend performances. Unable to find a suitable place in Kensington, they decided on a location on Germantown Avenue (in the Fairhill-Hartranft neighborhood), on the western side of the Latinx barrio (see Map 21). They in effect moved from one cultural ecotone to another.

In addition to pragmatic concerns about cost, safety, and the quality of the physical space, the character of the neighborhood was also a major factor in Mascher Space’s choice of a new location, as the same interviewee describes:

[The new location] ended up being the one that had a safe, smooth, clean, cleanable dance floor. [It had] an affordable rent that we could pay. It didn’t feel too far away from a subway. Yes, it was in the neighborhood with one of the highest crime rates in the city at that time and decades prior, but that particular block has quite a feeling of warmth. It’s right across the street from the Village of Arts and Humanities. And so it felt good.

The reference to the Village of Arts and Humanities is telling. The Village is an over thirty-five-year-old arts organization that itself embodies solidarity economy principles. The Village’s mission revolves around the use of art and self-expression to inspire community members to “imagine, design, and build a more just and equitable society.”47 Among its key initiatives is the People’s Paper Co-op, a women-centered and women-powered initiative located nearby that brings formerly incarcerated women, primarily women of color, together to collaboratively run a craft-based business and promote transformation of the criminal justice system. The fact that Mascher drew confidence and comfort from the presence of other solidarity-based art initiatives nearby is a testament to the solidarity economy’s placemaking potential. We see pragmatic economic concerns interwoven with the desire to find cooperative ecologies and like-minded organizations. This interplay again suggests a self-reinforcing dynamic at work: existing solidarity economy initiatives help to define the place, which in turn attracts people who are more likely to support additional solidarity economy initiatives.

For some cooperatives, choosing a location is less about economic pragmatism and cultural fit and more about upholding a strong ethical mission. It is about putting values of solidarity to work and making sure that people who need important goods and services actually have access to them. We found this to be especially the case in West Philadelphia with its history of radical activism. In a profound example, the white director of a cooperative health-care clinic described to us how their cooperative moved to an edge-zone neighborhood precisely for the racial and economic diversity it offers. The move was an opportunity to put normative commitments to racial and social justice into practice. Reports of medical discrimination against people of color motivated the clinic to relocate from a more affluent and predominantly white neighborhood to a neighborhood where they could more easily draw in diverse patients. In the director’s words: “In a city like Philadelphia that has such segregated areas, these cusp zones are a great place to reach a wider demographic organically.”48 They aimed, in effect, to bring health-care services to a diverse neighborhood rather than merely expecting diverse clients to come to them.

There are interesting racial dynamics at work here. For many white social-justice-minded practitioners, moving into a highly concentrated nonwhite neighborhood is not regarded as a viable option, both because they perceive such neighborhoods as less welcoming of them and because of the complicated ethical implications of such a move. As one white respondent put it, “You’re not going to do a weird pioneer moment” and establish a cooperative business in a neighborhood that couldn’t be your own.49 The comment demonstrates how racial fault lines can shape perceptions of local culture and define horizons of economic opportunity. It is also suggestive of how cultural ecotones might serve as unique spaces for navigating the constraints posed by a spatially segregated city, offering solidarity economy participants a place to participate in transformative agendas while also feeling that they can belong and succeed professionally.

Zones of Encounter

The stories we have just recounted suggest that many of Philadelphia’s cooperative initiatives, and perhaps especially those located in edge zones, constitute “zones of encounter” where cross-racial and cross-class alliances are formed and negotiated.50 We use this idea of zones of encounter to refer not simply to places where different people are proximate to one another, like ships passing in the night, but rather to places where interactions are meaningful and where encounters with people who are situated differently in society can transform one’s sense of self, neighborhood, and city. This is what we call “edge work.” In this section, we lay out what this work looks like. What hangs in the balance for us is how cooperatives contribute to larger neighborhood dynamics and whether they reinforce or challenge the larger divisions in society that define urban life. We describe how cooperatives in these edge zones facilitate microlevel interactions across differences within shared physical spaces. We also describe how the edge-zone features of the neighborhoods shape the frequency and character of such encounters, setting the stage for cooperatives’ engagement with racial and economic justice concerns. As we illustrate, these encounters can be both transformational and fraught with contradiction and tension. Cooperatives nevertheless have foundational ethical commitments that can be mobilized to deal with racial and economic fault lines. Maybe they do it imperfectly, and with room for improvement, but potential is there to encourage the hard edgework of transformational encounter.

Edge-zone encounters frequently occur on the micro scale of daily navigation of a shared space. This is something we saw vividly in chapter 3 with our analysis of Worcester and Stone Soup. We heard numerous examples of similar micro encounters in our conversations with Philadelphia cooperatives. These range from the Life Center Association housing cooperatives as day-to-day spaces of intentional multicultural coliving to Mascher Space having to negotiate rehearsal times with a Black church located upstairs from their dance studio.

