Notes

1. We have chosen to use the term Latinx in this book as a gender-neutral term encompassing all people who have Latin American roots. It includes, for instance, all Brazilians, who would not be included in the more linguistic category of “Hispanic.” Although the term Latinx may not be widely used in everyday language—many people still prefer Latino/Latina or Hispanic, according to Pew Center polls (see Noe-Bustamante, Mora, and Lopez, About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics; García, “Cultural Insights for Planners”)—it has become much more mainstream in academic writing in the last ten years due to its inclusivity in terms of gender. We do nonetheless use the term Hispanic in some instances, especially when making assertions on the basis of U.S. Census data, which uses the term Hispanic.

2. Zucchino, “Badlands”; Thompson, “Norris Square”; Wherry, Philadelphia Barrio.

3. Today, the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, an organization founded by many of these same women, directly manages six prized community gardens organized around Latinx and Afro-Caribbean culture.

4. The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue defines a tax lien as “a charge on real or personal property for the satisfaction of debt or duty” (Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, “Pennsylvania Tax Liens”). The Department of Revenue files a lien when an individual or business has unpaid delinquent taxes. The lien ensures the government is listed as a priority creditor that must be paid before other financial transactions can take place. In 1997, the city, undergoing a fiscal crisis, sold tax liens on thirty-three thousand properties to U.S. Bank to help fund the Philadelphia School District. While U.S. Bank does not own the properties themselves, ownership of the liens (many of which are worth more than the land) gives the bank control over land sales. S. Melamed, “Decades-Old Money-Making Scheme.”

5. Michael Gonzalo Moran, Iglesias Garden secretary, in discussion with Craig Borowiak, October 17, 2022.

6. The gardeners sometimes refer to their project in the plural as “Iglesias Gardens.” The use of the plural is meant to reflect the inclusion of several garden plots that are in the vicinity but not adjacent to the core garden space.

7. Ximena, “Philadelphia Buys $1 Million.”

8. For definitions of spatial imaginaries, see Watkins, “Spatial Imaginaries Research in Geography.”

9. We capitalize Solidarity Economy and Solidarity City when we refer to them as general concepts. We use lowercase when referring to particular solidarity economies and solidarity cities that are multiple, of diverse types, and in many geographic locales.

10. For accounts of some of these historical and contemporary formations, going under under various names from mutual aid to community wealth-building economies, see Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Hossein, “Black Epistemology for the Social and Solidarity Economy”; Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro; Guest, God in Chinatown; Pavlovskaya, “Other Transitions”; Min, Ethnic Solidarity; Woods, “Les Misérables of New Orleans”; Safri and Graham, “Global Household”; Stenning et al., “Credit, Debt, and Everyday Financial Practices”; Oji, Managing Culture Shock and Conflict; Smyth, “Re-reading Remittances through Solidarity”; Birdsong, How We Show Up; Spade, Mutual Aid.

11. Gibson-Graham, End of Capitalism; Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy”; Healy and Graham, “Building Community Economies.” For discussions that situate alternative economies within the context of much larger diverse economies, see Healy, “Economies, Alternative.”

12. Especially popular in the past decade is a mycelial turn in social thought touched off by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World. That book is, in part, a dialogue with postcapitalist theory in its efforts to describe the complex interactions between human communities, disturbed ecologies, and fungi. Mushroom picking is described as a practice of freedom and a livelihood strategy that leads to their movement from an extracted resource to a global commodity and ritualized gift exchange.

13. Grassroots Economic Organizing, “Decolonizing Our Solidarity Economy”; Borowiak et al., “Navigating the Fault Lines.”

14. In 2014, New York City passed the first legislation in the country (since duplicated in other cities) to direct city council funding toward the development of worker cooperatives. Except for citywide cuts due to Covid-19, the program has received increasing annual funds, and in 2022 it allotted $3.8 million to worker cooperative development. This is an example that we see of where urban-level initiatives to support solidarity economies can find more fertile ground as city council members are made to understand the ways that these economies offer enhanced resilience and stability for city neighborhoods and residents. Sutton, “Cooperative Cities.”

15. For a similar account of the overdetermined, aporetic, and uncertain dynamics of urbanization, see C. M. Anderson, Urbanism without Guarantees.

16. Poverty segregation refers to the extent to which the lowest-income populations are segregated from more affluent ones. See Silver, “Most Diverse Cities”; Logan, “Separate and Unequal”; Massey and Tannen, “Research Note on Trends in Black Hypersegregation”; Florida and Mellander, Segregated City.

17. Philadelphia is, for example, home to the country’s first cooperative, a mutual fire-insurance company founded in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin. It was also home to early mutual benefit societies associated with the first independent Black churches, including the Free African Society cofounded in 1787 by Richard Allen, who later founded the African Methodist Episcopalian Church. Philadelphia’s history of urban community gardening dates back at least as far as the 1890s when the Philadelphia Vacant Lots Cultivation Association was chartered.

18. Duménil and Lévy, Crisis of Neoliberalism; Lapavitsas, “Profiting without Producing.”

19. Worcester was, for example, at the center of the First Indian War in the seventeenth century and American Revolutionary battles in the eighteenth century.

20. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will.

21. U.S. Census Bureau, “Census 2020, PL94 Redistricting Data”; U.S. Census Bureau, “Census 1970.”

22. Worcester and Worcester County have seen a dramatic diversification of their populations over the last decade. This has been especially dramatic in relation to people with multiracial identities, a 300 percent increase in the past decade. See Hanson, “Worcester Population Increases to 206,000.”

23. Benjamin, Viral Justice.

24. Gibson-Graham, Post-Capitalist Politics, xxxi–xxxii.

25. Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class; Gibson-Graham, End of Capitalism.

26. Gibson-Graham, End of Capitalism, 59.

27. St. Martin, “Toward a Cartography of the Commons,” 2.

28. Gibson-Graham, Postcapitalist Politics.

29. Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy”; Miller, “Solidarity Economy”; Kawano and Matthaei, “System Change”; Utting, Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals; Laville, Solidarity Economy.

30. Cox, Nilsen, and Pleyers, “Social Movement Thinking beyond the Core”; Fadaee, “Bringing in the South.”

31. Naylor and Thayer, “Between Paranoia and Possibility.”

32. Jayasooria, Developments in Solidarity Economy in Asia; Singer, “Recent Rebirth of the Solidarity Economy in Brazil.”

33. Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy.”

34. In June 2022, at the 110th International Labour Conference, the International Labour Organization adopted the following definition of the Social and Solidarity Economy. The complexity of the definition is itself a reflection of the diversity of the movement.

The SSE encompasses enterprises, organizations and other entities that are engaged in economic, social, and environmental activities to serve the collective and/or general interest, which are based on the principles of voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, democratic and/or participatory governance, autonomy and independence, and the primacy of people and social purpose over capital in the distribution and use of surpluses and/or profits as well as assets. SSE entities aspire to long-term viability and sustainability, and to the transition from the informal to the formal economy and operate in all sectors of the economy. They put into practice a set of values which are intrinsic to their functioning and consistent with care for people and planet, equality and fairness, interdependence, self-governance, transparency and accountability, and the attainment of decent work and livelihoods. According to national circumstances, the SSE includes cooperatives, associations, mutual societies, foundations, social enterprises, self-help groups and other entities operating in accordance with the values and principles of the SSE. (International Labour Organization, “ILC.110/Resolution II, Resolution Concerning Decent Work and the Social and Solidarity Economy,” June 16, 2022, https://www.ilo.org/resource/ilc/110/resolution-concerning-decent-work-and-social-and-solidarity-economy)

The United Nations largely adopted this definition in the resolution passed in April 2023 encouraging all member states to promote and implement national, local, and regional strategies and policies for supporting the social and solidarity economy. U.N. General Assembly, Resolution 77/281, Promoting the Social and Solidarity Economy for Sustainable Development, A/77/L.60 (April 27, 2023), https://www.un.org/en/ga/77/resolutions.shtml.

35. Quiñones, “Facets of Solidarity Economy”; Loh and Agyeman, “Urban Food Sharing”; Loh and Shear, “Solidarity Economy and Community Development.”

36. Throughout this book we write both about the solidarity economy movement and about the solidarity economy more generally. In the case of the former, we refer to people who self-identify with the solidarity economy, whether actively engaged or more passive. When we refer to the solidarity economy more broadly, we include people who participate in solidarity economy initiatives irrespective of whether or not they self-identify with the concept or the movement.

