Making Cities with Solidarity through Time

Spatial Distribution of Solidarity Economies: Clustering and Density

The maps in the preceding chapter show the aggregate spatial distribution of the solidarity economy to be both large and uneven. Some parts of the cities (e.g., downtown areas) have many solidarity economy organizations, whereas others have only a few. All of this invites questions about the clustering of solidarity economy initiatives, where they tend to concentrate and settle, and, most importantly, for what reasons.

While the dot maps in the previous chapter (Map 1) provide an overarching view of the solidarity economy’s sectoral distributions, the maps nonetheless underrepresent the extent to which initiatives converge in particular spaces. This is because the overlapping of dots masks the full density of solidarity economy clusters. In this chapter, we probe such clusters more fully by presenting the same data via a density surface in Map 2. This was done by applying a geospatial technique called kernel density estimation. Simply speaking, the density maps show where the solidarity economy activity is more or less dense. Similar to how population density maps show quantities of people per area unit (e.g., persons per acre), our maps show variation in quantities of initiatives per acre. Areas with higher densities are colored with darker shades, while areas with lower density have lighter shades.

Map 2 offers a two-dimensional look at the landscape. In it, we observe stark contrasts between areas where the solidarity economy is dense and areas where it is sparse. But even these maps do not convey the full intensity of those solidarity economy clusters. Map 3 presents these density surfaces in three dimensions. This perspective further amplifies the solidarity economy’s presence and patterns on the maps. The three-dimensional landscape might remind viewers of a relief composed of mountains, valleys, and plains, with higher densities resembling mountain peaks and lower densities resembling lower elevations. The map images not only display the solidarity economy as a citywide phenomenon deserving thoughtful consideration but also beckon the viewer to ponder which specific areas of the city align with these most vibrant centers of solidarity economic activity. We want to recognize these specific neighborhoods, find out their names, and explain why those neighborhoods have high densities of solidarity economies.

Solidarity Economies inside Redlined Neighborhoods

Urban landscapes are not produced overnight. The inequalities that we mapped earlier in the chapter are the product of generations of entanglement with racial capitalism, biased government policies, and other forces: the migration of working-class people; the dynamics of industrialization and deindustrialization; urban neoliberal restructuring; dislocations through urban renewal, gentrification, and incarceration. These all shaped the cities we now inhabit. Many volumes have been written explaining these dynamics, and we will not attempt to review them all here. Instead, we devote special attention to one process in particular, commonly known as redlining. Redlining refers to a set of urban practices widely used in the middle part of the twentieth century to shape cities in powerful ways. The resulting geographic patterns of urban poverty and organized abandonment continue to define urban space to this day. Notably, redlining worked to racialize and segregate urban communities by poverty through a series of maps. The cartographies of the solidarity economy that we overlay against the borders of redlined neighborhoods make it clear that in the past, like today, urban space has been powerfully created through solidarity, as well as through racist policies and capital.

Redlining, a major instrument of federal housing policy, produced rippling effects on urban space. In concert with the actions of urban administrations and real estate developers, federal policies entrenched the spatial dynamics of racial capitalism by retracing and carving even deeper fault lines of residential racial segregation in hundreds of U.S. cities. For us, redlining is especially important because it exemplifies how maps have been deployed to sustain and consolidate hegemonic social orders, a theme we discussed in chapter 1. Redlining brought together race and mapping in a process that helped constitute the racialized and economically stratified urban settings we study and against which we position solidarity economies.

Federal redlining began in the 1930s with the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) as parts of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ostensibly designed to lower housing foreclosure rates and expand homeownership through government-backed loans to homeowners and developers of new residential areas, the agencies were tasked with assessing investment risk within urban housing markets for the sake of lowering risk for taxpayer-backed loans. Their efforts to codify the risk levels of different neighborhoods ultimately determined where federal subsidies and private investment would flow.5 The HOLC and FHA produced maps of cities by block, with detailed information about the sociodemographic makeup of each mapped neighborhood and the condition of housing stock.6 Both were used as factors in risk assessment for government investment in housing construction. Areas marked by green and blue colors on the HOLC maps corresponded to “Best” and “Still desirable” categories for low-risk loans. These areas, assessed as suitable for new construction, like suburbs with room to build, received practically all investment and subsidies. Other, mainly urban, neighborhoods, shown on the maps with yellow and red colors (hence the term “redlining”) and corresponding to “Definitely declining” and “Hazardous” categories, respectively, could not access new investment, subsidies to builders, and mortgages to residents. We reproduce these maps in Map 10 against the concentrations of the solidarity economy.