Some cooperative zones of encounter are deliberately outward facing. A-Space, an anarchist community center in West Philadelphia, provides a particularly interesting example of this, as one member describes:

I would say that West Philly was always a community-minded place, right? You had young punks starting communal houses in the neighborhood where the vast majority of properties were owned. You both had multigenerational ownership by Black families and often had multiple generations living in homes all at the same time. And then there’s community in oppressed groups that is different than [in] privileged groups. So it’s already kind of a communal vibe in the neighborhood. . . . Community existed before white people showed up, but the white people who showed up were communally minded for the most part. And the A-Space was an intentional community-building space so then it just kind of became reciprocal. . . . People who would maybe normally not ever cross paths crossed paths at the A-Space.51

West Philadelphia has a community-minded culture that draws other people from the city with that bent, feeding a dynamic of mutual reinforcement. Co-ops like A-Space facilitate this by creating a public space of interaction and conversation. Our interviewee also suggests that noncapitalist spaces can provide a bulwark against both abandonment and profit-driven gentrification: “On Baltimore Ave, it’s either you’re making money or you’re abandoned as far as storefronts go. So it’s the only storefront that is purely for community enjoyment and not for personal profit. And so spaces like that slow development and gentrification.” The diverse ecotone character of the neighborhood provides the context for the encounters that A-Space facilitates. The space is both a product of the neighborhood and a contributor to the neighborhood dynamic.

In attempting to connect and relate across a context of unequal power and social difference, interactions in contact zones can challenge understandings of one’s own societal position with significant transformative effects. In one mixed-race edge neighborhood, a community acupuncturist recounted how serving diverse clients had sensitized her to the subtle ways that racism can operate—from decisions about volunteer staffing to the way an acupuncture needle is administered and received. The experience led her to adapt her hiring practices to make them more inclusive and inviting: “I do, much more purposefully, try to seek out people of color to sit at the desk because I want people of color patients to be here. If I make you uncomfortable, maybe the front desk person is making you feel a little bit less so.”52 In another example, an interviewee described how proximity to Kensington communities with a lot of drug users had led members of her art collective to refocus their personal activism around the opioid epidemic. Yet another example comes from Jon Bekken at Bindlestiff Books. Bekken recounts the story of an older bookstore volunteer who was able to build new community connections through her encounters with diverse customers:

During her five years at the store, she would talk to people, she would invite parents and children to her home for tea and cookies. She was an older Jewish woman, but she was inviting African American children, African immigrants, and so forth who she had talked to, who seemed to share her interest in books. And so, in that sense, she was making real connections and being involved with people. In her home, she was pretty much a recluse. I knew some of her neighbors, and they did not have much interaction with her. But the store brought her out into the community, and I think that’s partly why she came to the store. Right, she wanted to be meeting different people and out in the community.53

The story speaks to real connections and relations forming across generational, age, and racial boundaries. Values like multiculturalism that undergird this bookstore collective are precisely what facilitate such encounters and transformations and also play out in their everyday business practices. The books they sell reflect the interests of residents, such as teachers seeking multiracial children’s books for their classes. The cooperative in turn influences readers by curating selections based on their relationships with diverse patrons. In mundane micropolitical but nonetheless important ways, we can observe the centering of community above profit-seeking. A shared space is created where neighborhood volunteers, including older adults past the age of formal employment, are invited in to become engaged in collectively building something of value for the community. These are the workings of the Solidarity City.

As transformative as encounters across difference can be, the path is not smooth, nor is a positive outcome guaranteed. Edgework can be contradictory, and attempts at solidarity can involve frequent missteps, misunderstandings, and power plays. In his insightful study of Philadelphia cooperatives, Andrew Zitcer introduces the term paradox of exclusivity to characterize the contradictory position that cooperatives often find themselves in as they seek to foster both an engaged membership and inclusive practices.54 In order to boost identification among members, cooperatives need to make membership count in special ways. This, however, implies leaving some practices and people out, a fact that can lead to forms of elitism and exclusivity that are contrary to underlying cooperative principles. This often manifests in tacit forms of racial and economic discrimination. It is not uncommon, for instance, for whiteness to predominate even when an organization is located in an otherwise diverse neighborhood.55 This is where norms of economic solidarity become particularly important in setting ethical coordinates for addressing displacement, fostering genuine inclusion, and learning to live with difference. Such insights have special relevance in edge-zone areas such as the ones we describe.