37. Tarrow, Power in Movement; Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.

38. Miller, “Anticapitalism or Postcapitalism?”

39. Kelley, Amariglio, and Wilson, “Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange.”

40. Ruha Benjamin puts it simply: “I don’t need an ally; I need you to smell the smoke” (Benjamin, Viral Justice, 20). She goes on to describe how racial capitalism harms even white people with privilege, such as when anti-Blackness leads to general divestment from social goods like education and health care.

41. Kelley, Amariglio, and Wilson, “Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange.”

42. In this instance, the activist was speaking about solidarity economies in the context of the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, by Ferguson police. The comment was made in discussion with Craig Borowiak at the North American Social Solidarity Economy Forum, Detroit, Michigan, April 9, 2016.

43. See Borowiak et al., “Navigating the Fault Lines”; Hudson, “New York City.” Scholar-activist Lauren Hudson points to gendered and racialized disparities within the movement space in New York City where much of the daily volunteer work of sustaining the movement falls to women, while men tend to occupy formal leadership positions.

44. Grassroots Economic Organizing, “Decolonizing Our Solidarity Economy.”

45. Hossein, “Black Epistemology for the Social and Solidarity Economy,” 212.

46. Robinson, Black Marxism.

47. For discussions of racial capitalism, see Robinson, Black Marxism; J. Melamed, “Racial Capitalism”; Gilmore, “Geographies of Racial Capitalism”; Pulido, “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II”; Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean”; Kelley, Amariglio, and Wilson, “Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange.” Something similar might be said of gender and heteronormativity: capitalism has always operated through gendered dynamics.

48. Gilmore, “Geographies of Racial Capitalism.”

49. Contrary to skeptics who regard the sordid history of modern racism as incidental to capitalism’s development (Walzer, “Note on Racial Capitalism”), scholarship on racial capitalism demonstrates that capitalist exploitation is enabled by racialization in ways that extend well beyond the U.S. experience rooted in slavery and colonialism, as Robinson in Black Marxism points out with numerous examples, including the racialization of the Irish in the United Kingdom and even more tellingly of Slavic peoples (with the root word for slave coming from the racial and class designation of that entire swath of eastern European geography).

50. Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism.

51. Dantzler, Korver-Glenn, and Howell, “Introduction,” 168. See also Dantzler, “Urban Process under Racial Capitalism”; Rucks-Ahidiana, “Theorizing Gentrification”; McClintock, “Urban Agriculture”; Taylor, Race for Profit; Ponder, “Spatializing the Municipal Bond Market.” We would note as well a growing body of literature that also explores how racial capitalism finds expression in relation to the experience of Asian immigrants. See Au, “Asian American Racialization”; Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism.

52. See Gilmore, Golden Gulag; McKittrick and Woods, “Black Geographies”; McKittrick, “On Plantations.”

53. Woods, “Katrina’s World”; McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place.

54. Barnes, “Explaining the 140 Million.”

55. There has been an explosion of papers thinking about the relationship between diverse economies and forms of racialization, particularly as diverse economies scholarship has internationalized (Ashford-Hanserd, “African-American Experiences”; Gabriel, “Work That Parks Do”; Naylor and Thayer, “Between Paranoia and Possibility”; Diprose et al., “Community Economies”; Vunibola and Scobie, “Islands of Indigenous Innovation”; Bargh, “Māori Political and Economic Recognition”; Hossein and Pearson, “Black Feminists in the Third Sector”; Loh and Shear, “Solidarity Economy and Community Development”). However, some people have been operating in this space for a span of more than twenty years (e.g., Rio, “‘On the Move’”). To that we would add our own previously published work as evidence that this encounter has been underway for quite some time. Borowiak et al., “Navigating the Fault Lines”; Healy et al., “Commoning and the Politics of Solidarity”; Pavlovskaya et al., “Place of Common Bond”; Safri et al., “Putting the Solidarity Economy on the Map.”

56. Robinson, Black Marxism.

57. Du Bois, Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans.

58. Robinson, Black Marxism. See also Mullings et al., “Biology of Racism”; Hossein and Pearson, “Black Feminists in the Third Sector”; Bhattacharya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism; Winston, “Maroon Geographies.”

59. See, for example, Nembhard, Collective Courage; Hossein and Pearson, “Black Feminists in the Third Sector”; Winston, “Maroon Geographies”; Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Escobar, Pluriversal Politics; Campos Medina, Nava, and Aramendi, “Tandas and Cooperativas”; Tornabene “Constellation of Economic Possibilities”; Sweet, “Locating Migrant Latinas”; Hammelman, “Urban Migrant Women’s Everyday Food Insecurity.”

60. Luna, “SolidarityNYC.”

61. Christoph and Kron, Solidarity Cities in Europe; Godoy and Bauder, “Sanctuary and Solidarity Cities.”

62. Akuno, “Build and Fight,” 3.

63. Akuno and Nangwaya, Jackson Rising, 36.

64. While Cooperation Jackson has been particularly influential, there are several comparable urban-scale initiatives in other cities, including Cooperation Humboldt, Cooperation Richmond, and Cooperation Austin, among others. There are also other emerging ecosystems of solidarity that are configured somewhat differently. For example, in Cincinnati, Ohio, union co-op-led initiative Co-op Cincy has been building an ecosystem of unionized worker cooperatives in different sectors, from food to childcare to finance, in order to “create an economy that works for all” (Co-op Cincy, “History”).

65. See Woods, “Life after Death”; Woods, Development Arrested; Gilmore, Abolition Geography; McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place; Hawthorne, “Black Matters Are Spatial Matters”; McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place”; Reese, Black Food Geographies.

66. Akuno, “Build and Fight”; Loh and Shear, “Fight and Build”; Kawano, “Building an Economy for People and Planet”; NDN Collective, “NDN Collective.”

1. Safri, “Mapping Noncapitalist Supply Chains.” A participatory action research project was central to the formation of the cooperative.

2. In imperial China, where maps served as a knowledge source and governance tool, maps were drawn to scale for thousands of years. This practice of knowing and governing the territory with maps was taken on by European colonizers who used maps to solidify colonial rule. The world map and gazetteer, with information about hundreds of cities, created by Arab geographer Muḥammad al-Idrīsī for King Roger II of Sicily have served for centuries as a main reference in Europe. Gerardus Mercator created a map projection that has been in use for navigation ever since. Maps remain essential scientific tools for all kinds of social, economic, and political projects today.

3. Pavlovskaya, “Theorizing with GIS”; Crampton, “Cartography.”

4. Katz, “All the World Is Staged.”

5. For an introduction to counter-mapping, see Peluso, “Whose Woods Are These?”

6. Black cartography is an important field that has become a global source for inspiration on counter-mapping; see McKenna, “Map of the Week” for an overview. As Catherine McKenna and many others show, counter-mapping is not particular to any racial groups but rather a method that has been used by many different groups around the world, traveling and deployed for different counter-hegemonic purposes.

7. One powerful example of a counter-map is Indigenous artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s painting State Names. Currently part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection, the painting presents a counter-map of North America that emphasizes stolen land and the extractive legacy of colonialism evident in the naming of territories. While the map retains elements of conventional state and provincial boundaries, the precise outlines are largely obscured and only territorial names that originate in Indigenous languages are shown. The other names are blurred out with dripping paint that resembles blood or tears. The painting destabilizes the now common political map and boundaries and represents North America as a space of contest and injury. Smith’s work attests to the idea of map as both art and science. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, State Names, 2000, oil, collage, and mixed media on canvas, 48 × 72 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/state-names-73858.

8. One interactive map run by Indigenous scholars is Native Land Digital’s Native Land Map, a digital mapping platform that seeks to accurately map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages worldwide, with high levels of detail in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Another powerful project authored by Indigenous scholars and artists, “Land-Grab Universities,” cartographically documents, using interactive maps, the ways in which land-grant universities received income from land directly expropriated from Indigenous nations. Lee et al., “Land-Grab Universities.”

9. Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter”; Pearce, “What Shall We Map Next?”; Louis, Johnson, and Pramono, “Introduction”; Lomawaima et al., “Editors’ Introduction.”

10. Arvidson, “Remapping Los Angeles”; St. Martin, “Making Space for Community Resource Management,” “Toward a Cartography of the Commons”; Pavlovskaya, “Between Neoliberalism and Difference,” “Other Transitions”; Drake, “Surplus Labor and Subjectivity.”

11. Cameron and Gibson, “Participatory Action Research”; Gibson and Community Economies Collective, “Building Community-Based Social Enterprises.”

12. Snyder and St. Martin, “Fishery for the Future,” 30; St. Martin and Olson, “Creating Space for Community.”

13. Snyder and St. Martin describe how fishers held weekly demonstrations on fileting and cooking with diverse fish, and community-supported fishery members were generally starting to care more about the health of oceans and fishing families. Snyder and St. Martin, “Fishery for the Future.”