Widespread discrimination permeated the dynamics of redlining, influencing local assessors’ judgments regarding which neighborhoods posed an investment risk, ultimately leading to their depiction in red on the map. Pervasive racism ensured that the maps consistently associated people of color with social problems. Subsequently, most inner-city neighborhoods containing large numbers of people not considered white (a category that variously included Black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, and twentieth-century Italian and Irish populations, among many others) were excluded from accessing federally backed loans, often disregarding the economic status of the residents.7 Not being able to purchase a new home elsewhere without mortgage access, residents of these neighborhoods were confined to increasingly segregated and disinvested locations where homeowners and even willing landlords were lacking subsidies for upgrading the dilapidated housing stock.8 On the other side of this dynamic, middle-class white households were able to retreat from rapidly devaluing neighborhoods into racially exclusionary suburbs or certain less densely built urban neighborhoods where newly built homes were made affordable by massive government mortgage subsidies.9 Redlining thus intensified and entrenched for decades to come the already ongoing spatialization of racialized poverty and wealth. Even after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the law that formally prohibited redlining practices, the effects of redlining persist due to intergenerational wealth transfers, the discriminatory workings of present-day real estate markets and development companies, and the everyday processes that reproduce racialized divisions in income, wealth, and opportunity. Recent research shows that practically three-quarters of the neighborhoods then designated as “Hazardous” by HOLC remain low-income today, and two-thirds of them are minority communities.10

In these ways, redlining is a potent illustration of the ontological power of mapmaking and how maps have been deployed in support of racial and class hegemony. The color-coded maps did not merely represent preexisting urban realities; they also helped intensify the existing racial divisions within urban landscapes while contributing to the emergence of new ones.

Neighborhoods categorized as “Best” became more prosperous as a result of redlining and the processes it set in motion. Meanwhile, neighborhoods designated as “Hazardous” became more hazardous due to the resultant disinvestment. From its inception, redlining was a form of worldmaking. The abandonment of particular urban neighborhoods did not just happen; it was organized through creation and widely spread application of those maps.11 The intentional segregation of nonwhite neighborhoods has led to profitable investments elsewhere. Wrapped in normative rhetoric about the importance of homeownership and upward mobility for middle- and working-class families, redlining was always and everywhere a way to shore up the status of white homeowners at the expense of nonwhite working-class neighborhoods.

In what follows, we relate solidarity economy hot spots to the history and geography of redlining in order to position those two ways to make urban space against each other. Our intentions are twofold. First, we seek new perspectives on the historical conditions that give rise to economic solidarity. Solidarity economies emerge in the context of neighborhoods. We ask why they concentrate in some neighborhoods and not others and, additionally, whether the solidarity economy has provided communities with the means to resist the devastating effects of redlining. For this, the redlining maps serve as a marker of the racialized modes of disinvestment that many neighborhoods have endured over decades and that influence solidarity pathways. Second, we undertake this as a form of counter-mapping designed to destabilize the normative order reflected in redlining maps. In contrast to those maps, we map the abundance and scarcity of economic solidarity initiatives, something that this hegemonic order either ignores or actively undermines through, for example, organized abandonment of the redlined neighborhoods. Juxtaposing solidarity economy hot spots with redlining maps is a way to illustrate that, while neighborhoods have been influenced by the forces of racial capitalism, they are not solely defined by them.

Our maps show the striking manner in which practically all contemporary solidarity economy hot spots coincide with formerly redlined areas, many of which remain home to communities of color living at or below twice the poverty line (Map 10). Today, for example, we see clusters of solidarity economies in impoverished Black and Latinx communities in formerly redlined areas of West and North Philadelphia (hot spots P3, P2, and P5) and in New York’s Lower East Side (N4), North Manhattan (N2), Harlem (N2), North Brooklyn (N5, N6, and N7), and the South Bronx (N1). In Worcester, the major solidarity economy hot spot in Main South neighborhood (W1) coincides with those red and yellow areas that were deprived of investment in the past and that continue to comprise working-class communities of color experiencing poverty.

Conversely, the densities of the solidarity economy are generally lower in the areas that were marked by HOLC in green and blue and thus for decades made accessible to mortgage lending to white populations. This is the case, for example, in Northwest and Northeast Philadelphia and in parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island in New York City. The same holds true for whiter and wealthier neighborhoods in northern and western Worcester.