To illustrate his point about exclusivity, Zitcer provides vivid accounts of incidents at Weavers Way and Mariposa food co-ops—in the Mount Airy and West Philadelphia edge zones, respectively—that reveal how the co-ops have variously fallen short of their own inclusionary values and how they have taken strides (some more successful than others) to rectify implicit racial bias. As major zones of encounter and as public faces of the cooperative movement in their respective neighborhoods, both co-ops have been subjected to intense scrutiny—arguably greater scrutiny than capitalist firms typically face—for how they enact solidarity and uphold cooperative values.56 They are a terrain on which visions for a more just and livable world are articulated and struggled over.

From this, we can see that disputes over inclusion within a cooperative frequently evoke a much broader issue: the quest for inclusion within society as a whole. This is profoundly evident in edge-zone spaces where cultural and economic divisions and hierarchies are especially stark and shifting, such as in Kensington. Several of the Kensington edge-zone cooperatives and collectives we spoke with conveyed a sense that they were existentially teetering between disinvested spaces and gentrified ones, between the destructive elements of poverty and the displacement of new development. In Kensington, as in many other parts of the city, the types of encounters you have can vary depending on which direction you walk. This point was evocatively communicated to us by a member of a collective who recounted the guidance given to clients as they left the space: “If you walk right, you’ll walk into a lot of cute eating places. . . . You’ll see people out walking their dogs. . . . If you walk left, you’ll encounter drug-addicted street people.”57 While meant to describe a particular street-level experience, these comments might just as easily serve as an allegory for the cooperative movement. Between walking left and walking right, how do cooperatives handle the edges of edge zones? The three neighborhoods are different contexts for answering these questions, and it should be clear that there is no single answer, no one way of translating a normative commitment to solidarity into practice.

We see such contradiction and struggle over values manifest in the community outreach efforts of another food co-op, the Kensington Community Food Co-op (KCFC). Founded as a buying club by relative newcomers to the Kensington neighborhood, KCFC spent many years accumulating resources, securing a location, and obtaining approval from the city to open a storefront, which it finally did in 2019. Its location ended up being closer to some of the rougher edges of Kensington and farther removed from more rapidly gentrifying areas and young professionals who might otherwise have made up its consumer base. From its beginnings, the co-op aspired to serve a transformational role in the local community by providing fresh food access, a positive gathering space, and job opportunities to the low-income area of Kensington. But it also struggled to balance its social mission with its business operations and the divergent interests and racial and socioeconomic positions of its founders, staff, membership, and surrounding community. These tensions played out in a controversy over a community refrigerator.

As a way to enhance food security in the surrounding community, the co-op sponsored a community fridge on its property. The fridge offered fresh fruit and vegetables, prepared meals, and other food items free for all and accessible at any time through an outdoor refrigerator and outdoor pantry. Although the membership generally supported the idea of helping the community with food security, there was considerably more discontent over the fraught community encounters occasioned by the fridge’s presence. As one of the co-op’s former board members describes:

It’s been controversial. Kensington is the center of the opioid epidemic on the East Coast. There are a lot of people in active addiction here, which seems to have only increased and become more public since the onset of Covid. We’ve had people complain about homeless people loitering around the property or saying that people are using drugs near the property. Or people have used drugs and are nodding off on the property by the fridge. . . . I wish it could be a simple, positive community project, but it’s become contentious.58

The fridge created rifts within the co-op. Sales revenue was dangerously low, and some members complained that the fridge was “scaring away customers” or that it was “inviting the wrong type of people here.” They suggested that the co-op “is not a social services agency” and that “margins should come before mission.” Other members, however, insisted that these are people who need food like everyone else—“If you don’t like it, why are you living in an urban area?” After extensive internal debate and an inconclusive poll of member opinion, the co-op staff and leadership elected to keep the fridge for principled reasons. In the words of the former board member, “We see it as part of our mission to help serve the community to advance food access.” Amid intense disagreement, the cooperative principles helped set ethical coordinates for moving forward.

The point of this example is not to paint cooperatives as panaceas for divided societies; co-ops have many complications. Nor is it to portray KCFC as a glowing example of good community partnerships. KCFC did some things right and many things wrong.59 The point is rather to display how, even in exceptionally divisive edge-zone settings involving intense encounters across stark socioeconomic divides, the cooperative framework provides normative resources for expanding solidarity’s reach. It is a story of a cooperative intentionally stepping into a fraught city space and doing what it can to grapple with the challenges of building an inclusive cooperative community.

We see examples of cooperatives stepping toward fault lines expressly to grapple with racial and economic divides and do the difficult edgework of advancing justice and understanding under what are often adverse conditions of division and conflict. Co-ops don’t create the contradictions that underlie the city, but they do have resources to deal with them. This directly speaks to the third main contention of the book that we laid out in the introduction: that solidarity economies have better solutions.