14. Safri, “Mapping Noncapitalist Supply Chains.”

15. Healy, “Biofuels, Ex-Felons, and Empower.”

16. Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy.” Borowiak is a founding member of Philadelphia’s Garden Data Collaborative, which has generated and manages the most comprehensive spatial dataset of the city’s community gardens. See City of Philadelphia, “Growing from the Root.”

17. Students at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center participated in mapping projects with 596 Acres, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, SolidarityNYC, Make the Road New York, the Transportation Justice Alliance, the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, and others. For some examples, see Pavlovskaya, “Other Transitions,” “Theorizing with GIS,” “Between Neoliberalism and Difference,” “Critical GIS as a Tool”; Pavlovskaya and Eletto, “Credit Unions, Class, Race, and Place.”

18. The original map has been superseded by the latest solidarity economy map created by the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City, which is an offshoot project of SolidarityNYC. See SolidarityNYC, “SolidarityNYC”; Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City, “‘Seeding Solidarity’ Map.”

19. See Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy.”

20. See Gaiger and Grupo Ecosol, “A Economia Solidária no Brasil.”

21. Safri, “Mapping Noncapitalist Supply Chains”; Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy.”

22. Kawano, “Seven Ways to Build the Solidarity Economy.”

23. Collaborative Research Award Number 1340030, NSF Award Number 1339748, NSF Award Number 1339846, and NSF Award Number 1339974.

24. Solidarity Economy Mapping Project, “Solidarity Economy Map and Directory.”

25. New Economy Coalition, “Member Directory”; Symbiosis, “Affiliated Organizations.”

26. Black Socialists in America, “Dual Power Map.”

27. See Economía Solidaria, “Cartografías internacionales de la ESS.”

28. For a fine-grained interpretation of cooperation as a practice, see Zitcer, Practice of Cooperation.

29. Kawano and Matthaei, “System Change.”

30. For example, solidarity economy activist Emily Kawano modifies the original USSEN typology in different ways—e.g., by adding the category of public-sector schools and public banks. See Kawano, “Seven Ways to Build the Solidarity Economy.”

31. Spade, Mutual Aid; Hudson, “Building Where We Are.”

32. RIPESS (the Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy) even led an initiative called ESSGlobal that was designed to make different national-level maps interoperable; the maps would “speak” to one another despite running in different languages (both spoken languages and coding languages) and involving different definitions. Even though ESSGlobal never came to full fruition, it nonetheless speaks to a sentiment of encouraging a “thousand flowers to bloom,” expecting and planning for diversity rather than homogeneity. Today, Socioeco (an online library including resources about social and solidarity economies in multiple languages) has developed multiple maps with different functions. For instance, one international map gathers examples of social solidarity economies from all over the world, while another gathers policies that support those economies. See Socioeco, “SSE Mappings.”

33. Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy.”

34. The specially marked categories reflect types of solidarity economy initiatives for which we were confident we could acquire sufficient reliable data. While most of these initiatives are readily mappable, some, such as participatory budgeting and freecycle networks, are not. Our inventories consequently account for more initiatives than appear on the maps.

35. Some of this data collection overlapped with the need for the USSEN to create a usable, analyzable, searchable map, which made the distinction between mappable and not-mappable salient. The need and desire for such a product came from actually existing movement activists interested in solidarity economies.

36. For examples, see Hudson, “Producing Movement Space”; Hossein, “Caribbean Women’s Use of Susu”; Nembhard, Collective Courage.

37. This and other maps of the solidarity economy in this book were created using geospatial technologies, which first required the process of geocoding. Geocoding enables us to show on the map the location of each solidarity economy initiative according to its street address and then to assess the distribution relative to census sociodemographic variables. The spatial distribution is crucial for understanding how and to what extent solidarity economies have been shaped by the fractious urban histories and geographies of class and race.

38. Hudson, “Producing Movement Space.”

39. When compiled by Hudson, the maps and interviews provide a personal yet authoritative view of solidarity economy movement space as gendered and also as often honed and developed in informal and private spaces, such as activists’ homes.

40. Our calculations show that per one hundred thousand population, New York City has twenty-six initiatives; Philadelphia, thirty-five; and Worcester, fifty-eight.

41. We use the codes for goods and services as laid out in categories of the North American Industry Classification System, the standard system used.

42. For more on predatory lending and the impacts on lower-income communities of color, see Cyrus, “Predatory Lending’s Prey of Color”; Rugh, Albright, and Massey, “Race, Space, and Cumulative Disadvantage.”

43. We include diverse entities in the eclectic group of professional services: artist collectives; worker co-ops in business consulting, media, and tech fields; and certain aligned nonprofits and community-based organizations. Recent decades have seen a notable shift from individual to collective art production that led to an explosion of organized artist collectives in which artists create collectively or collaborate in publicizing art projects and sharing production costs (see Bublitz et al., “Collaborative Art”; Hewlett and Strokosch, “Artist Collectives and the Changing Landscape of Residencies”; De Wachter, Co-art). Although we included all social-justice-oriented artist collectives known to us and our expert colleagues, our accounting especially of artist collectives is fundamentally partial due to their largely fluid nature. From corresponding with artist Caroline Woolard, who works in the intersection between art and solidarity economy, we understand that there are potentially thousands of art collectives in New York, both those that earn revenue and those that don’t (email message to Craig Borowiak, January 26, 2021). For more on art and solidarity economy, especially future possibilities and visionary strategies, see Linares and Woolard, Solidarity Not Charity.

1. Henri Lefebvre’s description of counter-spaces as locales for “becoming irregular” furnishes us with another way of thinking about how solidarity cities are “throwing out of order” conventional capitalist ways of doing and living. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 44.

2. For Philadelphia and Worcester, we use the federal poverty threshold, which in 2019 was $20,578 for a household with two adults and one child (U.S. Census Bureau, “Poverty Thresholds”). For New York, we use the 2018 poverty threshold defined by the city. When we started our analysis, the 2019 poverty thresholds were not yet available; they became available in 2021. The 2018 poverty threshold was $30,845 for a family of three, while the 2019 NYC poverty threshold was $31,917 (New York City Mayor’s Office for Opportunity, “Appendix B,” 2018; New York City Mayor’s Office for Opportunity, “Appendix B,” 2019). Given this, our counts of solidarity economy entities in areas of high poverty might be slightly underestimated.

3. Lawson and Elwood, Relational Poverty Politics.

4. For discussions of such definitions, see the Institute for Research on Poverty, “How Is Poverty Measured?”; Barnes, Koshgarian, and Siddique, Poor People’s Moral Budget; Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, “Center on Poverty and Social Policy.”

5. Following Richard Rothstein (Color of Law) and Daniel Aaronson, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder (“Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps”), we note that HOLC was part of a suite of ostensibly progressive New Deal policies—such as the GI Bill and the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority—that had the intention of creating a homeownership society. The whole point of the FHA’s investment in equity was social stability (rather than social upheaval or revolution), and, as Rothstein argues, the dominant assumption was that racial segregation was key to this stability (Color of Law, 65–66). Here, we might see these supposedly color-blind progressive policies as working to only benefit people who were considered to be white at the time.

6. The FHA created similar color-coded maps for city blocks, albeit with a different color scheme and accompanying letter grades ranging from “A” (Best) to “D” (Declining). These were widely used in FHA manuals and guidance to banks on investment risk in cities. For a discussion of the complex relations between HOLC, the FHA, and local actors, see Gioielli, “Tyranny of the Map”; Fishback et al., “New Evidence on Redlining.”

7. Wilder, Covenant with Color; Rothstein, Color of Law.

8. This precipitated the continued credit starvation of these communities by banks, the dramatic devaluation of housing stock, a paucity of green space and shade trees, and underinvestment in health, sanitary, and education services with grave consequences for living conditions for decades to come. See Rothstein, Color of Law; Taylor, Race for Profit; Coates, “Case for Reparations.”

9. Jackson, “Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal”; Wilder, Covenant with Color; Nelson et al., “Mapping Inequality”; Adams et al., Restructuring the Philadelphia Region; Rothstein, Color of Law.

10. Mitchell and Franco, “HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps.”

11. Gilmore, Abolition Geography; Rothstein, Color of Law; Martinez and Glantz, “Modern-Day Redlining.”

12. Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification”; Marcuse, “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement.”

13. Winkler, “Legacy of Urban Renewal.”

14. Digital Scholarship Lab, “Renewing Inequality.”

15. Hossein, Wright-Austin, and Edmonds, Beyond Racial Capitalism, 12.

16. Preservationist seed banks around the world hold billions of seeds in temperature-controlled facilities to preserve genetic diversity.