Taken together, these findings reveal an interesting inversion of the normative hierarchy. Many of the neighborhoods labeled as the “Best” on the redlining maps, representing areas abundant with capital and investment opportunities, are the very places where solidarity economy initiatives are conspicuously scarce. By contrast, many neighborhoods that were once categorized as “Hazardous” and lacking in opportunity are here shown to be rich in economic solidarity. While many of these latter neighborhoods undoubtedly continue to endure economic hardship, the maps reveal they are much more than their redlining designation.

A small number of our hot spots appear in areas that used to be redlined but are today areas transformed by gentrification into well-to-do, predominantly white neighborhoods. This is perhaps most evident in portions of South Philadelphia (P4), northwest Brooklyn (N6), and western Manhattan (N3), though it has happened elsewhere as well. Redlining and urban abandonment played a role in this too. As urban geographers argue, and as we discuss in chapter 5, disinvestment and gentrification (or redevelopment) are often two sides of the same coin.12 Disinvestment creates the conditions of profitability (known as the “rent gap”) that developers seek to capitalize on, encouraged by urban administrations that seek to eradicate so-called blight. This large-scale condition generates spatially focused consequences such as displacement. Almost 50 percent of New York’s urban renewal projects and 70 percent of public housing projects targeted disinvested neighborhoods, displacing residents experiencing poverty from some distressed neighborhoods and further spatially concentrating them in others.13 Similar dynamics played out in Philadelphia. The historic Black neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, for instance, were directly targeted for urban renewal. Between 1950 and 1966, more than thirteen thousand Philadelphia families were displaced through urban renewal projects. Seventy-two percent of these families were Black.14 As we will explore in subsequent chapters, the dynamics of organized abandonment, redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement continue to operate in each of these cities. But while displacement of residents with the lowest incomes remains a distinct possibility in gentrifying neighborhoods, it is not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the threat of displacement serves to underscore the significance of solidarity economies, both as a potential contributor to urban renewal and gentrification at times and as a potential ballast against displacement. In some neighborhoods, people who would have otherwise been displaced have been able to remain in place because of the infrastructures of solidarity: community gardens, credit unions, and especially through affordable housing cooperatives (see chapter 6).

Overall, the foregoing analysis establishes a connection between the historic, racist practices of redlining and the distributions of contemporary urban solidarity economies. This suggests that the solidarity economy provides unique collective ways of coping with racialized poverty and economic injustice. While this is certainly true to a large extent, it would be a mistake to portray the solidarity economy as only reactive, a view that would give all of the power and agency to government policies and oppressive conditions. Credit unions, cooperatives, community gardens, and other solidarity economy initiatives may indeed be responses to redlining (and other racial capitalist forces) and its enduring consequences, but they also come from different inspirations and practices that are not just defined by opposition.

We join Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Sharon D. Wright-Austin, and Kevin Edmonds in seeking to shift the discourse “from one of necessity to one of agency and collective determination, to present to the world collective organizing occurring from the ground up.”15 Such initiatives might often be motivated by necessity, but they are born out of visions of a more just and cooperative economy. Inspiration for envisioning other worlds is generally drawn not from capitalist institutions but from shared cultural histories of human solidarity.

There are different visions of solidarity at work in the ecosystems of those solidarity economy hot spots. They come from different seeds. Those seeds are coming from deeper traditions, from other places, from other forms of worldmaking that have vitality and principles of their own. Much of the solidarity economy took hold within those redlined neighborhoods and beyond specifically because those who came from other parts of the United States and other countries actively made place in noncapitalist ways and built the solidarity cities. The subsequent chapters of the book pick up this theme in the context of the contemporary landscapes of solidarity economy. In the last section of this chapter, we reflect on where some of these seeds come from and what their contribution has been historically to overcoming organized abandonment and displacement, as well as building noncapitalist urban space through the solidarity economy. We do not promise to describe an entire seed bank; we scratch at the surface to simply connect our current-day solidarity economies to older traditions.16

The Many Sources and Deeds of Solidarity

The clustering of solidarity economy initiatives within the previously redlined neighborhoods testifies to their capacity to resist the oppressive conditions that have prevailed for decades within those communities. But it also embodies the creativity, emancipatory visions, and deep history of economic solidarity that people from all walks of life who settled in those neighborhoods have practiced as part of their cultures and newly acquired experiences.