The complexity of such dynamics underscores the fraughtness of edge zones—that’s what makes an edge an edge—and the potency of solidarity norms and the cooperative principles to guide both organizations’ efforts to do what’s right and efforts to hold such organizations accountable for their exclusivity and dislocating impacts on the community. Indeed, this is something we have consistently found: cooperatives stepping into the edge-zone dynamics, seeking to transform fault lines with intention. As critics observe, they don’t always get things right. But they are striving to build better worlds beyond the capitalist frame.

Encounters and Ecotones in Their Broader Context

We opened this chapter with two dramatically contrasting representations of the role of cooperatives in urban space. Salt Pepper Ketchup depicted white-led cooperatives as a source of gentrification, racialized divisions, and, ultimately, as a tragic caricature set in Philadelphia. The other play, Black Conference, rooted itself in a history of leadership and formation of cooperatives in Black communities, highlighting the emancipatory potential of cooperatives. We wanted to see how this aligned with the actual experience of co-ops in Philadelphia with respect to both their locations and the solidarity work they are doing along edge zones of the city. What kind of membership or clientele are they trying to serve? And how are they dealing, or not dealing, with race? To what extent does life imitate art? Our evidence reveals a far more complex and indeterminate set of dynamics at work than either play suggests. We find that the roles cooperatives play and the struggles they face are highly mediated by geography. In Philadelphia, cooperatives tend to gravitate to demographically diverse neighborhoods, either downtown or in edge zones between segregated same-race neighborhoods.60 We have been particularly drawn to this edge-zone (or ecotone) pattern and to the notion that such neighborhoods might be defined not simply by the divides (the fault lines) but by the rich intermixing of peoples and cultures. What, we ask, might it imply about cooperatives’ capacity for emancipatory action?

We spoke to many of the cooperatives in those zones and discovered the reasons why they chose those neighborhoods to start those initiatives and also how they dealt with contradictions arising from segregation. Some cooperatives are originating from within the neighborhoods themselves, like Bindlestiff Books, which crafted real, multicultural, cross-generational relations in their space. Some cooperatives, looking for the right destination, are settling in neighborhoods with high crime rates because other co-ops are also nearby. And certainly there are cooperatives grappling (sometimes well but not always successfully) with encounters between different racial groups and across great income disparities. In doing this, they are engaged in edgework, negotiating coexistence in the everyday life of neighborhoods shaped by racial and poverty fault lines.

Navigating this social landscape is not easy, even for seasoned cooperators committed to the cause. It requires sound judgment and attunement to shifting conditions in the community. It takes intention. But intention alone is insufficient. It also requires learning about others’ experiences and about what racial and economic injustice require. That learning happens by breaking out of enclaves and making the most of encounters. Solidarity economies are, in this respect, hard work.

Such work is made easier when there are support organizations within a wider cooperative ecosystem keyed into antioppression frameworks and practices. In this chapter, we’ve shown how the cooperative cultures within edge-zone neighborhoods can contribute to such work, but citywide efforts have a role to play as well. In Philadelphia, we find elements of such a supportive ecosystem in many places. We see it in the work of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) and in training offered by the Anti-oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA). Both organizations are based in Philadelphia.61 We also see it in the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, a multisectoral umbrella organization (a cooperative of cooperatives) that advocates for and supports the city’s cooperative movement and openly embraces a solidarity economy framework and a racial justice orientation. Such alliances are vital for leveraging knowledge and assets across contexts, and it is through their work that we see the Solidarity City in formation.

The edge-as-ecotone metaphor has helped us illuminate how these edge areas are neighborhoods in their own right and not merely spaces of transition between more homogeneous neighborhoods. The ecotone metaphor speaks to how cooperatives can flourish in such contexts and generate greater solidarity. Such a possibility contrasts sharply with deterministic accounts that portray gentrification in such edge spaces as all but inevitable and that position cooperatives in the role of (un)witting accomplice. Our intention, however, is not simply to invert the deterministic reasoning in favor of more utopian outcomes. Gentrification and displacement do occur in edge zones where cooperative ventures thrive, and cooperatives do, at times, contribute to gentrifying processes. However, we are suggesting that this is not always the case and that such areas should not be defined by gentrifying dynamics alone. Their meaning and potential needs to be understood and acted upon, rather than taken as a given. Edge zones can be areas where networks of diverse people engage in economic practices rooted in solidarity and in transformative struggle against racial and class division. In this edge space, cooperatives can be places of encounter and solidarity across lines of race, wealth, and poverty—a basis for renegotiating relations by means of cooperation. They can be spaces of antiracist learning and activism, and the rich dynamics that unfold in them can have placemaking implications, giving shape to neighborhood identities. What’s more, the principles underlying the cooperative movement and the solidarity economy more generally provide normative resources to make such transformative practice more likely and impactful. The aim, then, should be not merely to critique cooperatives for their shortcomings but also to cultivate their potential. The cooperative framework may be an opening, but it is not an ending.