17. Nembhard, Collective Courage; Hossein and Pearson, “Black Feminists in the Third Sector”; Du Bois, Economic Co-operation; McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place.

18. Clyde Woods developed the concept of “blues epistemologies” in a number of works, including “‘Sittin’ on Top of the World.’” See also Wilson, “Clyde Woods.”

19. African Methodist Episcopal Church, “Our History”; Kammerer, “Free African Society”; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet.

20. See Penniman and Washington, “You Belong to This Land”; Reese, Black Food Geographies; Penniman, Farming While Black. Karen Washington’s work in community gardens in New York, including the Black Urban Growers and Rise and Root Farm, also seeks to recover a rich history of women’s work in farming and agricultural expertise in communities of color. For similar perspectives in Philadelphia, see Soil Generation, “Soil Generation.”

21. While West Philadelphia was MNS’s main location, it had additional locations across the country, including in Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Tucson, among other locations. For a fuller account of MNS, see Cornell, Oppose and Propose!

22. Carl Boggs’s formulation of prefigurative politics has been very influential. He wrote: “By ‘prefigurative,’ I mean the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.” Boggs, “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control,” 100.

23. See Antonelli, “History of Green Hill Park.” On Worcester’s immigrant working class, see Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will.

24. For instance, one of the most popular Mexican soft drinks, Boing!, is produced by worker cooperative Pascual Boing. It emerged from a high-profile fight involving the most popular Mexican soft drink maker in 1982, because the workers waged a three-year strike (during which three workers were killed) because the owner had refused to pay workers a 30 percent federally mandated increase in wages. Workers finally assumed control with federal intervention in 1985, and anybody casually picking up their favorite tamarind soft drink today will see the label saying “Sociedad Cooperativa Trabajadores de Pascual” (the Workers Cooperative of Pascual). This is just one of many “recovered factories” that would also form in Argentina and Venezuela in the twenty-first century and in many other places and times as well. For more, see Ness and Azzellini, Ours to Master and to Own; Ruggeri and Vieta, “Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises.”

25. For the story of this garden from CENTRO (the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College) archives, see Rodriguez, “Re-discovering Community Gardens.”

26. In all three cities, Puerto Ricans are a sizable share of the total Latinx populations: 60 percent of all Latinx people in Philadelphia, half of the Latinx totals in Worcester, and a third of the Latinx total in New York.

27. Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny, “Culturing Community Development.”

28. More generally, Indigenous mechanisms for the communal distribution of food, shelter, land, and surplus have played a key role in the survival of those communities, precontact and in the face of genocide. See Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Simpson, As We Have Always Done. Poetically, for the Red Nation (a group of Indigenous activists), communal living is in the past, present, and future of Indigenous peoples. They write with fire: “Though the language of socialism and communism is largely attributed to Marx, our ancestors were born free and practiced systems of caretaking that provided for the people without profit or accumulation in the capitalist sense. . . . Communism is our past and our horizon. Indigenous people have always been communists. We call for communism in our prayers because communism is our rightful relation with the earth.” Red Nation, Communism Is the Horizon, 3.

29. Many immigrant communities participate and organize rotating zero-interest loan funds based in religious and community organizations; they are called biao hui in Chinese communities, gye in Korean communities (Kim, “Ethnic Advantage or Structural Constraint?”), visi by Gujarati Indians, susu by Caribbean migrants. Academic investigation groups them all as rotating savings and credit associations. See Hossein and Christabell, Community Economies in the Global South. While there is significant participation in informal solidarity economies by Asian people in all three cities, they are outside our scope of study. For Islamic banking, see Pollard and Samers, “Islamic Banking and Finance.”

30. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 15.

31. Gilmore, Abolition Geography, 481.

1. See Kelley, Freedom Dreams. We are borrowing from Robin D. G. Kelley’s understanding of freedom dreams here.

2. Gessel, “Comparison of Community Development Corporations.”

3. Main South Community Development Corporation, “Main South CDC Community Investment Plan.”

4. Median income of Worcester from 2013 to 2017 taken from U.S. Census Bureau, “QuickFacts: Worcester City.”

5. Over time, Stone Soup member organizations included the American Civil Liberties Union of Central Massachusetts, Chromeleon Graphics, Diggers Cooperative, Ex-prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement (EPOCA), Food Not Bombs, Future Focus Media Co-op, HX Library, Indigenous Peoples’ Network, StandUp for Kids, Stone Soup Graphics Shop, Tertulia Julia de Burgos, Voice of the Voiceless, Worcester Unemployment Action Group, Worcester Earn-a-Bike, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, Worcester Roots/Toxic Soil Busters, and YouthGROW.

6. Matt Feinstein, interview by Stephen Healy, May 1, 2014.

7. Healy et al., “Commoning and the Politics of Solidarity.”

8. The relationship between commons and the community of commoners is significant in both practical and political terms, on which there is an abundant literature. One strand of commons research associated with Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, focuses on local common pool resources (e.g., an irrigation system, pasture, fishing waters, common land). These can be collectively cared for (or, less interesting to us, privatized or made property of the state). When commons are managed well, Ostrom argues, commons may last for centuries of use. However, Amanda Huron, in Carving Out the Commons, usefully points out that this framework posits mostly racially and ethnically homogeneous commoners caring for natural commons. And theorists from the other major framework on the commons (e.g., Negri and Hardt, Commonwealth; De Angelis and Harvie, “Commons”) speak about and to a global commons rooted in shared ownership over knowledge, technology, and much else. Huron’s work on examining limited-equity housing cooperatives as commons in D.C. is closer to our own in that she examines how urban commons are constituted by very diverse constituencies that cannot rely on common being but must forge that together.

9. Matt W., interview by Stephen Healy, May 4, 2014.

10. Worcester’s Ghanaian community is estimated to be twenty thousand people, around 10 percent of Worcester’s current population.

11. Feinstein, interview, 2014.

12. Valentine, “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.”

13. Feinstein, interview, 2014. See also Loh and Jimenez, Solidarity Rising in Massachusetts.

14. It is the case that many of the issues raised in Black Lives Matter can be traced to a long history and tradition of militating against the disposability of Black life. However, it is also clear that this recent eruption is an important moment with widespread potential implications. See Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

15. Cedric A., interviewed by Stephen Healy, April 14, 2014.

16. Feinstein, interview, 2014.

17. Jeuji Diamondstone, interviewed by Stephen Healy, September 4, 2021.

18. Matt Feinstein, interview by Stephen Healy, September 4, 2021.

19. Shaner, “Stone Soup Situation.”

20. The website https://exprisoners.org/ contains an archive of EPOCA’s accomplishments.

21. Wet shelter refers to the provision of accommodation for people where abstinence from drug and alcohol use is not a requirement. Traditional homeless shelters mostly have a zero-tolerance policy for drug and alcohol use, difficult to even temporarily sustain for chronically dependent people.

22. Shaner, “Stone Soup Situation.”

23. Shaner.

24. Village Worcester, “Intro.” BIPOC refers to Black, Indigenous, people of color.

25. Village Worcester.

26. Loh and Shear, “Fight and Build.”

27. One Earn-a-Bike member concisely states their organizational purpose: “Our big picture is that if everyone in the community who wants a bicycle has one, that more will want one . . . and that a surge in cyclists leads to improvements in bike infrastructure, acceptance among motorists, and a more livable community.” Matt W., interview by Stephen Healy, April 24, 2014.

1. Alkon and Guthman, New Food Activism.

2. The following scholarship examines how racial bias is baked into the geographies of the U.S. food economy: Sbicca, “Growing Food Justice”; Bradley and Galt, “Practicing Food Justice”; Reese, Black Food Geographies; Brones, “Karen Washington.”

3. Loh and Agyeman, “Urban Food Sharing.”

4. Reese, Black Food Geographies.

5. Alkon and Agyeman, Cultivating Food Justice; Guthman, “‘If Only They Knew’”; Slocum, “Whiteness, Space, and Alternative Food Practice”; Zitcer, “Food Co-ops and the Paradox of Exclusivity.”

6. White, Freedom Farmers; Reese, Black Food Geographies; McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place”; Garth and Reese, Black Food Matters; Penniman, Farming While Black; Ramírez, “Elusive Inclusive.”

7. White, Freedom Farmers.

8. Brown and Miller, “Impacts of Local Markets”; Cooley and Lass, “Consumer Benefits from Community Supported Agriculture Membership”; Lass et al., “Community Supported Agriculture.”