Black neighborhoods figure prominently as roots of the solidarity economy clusters today across large urban areas of New York City and Philadelphia. This connects to a history of Black solidarity encompassing a variety of institutions, including mutual aid societies, maroon settlements, cooperative businesses, mutual insurance companies, benevolent burial and beneficial societies, cooperative stores, communal breakfast programs, and credit circles, among many other forms. As Jessica Gordon Nembhard and others observe, such cooperation has often been informal and hidden, sometimes purposely as a survival strategy by the communities themselves and other times through erasure by white supremacist institutions.17 Such solidarity practices have enabled Black communities to persevere in the face of economic exclusion, discrimination, and brutal violence from the time of slavery to the present day. This history is a resource. As Clyde Woods argues, much strength comes from Black culture and the creation of a “blues epistemology” that combines stories of suffering and resistance with visions of a liberated society in which communities take care of their members and where the full humanity of all is recognized.18

A strong cooperative tradition needs to be accounted for when evaluating solidarity hot spots in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Consider, for example, the significant presence of faith-based credit unions in such neighborhoods, a topic we pick up again in chapter 6. Historically, a wide variety of organizations have formed credit unions for their membership communities. But we found that in New York City’s Black neighborhoods, credit unions created by Black churches (with the church playing a major role in Black communities all throughout the country) date back to the 1930s and the start of redlining. In his groundbreaking 1907 study Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois traces the roots of Black economic cooperativism to the Black church, which loaned itself to antislavery insurrections and has remained a perpetual source of solidarity and spiritual and economic uplift for its community. To give one local example of the connection between the church and solidarity economy formations, we can look at the influential African Methodist Episcopalian (AME) Church, which traces its origins back to one of the country’s first Black mutual aid societies. In 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, formerly enslaved individuals, cofounded the Free African Society, a nondenominational mutual aid society committed to serving Philadelphia’s burgeoning free Black community. Building on his experiences with this mutual aid society, Allen went on to establish the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794. This, in turn, served as the immediate precursor to the independent African Methodist Episcopal Church, which Allen formally founded in 1816.19 After its founding, the AME church went on to coordinate with Quakers on the Underground Railroad (which had major stops in Brooklyn, Worcester, and Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood) and to found schools, historically Black colleges and universities, and, indeed, credit unions. Today, over a century after Du Bois’s study, we see the continuing importance of the Black church’s cooperative commitments in the clustering of faith-based credit unions in previously redlined neighborhoods of New York City and other major cities. These credit unions provide banking for communities that are otherwise deprived of safe and affordable financial services. In this sense, they provide collective responses to racial capitalist forces. But they are also contributing to social development and cultivating visions of caring communities at the levels of congregation, neighborhood, and society.

Defense against racial capitalist forces is happening, yes, but so too is the construction of something new. This can also be seen in community gardens in low-income neighborhoods. Such gardens are not merely addressing food scarcity; they are also manifestations of community agency, cultural heritage, and different ideas of ecological relations. Many Black-led community gardens and farms self-consciously tap into cooperative traditions of Black agronomy and Black ancestral knowledge of tending the land.20 The gardens are built to harness larger dreams, blending care for the soil with care for the community. Ecological visions and relations premised on sustainability and health can obviously connect and bind together many different communities and racial groups. Recognizing and understanding the deep-rooted cultural and historical aspects of these gardens is essential for appreciating the full scope of their significance and the broader context in which they exist.