9. For New York, we use the city’s own poverty thresholds, which are developed by the municipal government to account for the higher cost of living in that city. For Philadelphia and Worcester, we rely on the federal poverty thresholds. In New York, the official poverty line for a family of three was $30,845 in 2018, whereas in Philadelphia and Worcester it was $20,587 in 2019. See chapter 2, note 2. In any case, given that we share an interest in those not officially categorized as experiencing poverty, but certainly near poverty by supplemental measures, we consider the bottom two brackets (two times the poverty line) to include those experiencing poverty.

10. By sharing our empirical evidence and speaking with CSA leaders and activists working with CSAs, we were able to confirm when individual initiatives were conforming or not conforming to the group characteristics of the neighborhood.

11. The Worcester maps of CSAs are constructed with 2022 data capturing the shifting locations of drop-off points. The demographic data are the most recent we had available at the time—2019.

12. Expanding the radius also makes clearer an east/west divide, in which western farms not visible on the map have drop-off points whereas eastern farms do not.

13. Producers and CSA members may both be majority white, but this does not mean they share the same socioeconomic status. For example, some CSA farms are quite precarious working-class endeavors in rather low-income rural areas. They might be seen as leveraging money from higher-income white households and redistributing value to those who need it to survive as small holistic farms. See the work of Rob Snyder and Kevin St. Martin (“Fishery for the Future”) on how Port Clyde, Maine, small fishers were able to use the community-supported fishery model to actually support and sustain small fishing vessels rather than corporations.

14. Black farm ownership declined from 15 million acres in 1920 to 1 million acres in 2017 (Black Farmer Fund, “About Us”; Castro and Willingham, “Progressive Governance Can Turn the Tide”). According to the USDA, for example, of the over 90,000 farm operators in Pennsylvania, only 140 are African American (Nark, “Black Farmers Finding Their Way”). In New York, there are only 139 Black farmers among over 57,000 farmers in the state. Such imbalances are themselves reflective of the long history of racial discrimination in U.S. agriculture.

15. Slocum, “Whiteness, Space, and Alternative Food Practice”; Alkon and Agyeman, Cultivating Food Justice.

16. The mainstream understanding is that CSAs as we know them now were developed in Japan and then imported to the United States in the 1980s. While this certainly happened, history is more complicated.

17. Bowens, “CSA Is Rooted in Black History.”

18. Penniman and Snipstal, “Regeneration,” 69.

19. Given Worcester’s industrial history, particularly metallurgy associated with wire manufacture, contamination has been an ongoing concern in all agricultural initiatives. Nuestro Huerto relied upon site contamination analysis the church conducted prior to construction, while the City of Worcester tested the soils made mostly from the annual collection of fall leaves. In 2017, Amanda Barker left Nuestro Huerto to start Cotyledon Vegetable Farm in nearby Leicester, Massachusetts. The original site was then given to three farming families from Nepal who had relocated to Worcester. Amanda Barker, interviewed by Jeuji Diamondstone, February 2, 2014.

20. Lawson, City Bountiful.

21. Vitiello and Nairn, Community Gardening in Philadelphia.

22. See Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, Philadelphia’s Urban Agriculture Plan.

23. Regional Environmental Council, 2023 Annual Report.

24. Kremer and DeLiberty, “Local Food Practices and Growing Potential.” See also Meenar and Hoover, “Community Food Security via Urban Agriculture.”

25. In none of these cities are there significant numbers of community gardens in census block groups with majority Asian populations. There are seven such gardens in New York and only one in Philadelphia. We do nevertheless find prominent examples of community gardens organized by and for Asian diasporic communities, including refugees from pastoral regions of Asia. For example, the community garden Growing Home in Philadelphia is organized by Burmese and Bhutanese refugees. A complex of eight gardens spread across two blocks, they grow from seed mustard greens, bitter melon, Thai basil, and other plants as part of their daily cuisine. More important, the place is one of intergenerational learning, like many gardens.

26. Steve Fischer, interview by Stephen Healy, April 30, 2014.

27. Econsult Solutions, “Vacant Land Management in Philadelphia”; Rosan and Pearsall, Growing a Sustainable City?, 89.

28. Vitiello and Nairn, Community Gardening in Philadelphia.

29. Jaramillo, “Urban Agriculture Leaders.”

30. Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny, “Culturing Community Development”; Martinez, Power at the Roots; Eizenberg, “Actually Existing Commons”; Aptekar and Myers, “Tale of Two Community Gardens.”

31. Chitov, “Cultivating Social Capital on Urban Plots”; Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny, “Culturing Community Development.”

32. In New York, Dominican and Puerto Rican communities constitute approximately 60 percent of the total Latinx population. In Philadelphia, Puerto Ricans alone are close to 60 percent of the total Latinx population. Rodriguez, “Re-discovering Community Gardens”; Pew, “Philadelphia’s Immigrants.”

33. Penniman, Farming While Black; Penniman and Snipstal, “Regeneration”; Reese, Black Food Geographies; DeBaise, “Urban Farmer Reflects on Food Justice”; White, Freedom Farmers.

34. For example, Black-led gardens such as the North Philly Peace Park (https://www.phillypeacepark.org) and educational farms such as Mill Creek Urban Farm (https://www.millcreekurbanfarm.org) and Bartram’s Garden (https://www.bartramsgarden.org) (both in West Philadelphia) provide invaluable advocacy and training on farming practices and social-political issues for new growers in marginalized neighborhoods. Similarly, Soil Generation (https://www.soilgeneration.org), a self-described Black- and Brown-led coalition of growers and community-based organizations, dedicates considerable resources to supporting the creation of gardens in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. In New York, similar work is done by La Familia Verde (http://www.lafamiliaverde.org) in the Bronx and Black Urban Growers (https://www.blackurbangrowers.org), an organization founded in New York but operating nationally to build networks and community support for Black farmers and leaders of community gardening.

35. Struggles to keep community gardens are also fundamentally struggles over land and communal rights to land. Decommodifying land to create another relation is a radical act.

36. Consider the recent memoir/documentary Beba by Rebeca Huntt, which recounts a time when both the main protagonist and her sister (both Afro-Latina) are turned away from a primarily white community garden in the Upper West Side of Manhattan run as a quasi-private social club.

37. Maantay and Maroko, “Brownfields to Greenfields”; Voicu and Been, “Effect of Community Gardens.”

38. Anonymous garden informant, interviewed by Adrianna Morsey and Anna Garrison-Bedell, October 25, 2020. The interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of the interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

39. Goldstein, “Land for the People Who Work It.”

40. Byrum and Gass, “Race and Place of Southwark.”

41. Even majority Black and Brown community gardens, like all of non-Native society, occupy Indigenous land. This means that while occupying land for some can be a liberatory experience, at the same time it is still a function of continuing expropriation from Indigenous peoples. All of this means that the solidarity economy movement has to do work to actually move toward decolonization as more than a metaphor. See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”

42. Loh and Shear, “Solidarity Economy and Community Development”; Loh and Agyeman, “Urban Food Sharing.”

43. Specifically, Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as “food stamps.”

44. Steve Fischer, interview with Stephen Healy, April 30, 2014.

45. We participate in this coalition.

46. Cahn, “Supporting Our Land Stewards.” One example is the 2013 landmark legislation establishing a land bank to manage abandoned public land. This legislation explicitly recognizes urban agriculture as a potential, valued use of such land. This recognition opens a legal pathway for gardens to defend their claim to the land when the city is otherwise inclined to sell land rights to the highest bidder. In practice, the land bank is still a hotly contested work in progress a decade after legislation passed. See Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, Philadelphia’s Urban Agriculture Plan.

1. Salt Pepper Ketchup, script by Josh Wilder, InterAct Theatre Company, Philadelphia, November 11, 2018.

2. Black Conference, script by Reg Flowers, Falconworks Theater, New York City, May 25, 2018.

3. By being set in Harlem in the 1930s, the play is choosing the context of a Harlem Renaissance that attracted Black people from around the country. A lesser-known aspect of this famous movement is how it attracted a diverse range of people of color: Puerto Ricans formed the backbone of Spanish Harlem starting in the same era; Italian Harlem was actually three times bigger than Little Italy; “Bengali Harlem” named a Bengali neighborhood (Bald, Bengali Harlem), among many other communities attracted by the simple cultural richness of shades of Brown and Black.

4. The play draws explicit inspiration from Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book Collective Courage.

5. The settings of the plays in the neighborhoods of Point Breeze in Philadelphia and New York’s Harlem are not incidental to our project: both neighborhoods have high concentrations of solidarity economy activity (see Maps 5 and 6) and both are sites of racial and class dislocation.

6. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera.

7. In an early incarnation of our research, we explicitly used the term border zones to describe our research findings (see Borowiak et al., “Navigating the Fault Lines”). We have subsequently adopted edge zone as a key term to incorporate the idea of how ecosystems shape life and the conditions of possibility for cooperation.

8. While such populations might have partial access to consumer markets and insecure waged work, they are unable to gain recognition or secure entry to the terms of capitalist citizenship. Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism, 26.

9. Along a similar vein, Suzanne M. Hall uses the terms edge economies and edge territories to characterize the experiences of migrant populations caught in border dynamics that increasingly constrict the life and space available to them. Globally, borders are produced by a racial capitalist order that, as Hall describes, “suspends, fragments, and discards” human potential to secure a subordinate and disposable labor force. Hall, Migrant’s Paradox, 6.

10. Hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.”

11. Brothers, “Fragmentation and Edge Effects”; Meiners and Pickett, “Changes in Community.”

12. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology.

13. Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty, “Living on the Edge.” See also McCay, “Edges, Fields, and Regions.”

14. See, for example, Loh and Jimenez, Solidarity Rising in Massachusetts.

15. A century ago, the Chicago School, for example, used the concept of ecological succession to describe sociological processes of neighborhood change in ways that legitimated racialized inequalities among urban communities and naturalized processes of organized abandonment and displacement. See Aldrich, “Ecological Succession in Racially Changing Neighborhoods”; Park, “Succession.”

16. Gibson-Graham, Postcapitalist Politics, 88.

17. Gibson-Graham, 72.

18. Valentine, “Living with Difference: Proximity and Encounter,” 7.

19. Valentine, 7; Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone.”

20. International Cooperative Alliance, “Cooperative Identity, Values & Principles.”

21. The location of the barrio in Kensington is itself a product of economic displacement. Initially, Puerto Ricans had settled in neighborhoods closer to the city center and to the locations of their work. This included Northern Liberties, Southwark, and Spring Garden neighborhoods. These communities were pushed out through organized policies of harassment, dispossession, and gentrification. See Wherry, Philadelphia Barrio; Whalen, El viaje; Arbasetti, “Moving Maps.”

22. Stevenson, “Home Care Associates”; Kondo, “Case Study of Childspace.”

23. Historically, successful cooperative movements have placed great emphasis on cooperative education.

24. Solidarity Economy Focus Group–Latinx Community in North Philadelphia, August 25, 2016, Philadelphia. The focus group was conducted in confidentiality, and the names of participants are withheld by mutual agreement.

25. For an illustration of a Philadelphia cooperative’s struggles to start up, see Borowiak, “Poverty in Transit.”

26. Solidarity Economy Focus Group–Latinx Community in South Philadelphia, August 28, 2016, Philadelphia. The focus group was conducted in confidentiality, and the names of participants are withheld by mutual agreement.

27. Several of the city’s Black-led cooperatives have headquarters in Center City, from where they can service a broad range of communities across the entire urban area.

28. We accept Peter Marcuse’s definition of gentrification: “Gentrification occurs when new residents—who disproportionately are young, white, professional, technical, and managerial workers with higher education and income levels—replace older residents—who disproportionately are low-income, working-class and poor, minority and ethnic group members, and elderly—from older and previously deteriorated inner-city housing in a spatially concentrated manner, that is, to a degree differing substantially from the general level of change in the community or region as a whole.” Marcuse, “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement,” 199.

29. Marcuse, “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement.”

30. C. M. Anderson, Urbanism without Guarantees, 205.

31. Zitcer, “Weavers Way Co-op and Mariposa”; Furman, “Postmodernism and Community in Schools”; Perkiss, Making Good Neighbors; Mumm and Sternberg, “Mapping Racial Capital.”

32. Perkiss, Making Good Neighbors, 3.

33. Perkiss. During the civil rights era, Mount Airy’s liberal model of integration received pointed critiques from Black leaders, including local NAACP president Cecil B. Moore, who perceived it as a symbol of Black middle-class complicity with the white establishment.

34. Judith Mercuris, the director of the Big Backyard cooperative nursery school, described the neighborhood this way: “I think Mount Airy is really kind of a great little enclave of a very mixed racial group. And it always has attracted young families because it’s just very neighborhood-y. And there is a really nice housing stock of small houses. So I don’t think it’s changed that much. I would say that we’re kind of middle-income families. It’s not low income and it’s not people who can just write a check to a private school. But it’s two working parents and, you know, childcare is important to them. And a good quality program is important to them.” Unpublished interview by Rachel Gass, July 6, 2023. Rachel Gass served as a research assistant on this project, and we are grateful for her contribution.

35. For vivid accounts of Germantown Avenue and the racial and economic dynamics within Germantown, see E. Anderson, Code of the Street; Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill, Gentrifier.

36. Zitcer and Dilworth, “Grocery Cooperatives as Governing Institutions”; Zitcer, “Weavers Way Co-op and Mariposa”; Zitcer, Practice of Cooperation. This includes birthing a number of new cooperatives—including a credit union, a heating oil cooperative, and a health-care buying club—in addition to expanding its own footprint with additional branches in the neighborhood and beyond. It has also been a stalwart supporter of other co-ops elsewhere in the city.

37. Childspace, a worker cooperative childcare center, is a notable exception. It has diverse clients and is predominantly staffed by women of color.

38. U.S. Census Bureau, “Census 2020, Race, Census Tract 79, Philadelphia”; U.S. Census Bureau, “Census 1950”; U.S. Census Bureau, “Census 2000.”

39. Anonymous informant #6.1, interview by Craig Borowiak, June 9, 2015. Interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

40. Gentrification and the city’s efforts at urban renewal pushed the city’s large Puerto Rican population out of South Philadelphia and the Spring Garden neighborhood (closer to downtown) and enticed them into Kensington with the offer of affordable housing, with houses sold for a dollar.

41. Ravitch, “Can a Food Co-op Thrive in Kensington?”

42. Judith Mercuris, director of the Big Backyard, unpublished interview by Rachel Gass, July 6, 2023.

43. Kondo, “Case Study of Childspace.”

44. Jon Bekken, Bindlestiff cofounder, unpublished interview by Rachel Gass, July 14, 2023.

45. Benji Harris, interview by Craig Borowiak, July 20, 2023.

46. Mascher Space informant, interview by Craig Borowiak, July 17, 2023. Interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

47. Village of Arts and Humanities, “About Us.”

48. Anonymous informant #6.2, interview by Craig Borowiak, June 16, 2017. Interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

49. Anonymous informant #6.1, interview by Craig Borowiak, June 9, 2015. Interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

50. Lawson and Elwood, “Encountering Poverty”; Valentine, “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.”

51. A-Space informant, unpublished interview by Rachel Gass, July 18, 2023. Interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

52. Anonymous informant #6.3, interview by Craig Borowiak, June 15, 2017. Interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

53. Jon Bekken, Bindlestiff cofounder, unpublished interview by Rachel Gass, July 14, 2023.

54. Zitcer, Practice of Cooperation; Zitcer, “Food Co-ops and the Paradox of Exclusivity.”

55. Reynolds, “Disparity despite Diversity”; Zitcer, “Food Co-ops and the Paradox of Exclusivity.”

56. To give just one example, in 2019, the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative (BBWC)—a Black, queer-led radical justice collective with roots in West Philadelphia—accused Mariposa on social media of being anti-Black on account of its role in displacing poor Black residents and for its surveillance practices toward unhoused community members. Importantly, the BBWC was not anticooperative. It actually held up Black-centered co-ops as the way forward. Its point was that Mariposa was failing to reflect adequate concern for the community and failing to uphold sufficient solidarity in pursuit of racial justice. Such charges were leveled even though Mariposa has an interracial staff and was actively donating resources to radical, Black-run community gardens, as it had previously donated to BBWC itself as part of Mariposa’s commitment to the Cooperative Principles.

57. Anonymous informant #6.4, interview by Craig Borowiak, July 21, 2023. Interview was conducted in confidentiality, and the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.

58. Anonymous informant #6.5, interview by Craig Borowiak, December 22, 2022.

59. In July 2023, KCFC permanently closed its storefront due to revenue shortfalls attributed to its having a product mix with price points that didn’t reflect the needs of the majority Black and Latinx staff or the largely Puerto Rican working-class communities around it.

60. The two largest cooperatives, Home Care Associates and Childspace Daycare Centers, are located in the city center. Their membership and leadership resemble the cooperatives depicted in Black Conference. Being in the Center City gives them a central location to provide key services throughout the city, even if that is not primarily where those particular workers tend to live.