The Black cooperative tradition is one fount of urban economic solidarity, but it is far from the only one. Other groups draw on different histories and traditions when developing noncapitalist economic alternatives within the solidarity economy hot spots. Consider the historical influences on cooperatives in West Philadelphia. The majority of the cooperatives located in the West Philadelphia hot spot can be traced, in one way or another, to the radical visions of a predominantly white group of Quaker activists. In the early 1970s, a Philadelphia-based group of Quakers formed what they called the Movement for a New Society (MNS), a national network of activists advocating nonviolent revolutionary change.21 Explicitly anticapitalist and anti-imperialist, they regarded war as inherent to capitalism and social inequality as inherently violent. Coming out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, they also observed fatigue within activist circles and frustration with traditional, top-down, hierarchical models of politics within activist organizations. MNS recognized that a successful revolutionary movement would require internal work within movement spaces to unlearn oppressive practices and to develop nonhierarchical modes of organizing. Drawing heavily from Quaker traditions, but also from deep ecology, feminism, anarchism, Gandhian principles, and other progressive influences, they developed a model of activism that combined direct-action campaigns with countercultural forms of politics. Cooperatives and collectives were a major part of this vision. Between their founding in 1971 and their disbanding in 1988, MNS established a food cooperative, a land trust, and as many as twenty housing collectives (what they called “life centers”) within roughly ten square blocks in West Philadelphia. Their projects were intentionally designed with a prefigurative politics to embody the ways of living today that they wished to see in the future.22 Importantly, intentional communal living was seen not merely as a vehicle for consciousness-raising and personal development but also as a means of training and sustaining a cadre of activists for revolutionary nonviolent action, including for racial and economic justice work within local communities. In the West Philadelphia neighborhood where they were located, this meant fighting against racial segregation. While redlining had been made illegal a few years prior, white flight and the aggressive blockbusting tactics of developers were further intensifying neighborhood segregation. In West Philadelphia, MNS deliberately used cooperatives and block security programs to build a more integrated neighborhood (and fight white flight) as part of its larger vision of a new society. One takeaway is that one of the major solidarity city hot spots in Philadelphia can be traced to a faith-based tradition that has a long history of being on the cutting edge of racial justice politics, stretching from the antislavery movement to the civil rights era.

Solidarity can be a driving force in nurturing a sense of responsibility for the urban environment. In many areas, this is happening in community gardens that constitute large shares of the solidarity economy hot spots in all three cities. To turn to a Worcester example, the Regional Environmental Council (REC) has taken on the task of establishing a network of community gardens in the Main South area, actively involving the city’s Puerto Rican population (W1 on Map 9). This endeavor has its origins in the urgent need to address environmental challenges arising from Worcester’s industrial history, including soil contamination and various forms of environmental degradation. The REC’s origins can be traced back to a critical moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was founded to address the pressing issue of closing an illegal landfill located near Green Hill Park, in proximity to the Burncoat neighborhood, which is to the northeast of the major solidarity economy hot spot in the Main South area.23 The establishment of parks like Green Hill was the result of sustained nineteenth-century labor activism and the efforts of Worcester’s immigrant working class to ensure that working people had access to leisure and green space. The REC not only pays homage to this rich historical legacy but also actively builds on it. It creates spaces of solidarity that hold cultural significance for Worcester’s Puerto Rican gardeners, among other communities of color, all while maintaining a steadfast commitment to advancing the cause of environmental justice in the city. Through these efforts, the organization ensures that the lessons of the past continue to guide and inspire solutions for the challenges of today.

We see this same dynamic of vision for solidarity-based economic practices come from near and faraway places. Places where there is both informal solidarity long embedded into cultural traditions, but also places and countries where formal solidarity economies are recognized more widely. Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil have all had social and solidarity economies recognized by the state in a number of official ways, and people there are more generally familiar with cooperative practices and communal agrarian traditions.24 We see evidence of this in that some solidarity economy hot spots we identified coincide with neighborhoods settled over the course of decades by Latinx migrants to U.S. cities. Their traditions of solidarity live on in those neighborhoods. For these communities, initiatives such as community gardens offer a way to alleviate the hardship of urban living by supplementing food and providing open green space, as well as offering a means for revisioning urban spaces to honor and sustain cultural traditions. One of the many diasporic influences in the United States can be glimpsed in any number of community gardens shaped heavily by Latinx culture and agriculture in Washington Heights, East Harlem, the South Bronx, and Norris Square. Names of the gardens reveal the extent of their Latinx roots. Often, these were the first gardens created within the disinvested redlined neighborhoods, like Rincón Criollo in the South Bronx hot spot N1.25 Other inspiring examples include El Jardin del Paraiso in the Lower East Side hot spot N4, and Las Parcelas in Philadelphia’s Kensington hot spot P5. All of this is to say that many solidarity economy hot spots have emerged as a result of community gardens that tap into generational farming practices passed down from gardeners’ home countries while also fostering community through the construction of shared social spaces. Especially in New York, Puerto Rican gardeners in particular tend to construct casitas (little one-room houses with communal kitchens).26 Casitas can be traced to traditional Boricuan housing, and even further back to bohios, the thatched huts originally built by the Taino Indigenous people next to common spaces for rituals; today many community garden casitas have basic kitchens to help gardens host quinceañeras, pig roasts, and community celebrations.27 In addition to food production in gardens, people also connect to different histories and cultures because of the multiracial composition of these garden spaces. In all three cities in the chapters to come, majority Latinx communities in the United States emerge as sites of diverse solidarity economies connected to a history and memory rooted in many places of Latin America, a world region that has some of the most widespread and popular solidarity economy practices. They are bringing seeds (sometimes literally, especially of culinary and medicinal herbs) of different cosmovisions that generate norms and ways of constructing communal relations.