61. Both AORTA and USFWC have been involved in key conversations around race and cooperativism.

1. Lapavitsas, Profiting without Producing.

2. Banks are still routinely found to engage in redlining practices. Consider, for example, First Republic, a bank that openly marketed itself to elite clients, like the CEO of Facebook. In 2016, a federal body (FDIC) published a report criticizing First Republic for having no branches in zip codes where people of color were the majority and for having virtually no lending to people of color. The Wall Street Journal defended the bank by questioning whether it is actually wrong to construct a bank that caters to the Ferrari and Prada set, whose “ATM machines only spit out $100 dollar bills,” and that offer special services like private museum tours with champagne and same-day large loan approval for clients whose net worth is at least in the multimillions (Ensign, Andriotis, and Overberg, “First Republic”). Stunningly, redlining is being justified in a new way quite openly in practice, and the kinds of reparation that the banks need to make in the name of “financial inclusion” mean that the best-case scenario for communities of color is to finally be a client with that same bank that would have easily continued discriminating if only they had not been caught. The worst-case scenario is financial inclusion, but into “subprime” markets, where they are charged higher fees as customers with assets not meeting a particular threshold. In this case, “greenlining,” which is financial inclusion but on predatory terms, especially in the mortgage market, becomes an unsatisfactory response to redlining.

3. De Angelis and Harvie, “Commons.”

4. Early usages of bulwark referred to the top edges of a large ship, fortified with planks to prevent people from washing overboard with high waves. The term also came to refer to a sixteenth-to-nineteenth-century feature of the military architecture of fortress walls in which one section juts out over the rest of the structure to offer protection against attack. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “bulwark (n.),” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1044957422.

5. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 6.

6. Akuno, “Build and Fight.”

7. In their “concrete program,” there are four types of city that need cultivation: the Solidarity City includes building up a vibrant solidarity economy anchored by a federation of cooperatives, credit unions, and more; the Sustainable City requires deploying community land trusts plus building sustainable city initiatives like ecovillages and community-based energy to transition our economy; the Human Rights City generates democratic policies and programs that promote the full range of human rights; and the Fab City contributes to equitable building of productive forces like 3D-printing fabrication spaces in communities. There is an expansive vision required in building cities to address a series of pressing concerns, ranging from human rights to sustainability.

8. See Miller, “Anticapitalism or Postcapitalism?”; Cornwell, “Worker Co-operatives and Spaces of Possibility”; Loh and Shear, “Fight and Build”; Kawano, “Seven Ways to Build the Solidarity Economy.”

9. See, for example, Curl, For All the People; Jackall and Levin, Worker Cooperatives in America; Dow, Governing the Firm; Whyte and Whyte, Making Mondragón; Dahl, Preface to Economic Democracy; Kaswan, “Developing Democracy”; Ellerman, Democratic Worker-Owned Firm.

10. Even popular press like the New York Times cover this potential. For an account of a similar worker co-op origin story, see Sussman, “Cleaning Together to Escape Day Labor.”

11. For more on worker cooperatives, and particularly on how they deal with profit, see Safri, “Worker Cooperatives.”

12. Kaswan, “Developing Democracy”; Berry, “Worker Co-operative Form”; Berry and Bell, “Worker Cooperatives”; Cornwell, “Worker Co-operatives and Spaces of Possibility”; Byrne and Healy, “Cooperative Subjects”; Meyers, Working Democracies.

13. See Pavlovskaya, Safri, and Hudson, NYC Worker Cooperative Survey.

14. Precisely because these data about CHCA are well known and documented in popular news outlets, we represent this one co-op by name. For more on CHCA, see Inserra, Conway, and Rodat, “Cooperative Home Care Associates”; Berry, “Worker Co-operative Form.”

15. Folbre, “Caring Labor.”

16. On the contrast between the average worker and the spokespersons for the movement, see Hudson, “New York City.”

17. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica; Theodore and Burnham, Home Economics.

18. Novick, “Cleaning Workers Are Fighting for Better Pay”; Sussman, “Cleaning Together to Escape Day Labor.”

19. Araceli Dominguez and Cirenia Dominguez, interview by Maliha Safri, February 4, 2021.

20. For more on New York City worker co-ops, see Berry, “Worker Co-operative Form”; Berry and Bell, “Worker Cooperatives.” It is beyond our scope to get into the nuances of the relation between unions and cooperatives, but there are many overlapping goals that lead many worker cooperatives to in fact join unions and for unions to also see cooperative advantages and begin serious efforts to build more. For more on this in the CHCA case specifically, see Pinto, “Economic Democracy, Embodied.”

21. This method is a subset of a family of methods called “social accounting models” that can be traced from François Quesnay to Karl Marx, Léon Walras, and Wassily Leontief.

22. We used the North American Industry Classification System codes for all of our analyses.

23. The focus on agricultural marketing co-ops and farm supply co-ops, credit unions, and electrical utilities dominated the field of reference for the most recent national analysis of economic contribution of all cooperatives (Deller et al., “Research on the Economic Impact”), as well as state studies such as in Wisconsin (Zeuli et al., Measuring the Economic Impact of Cooperatives), Minnesota (Folsom, “Measuring the Economic Impact of Cooperatives”), North Dakota (Bangsund and Leistritz, “Economic Contribution of the Sugarbeet Industry”; Coon and Leistritz, “Economic Contribution North Dakota Cooperatives Make”), Indiana, and Colorado (Mcnamara, Fulton, and Hine, “Economic Impacts Associated with Locally Owned Agricultural Cooperatives”).

24. The traditional export-based orientation of many of the midwestern studies privileges cooperatives “directly engaged in activities that lead to a significant share of sales to non-local customers, or cooperatives that had direct links to firms that serve external markets.” Zeuli et al., “Cooperatives in Rural Community Development.”

25. Craig and Pencavel, “Behavior of Worker Cooperatives.”

26. Berry and Bell, “Worker Cooperatives.”

27. Based on our qualitative research, we have reason to believe that the stratification of labor income is greater in capitalist firms, meaning that the average wage per job in capitalist firms does not reflect wages of the frontline workers. Worker co-ops are keeping their eye on job creation and total payroll, which is where we see the difference from capitalist firms materialize.

28. Most macroeconomists find the average propensity to consume is higher at the lower end of the income spectrum since higher-income people tend to save more than spend as income rises, meaning that their average propensity to save rises with income and their average propensity to consume falls (Palley, “Relative Permanent Income Theory of Consumption”; Carroll, “Why Do the Rich Save So Much?”; Dynan, Skinner, and Zeldes, “Do the Rich Save More?”). In the most basic terms, when receiving an extra dollar of income, those with very low incomes go out and spend more money on food, education, and housing; those with higher average incomes don’t necessarily buy more bananas, or even more locally, but are more likely to save. When it comes to the macroeconomic impact of cooperatives, our work seems to confirm that which has been previously investigated: the spending impact of poorer people is greater, therefore their receipt of income generates more economic activity than the receipt by higher-income households.

29. The city council machinery around worker cooperatives is significant. The coalition, which includes sixty-eight co-ops as of 2023, has worked up a proposal platform that has become a model for other solidarity economy sectors (see New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, “NYC’s Future Is Cooperative”). The platform includes advocating for direct financial assistance (through grants and the usage of a public banking system); for education and technical assistance, and especially for training in how to apply for and secure city contracts (procurement); and for participating in immigrant and racial justice campaigns—for instance, working in local city coalitions acting on specific harms like the partnership between the police and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It has vision and long-term goals that could be considered radical, as well as practical short-term demands, such as city support for training and education equal to other small business initiatives.

30. New York City Department of Small Business Services and Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, Working Together, 2015; New York City Department of Small Business Services and Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, Working Together, 2022.

31. Crim, “Building a Worker-Centered Platform.”

32. New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives (NYC NOWC, the largest city network in the country) successfully worked to pass a broader “driver’s license for all” campaign that would grant all New York residents over sixteen the right to a driver’s license if they have the appropriate training. In doing this, NYC NOWC was advocating for a larger transformation that affected some of their own workers’ lives, extending past the domains of the worker cooperative itself (more internal help takes the form of trainings, workshops, accounting courses, etc.).

33. Citizens Budget Commission, “Think Your Rent Is High?”

34. Earlier research on this was published in Safri et al., “Putting the Solidarity Economy on the Map.”

35. Citizens Budget Commission, “Think Your Rent Is High?”

36. Saegert et al., “Healthy Housing.”

37. Saegert et al.

38. Dubinsky, “End of a Slum,” 1.

39. As James Baldwin famously described urban renewal discourse succinctly on television in 1963, “Urban renewal means . . . Negro removal.” Clark, “A Conversation with James Baldwin.” For more on displacement of people of color during urban renewal programs of Moses, see Caro, Power Broker.

40. Schuman, “Labor and Housing in New York City.”

41. Schuman. Co-op City was built on a failed amusement park ignominiously titled “Freedomland,” Rochdale was built on an abandoned racetrack, and Starrett City was built on marshy, city-owned land. See Sammartino, Freedomland.

42. The architect Le Corbusier pioneered and championed the design of soaring towers in parks as a way of dealing with urban density while also expanding access to parks and communal green space. While his work and vision of a perfectly rational city have been criticized, the early tenants of Mitchell-Lama co-ops were drawn to the spaciousness, the green space, and light in places like Co-op City (80 percent of whose footprint is green space), which contrasted with cramped tenement construction.

43. Nevius, “Living in Co-op City.”

44. Harold Ostroff, former executive vice president of the United Housing Foundation, resigned on April 10, 1976, saying, “What took a half century to create and establish has been smashed and set back twenty-five years . . . by the irresponsible action of a relatively few people at Co-op City and by the apathy of the vast majority of members of that cooperative.” Ostroff quoted in Schuman, “Labor and Housing in New York City.”

45. Sammartino, Freedomland; Schuman, “Labor and Housing in New York City.” For more on spatial fix, which puts into question the necessity of rising construction costs, see Harvey, “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix.’”

46. Polanyi, Great Transformation.

47. Staeheli, Mitchell, and Gibson, “Conflicting Rights to the City.”

48. Volner, “This Non-profit Wants to Help.”

49. In-person conversation between Maliha and Alex Roesch, assistant director at UHAB, July 2019.

50. Huron, Carving Out the Commons.

51. Huron.

52. Sam Stein writes in Capital City that by 2019, 45,841 rental units and 6,479 co-op apartments left the Mitchell-Lama program.

53. See Estock, “History of Cooperative Housing.” Other reasons for the lack of housing co-ops have to do with the built environment of Queens, which includes prevalent single-family housing construction.

54. For racial information on Staten Island, see U.S. Census Burea, “Census 2020.” Staten Island is the most suburban and least populous of New York City’s five counties. The borough famously campaigned to secede from the rest of New York City in the 1980s, voting to do so by a two-thirds majority in a 1993 referendum. The secession was stopped by the New York state legislature, and the campaign died down with the mayoral election of Rudy Giuliani. Staten Island is also famously home to the city’s police and firefighting forces, which connects to deep citywide racial tensions that culminated on the North Shore of Staten Island in the police murder of Eric Garner, whose last words became the rallying cry for Black Lives Matter: “I can’t breathe.”

55. Kramer and Flanagan, Staten Island.

56. This section includes our research and text adapted from Pavlovskaya et al., “Place of Common Bond,” and Pavlovskaya and Eletto, “Credit Unions, Class, Race, and Place.” See those publications for detailed geographic analysis of all credit unions in New York City.

57. Hossein and Christabell, Community Economies in the Global South; Hossein, “Politics of Resistance.”

58. National Credit Union Administration, “Call Report Quarterly Data.”

59. See Deller and Sundaram-Stukel, “Spatial Patterns in the Location Decisions of US Credit Unions,” 425; Pavlovskaya et al., “Place of Common Bond.” Practically all associational credit unions were faith-based, with only 4 percent being part of white European ethnic associations and historic social advocacy groups (e.g., University Settlement).

60. Du Bois, Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans.

61. Nembhard, Collective Courage.

62. Saint Philip’s Church Harlem, “Credit Union.”

63. Calculated using National Credit Union Administration data.

64. National Credit Union Administration, Annual Report 2022.

65. See Pavlovskaya et al., “Place of Common Bond.” Employment-related credit unions constituted 39 percent of the city’s financial cooperatives in 2014, but because they are generally large institutions, as a group, they accounted for 76 percent of credit union members in the city, 53 percent of total assets, and 43 percent of total credit union loans. Approximately 40 percent of employment-related credit unions in New York City have minority designation. In plain words, work-related credit unions are dominant in the landscape in terms of membership totals, assets, and loans disbursed, while a big chunk of membership is nonwhite, reflecting large employment of people of color in the city agencies. Thus, employment-based credit unions are inclusive by race, but they serve the better-off groups of New Yorkers who access solidarity finance through their employers.

1. Gibson-Graham, Postcapitalist Politics, xxvi. In describing the disposition required for a postcapitalist politics, Gibson-Graham paraphrase the famous Serenity Prayer: “A politics of collective action . . . requires an expansive vision of what’s possible, a careful analysis for what can be drawn upon to begin the building process, the courage to make a realistic assessment of what might stand in the way of success, and the decision to go forward with a mix of creative disrespect and protective caution.” Here, “creative disrespect” refers to a willingness to challenge hegemonic systems in imaginative ways. And the appeal for “protective caution” is a call not for timidity but rather for situated awareness about conditions on the ground and for protective stances toward vulnerable populations and community-centered initiatives.

2. Nembhard, Collective Courage.

3. Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn of Everything.

4. Menendian, Gambhir, and Hsu, “Roots of Structural Racism.”

5. At its sixty-sixth plenary meeting on April 18, 2023, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 77/281, Promoting the Social and Solidarity Economy for Sustainable Development, A/77/L.60 (April 27, 2023), https://www.un.org/en/ga/77/resolutions.shtml.

6. Block, Capitalism. See also Healy and Gibson-Graham, “Fred Block, Capitalist Illusions.” Block’s argument is that contemporary cities should not be thought of as postindustrial. Rather, a better framing is to see habitation as a primary economic activity in cities around the world—a set of activities, in both the public and private sectors, that is directed toward enhancing livability. Educators and carers would fall into the category but so too would occupations concerned with the construction and maintenance of infrastructures that contribute to livability.

7. The urban agriculture movement in Detroit is significant, with particularly important leadership coming from Black-led farms, like the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative and D-Town Farm, that explicitly center community self-determination. Other organizations dedicated to community-based composting initiatives work to deal with organic waste while improving soil fertility. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has created their own version of counter-mapping: “Composting for Community Map.” The community compost map is a nationwide counter-map that locates community-based composting initiatives and other infrastructures that support that process. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance maps composting alongside other initiatives, such as distributed energy networks, community broadband, and waste to wealth programs that work to enhance local community capacity.

8. Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, “About Us.” See also, Loh and Shear, “Solidarity Economy and Community Development”; Loh and Jimenez, Solidarity Rising in Massachusetts.

9. The fault lines will look differently elsewhere, especially extending to other countries since racial capitalism is global yet produces distinct divisions across caste, Indigeneity, ethnicity, immigration status, etc. Consequently, the data needed to assess those divisions will look differently elsewhere. Counter-mapping would need to address unique geographies and unique histories of both division and conflict, as well as efforts at solidarity.

10. Gilmore, Change Everything.

11. For example, the work of the Anti-oppression Resource and Training Alliance, a cooperative of facilitators who specialize in antioppression training, including training in transformative justice paradigms.

12. Part of what we have in mind here is Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s call to reimagine reparations as a global project in the form of a sustained response to the climate crisis. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations.

13. We can call simply for funding more of these initiatives either through nonprofit or state grants, and we can dream of a long-term fund that would support activist fellowships.

14. Weber, “Extracting Value from the City.”

15. Geron et al., “Residents’ Roles as Environmental Policy Actors.”

16. Municipal, state, and federal governments could consider legal and tax incentives developed in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere that offer robust examples of supportive policy. For a discussion of how Italy has passed a series of laws that have supported and sustained cooperatives for many decades now, see Zamagni and Duda, “Learning from Emilia Romagna’s Cooperative Economy.” Different U.S. groups and communities could also make better use of existing U.S. tax laws that are supportive of cooperation, like the tax benefits offered to firm owners who turn firm ownership over to workers.

17. This movement is often referred to as the “solidarity city” or “refuge city” movement, though it understands solidarity city differently from us. Berlin’s house of representatives member said in explaining why he was supporting Solidarity City Berlin (an official designation by Berlin city government): “For us . . . ‘solidarity city’ Berlin . . . is an alliance of many groups in different fields. We understand our solidarity city approach more broadly than only an official network of cities, but we want to weave the idea of a solidarity city through all fields of politics.” Bauder, “Urban Migrant and Refugee Solidarity,” 3,224.

18. Those are outlined in Hudson, “Producing Movement Space.”

19. When our spirits flag, our watch words are Romand Coles’s concept of receptive generosity or Adrienne Maree Brown’s concept of pleasure activism. In different ways, both speak to a kind of shift in subjectivity required for collective action. See Brown, Pleasure Activism; Coles, Visionary Pragmatism.

20. For an international perspective on gender and the solidarity economy, see RIPESS, “Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) with a Gender Perspective.” For gender dynamics of solidarity economy movement space in New York City, see Hudson, “Building Where We Are.”