These are only a few examples of the diverse traditions that have been tapped into in the making of solidarity economies in heavily disinvested neighborhoods. These traditions of solidarity continue to support those communities today. The above examples illustrate some of the solidarity economy practices of the three racial groups—Black, Latinx, and white—that we focus on in the book. By virtue of their large demographics in contemporary urban populations, these groups participate today in many forms of solidarity economies that we study in these three cities. There are certainly many other communities that have long practiced their own forms of solidarity and that today participate in the solidarity economies we examine but who are not present within the cities in sufficient numbers to be amenable to the census-based analysis that constitutes an important dimension of our research. Nonetheless, cultural multiplicity marks all kinds of solidarity economy projects; myriad other examples could be cited coming from other groups who have been making solidarity cities based on visions drawing on deep and abundant traditions. Important seeds come from Indigenous roots, for example, as even the casitas in community gardens show us.28 Some practices sprout up simultaneously in different communities, like zero-interest peer lending groups in Asian and Caribbean communities as well as among Muslim cultures, which are traditions that migrants bring with them and transplant here.29 Many such traditions provide vision that supports urban solidarity economies, with lots of cross-fertilization also happening.

This diversity underscores that all cultures can generate visions of economic solidarity because solidarity is deeply embedded into all human histories. Those visions and practices enter the inheritance of humanity and are constantly at work shaping its future. As we noted in the introduction, solidarity work is not just a product of a particular point in time or group of people; it speaks to a core mode of humanity, writ large. For us, this means looking at cities not just with an eye toward how racial capitalist processes shaped urban space but also with attention to how solidarity economies shape cities.

The entire point of counter-mapping cities as we do is to show this interplay and tension between forces of racial capitalism and solidarity economies. This is what we do in the chapters to come. The chapters look at how different forms of the solidarity economy take root in urban space, find themselves in tension with fault lines of racialized economic inequality, and transform this space, often successfully but sometimes not, into community bulwarks and spaces of encounter.

In this chapter, we closely examined how solidarity economies cluster and form geographic hot spots in particular neighborhoods in all three cities. In most cases, these hot spots are found in historically redlined neighborhoods that are both low-income and majority people of color. Thus, the solidarity economy emerges as a widely practiced community response, or some might say reaction, to economic and social marginalization. However, to say that they are only a reaction would be to miss all the different ways that communities are practicing vital collective traditions and enacting their own visions of urban life. Rather than evaluating neighborhoods solely in terms of their suitability for capital investment (as the original redlining maps intended) or conversely in terms of the degree of victimization by racist practices that unfairly denied access to capital (the perspective of many critics of redlining), we use counter-mapping to look at cities with a different lens. We find and make visible on our maps an abundance of economic solidarity at work that has long shouldered various “build and defend” strategies within those marginalized neighborhoods while drawing on traditions of everyday solidarity in different cultures.

Karl Marx famously said that we make our own history but not under circumstances of our own choosing.30 People and institutions that are part of today’s solidarity economy movement operate in urban environments that have been powerfully shaped by forces ranging from capitalist development and government housing policy to ongoing police and structural violence. These are the circumstances not of our choosing. But what we wish to emphasize is the tenacity of the solidarity economy movement and the ability of urban communities, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “to make where they were into places they wished to be.”31 What we (the authors) have continually learned from the movement is that the opportunity to further realize the solidarity city depends upon identifying the possibilities for mutuality and social transformation. To move toward equitable worlds is to engage wholeheartedly in the work of healing and repair, building forms of collective assurance and joy.

We are keenly aware, though, that the circumstances of the Solidarity Cities coming into being are never ideal. In the next chapter, we return to the present-day politics of solidarity economy in Worcester, Massachusetts, in order to illuminate how solidarity is always facing hostile forces wishing to unmake the very oases that offer so much to their participants. We recount the efforts of one organization to create a common space to extend solidarity among many initiatives but also across lines of racial, gender, generational, and economic difference. Set in one place, this richly detailed story is instructive in that it sheds light on what solidarity economy institutions with ethical commitments could be struggling with elsewhere while keeping the work of solidarity going.