Horizons of Economic Solidarity and More Livable Worlds

Seeing the Solidarity City

As we have argued throughout the book, the Solidarity City is not a utopian proposition. One of our principal aims has been to understand how the efforts of people working in community gardens, community-supported agriculture (CSAs), worker cooperatives, credit unions, artist co-ops, housing cooperatives, collectives, and community spaces, among other solidarity spaces, add to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Taken together, these diverse initiatives help the Solidarity City, a progressive postcapitalist urban imaginary, to cohere as a shared reality. We can see its expanding contours, something that is especially evident in the introduction and chapter 1, where its overall spatial footprint emerges within our maps of urban landscapes in all three cities. And this only scratches the surface. The solidarity economy we have been able to put on the map is only the visible part of a broader current of mutuality, care, and provision that occurs in everyday life in households, between neighbors, in places of work and worship, libraries, parks, community gardens, and on the street. Continuing with the ecosystem metaphor, we can conceive the visible part that we examine as not just a few scattered trees but rather as a robust forest of solidarity economy, one sustained by a vast mycelial network of human solidarity just below the ground. We take heart from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s long view of history, that the human capacity for collective experimentation is part of our shared birthright as a reflexive, creative, and playful species.3 The exercise of this birthright requires us to see the Solidarity City more clearly as a precondition for realizing it.

It is possible to reforge economies and our relations with one another and with a living planet on a solidarity basis. It is possible to make cities into places organized by logics of care. As coauthors, we can write this confidently because we see how solidarity economies have already shaped our cities in large and small ways. The possibility for future development is real, but that is not to say that it can be taken for granted or that the work of rebuilding cities to be both more livable and equitable is easy.

Patterns in the City and the Politics of Solidarity

The solidarity city does not emerge in a vacuum. We have shown how all three cities are placed in unique contexts that shape the emergence of solidarity economies. Yet across that difference, throughout the book we have presented abundant evidence on how spatial patterns in the distribution of solidarity economies—hot spots, bulwarks, edge zones, and ecotones—define the shape of the solidarity city in each place. Each pattern we identified reflects a different proposition about the realities of life and the possibilities of solidaristic responses to the dominant trend in which U.S. cities continue to be segregated by race, poverty, and wealth. As Stephen Menendian, Samir Gambhir, and Arthur Gailes at the Othering and Belonging Institute documented in 2021, most cities are now more segregated by both race and income than they were in the 1990s.4 The lived experiences of city residents are partly defined by the fault-line patterns that divide them, and those divides also affect the solidarity economy movement itself, as we explored through our analysis of various types of cooperatives across the cities. Pattern recognition, in this case, recognizing patterns of division and exclusion, is a first crucial step in repatterning capitalist urban space to encourage solidarity. We identified moments and places where communities of people defend themselves against racial capitalist forces of exploitation, extraction, and predation, what we called the “bulwark pattern,” as well as those spaces on the edge where people encounter one another and extend the bonds of solidarity across fault lines of race and poverty, what we have termed the “ecotone pattern.”

We focused our research on three particular cities. New York, Philadelphia, and Worcester represent different scales of urbanization, but their histories follow the arc of the U.S. experience. We wanted to see how these cities were shaped by the historical process of redlining, among other urban processes, something we explored in chapter 2. Redlining also illustrates the power of maps to shape cities by a racial capitalist logic. The creation and extensive use of redlining maps set in motion the dynamics of organized abandonment in cities across the United States. Their legacy has followed us into a present moment defined by both segregation and an ongoing crisis of affordable housing, food insecurity, predatory financialization, and police violence. As we also uncovered in chapters 2 and 6 though, redlining is one of the important racial capitalist processes against which solidarity economies have arisen. We presented significant evidence showing how different kinds of solidarity economies have largely concentrated in precisely many of the areas adversely affected by redlining, including areas that today still comprise predominantly low-income communities of color.

Many of our chapters illustrate that the solidarity economy has played multiple roles in those neighborhoods as a long-term survival strategy, a means of collective resistance, and a noncapitalist mode of world-building. We consider our analysis of the geographic patterns of the solidarity economy through a series of maps to be a strategy of counter-mapping that, similar to redlining maps, has ontological power to produce urban realities. Making solidarity economies visible on the maps leads us to recognize their role as urban processes that contribute definition to cities as we know them today. It is critical to understand how the gentrification, organized abandonment, and other dynamics of racial capitalism have patterned the practices of solidarity.

In looking for more equitable approaches to life, we see some cause for urgency. Pressing social crises like stunning wealth inequality and the lack of affordable housing are problems in cities around the world, threatening to make present forms of segregation, exclusion, and marginalization worse. At the same moment, the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, militarism, patriarchy, and a vitriolic politics of white supremacism pose an ongoing threat to life, both human and more than human, on a planetary scale. Now more than ever the question of how humanity moves forward toward more livable worlds in solidarity is an urgent one. That our paths are intertwined and interdependent means that the work of solidarity entails the ongoing work of building and maintaining relationships, as well as extending them across long-standing social divisions.

Extending Solidarity Cities: Building on What Exists

Patterns allow us to critically assess where we are, determine what we must provisionally accept as a starting point, and establish the basis of what might yet be changed. Engaging with entrenched fault lines is difficult work and takes ongoing commitment. There are no guarantees, but as we argued in chapters 3 and 5, we can see how many cooperators intentionally keep engaging in edge work, navigating the dilemmas of being together in solidarity.

For those of us committed to social justice, in building solidarity economies as the basis for other worlds, both a racialized history and the present situation are part of what we must accept as a shared starting point. Confronting racial capitalist forces and constructing alternatives that better serve communities become two sides of the same process. Fault lines can be repatterned, unmade, and transformed. Returning to chapter 4, while it is true that the food solidarity economy seems to be caught up in the same fault lines of division that define the broader society, we can also read this sector for the difference that solidarity makes. This chapter provided numerous examples of solidarity initiatives that are looking to reinvent the food system in ways that are working to unmake these divides. Efforts that link farmers in regional and rural areas to diverse urban communities are joined by CSAs and gardens that prioritize the needs of people living on low incomes. Some initiatives organize to defend community garden space, while others try to improve their accessibility for youth, particularly in communities of color.

Through our counter-mapping efforts, we have also identified the geographic patterns of edges and ecotones, from which we have learned not only that intentions matter but so too do the ecosystems in which solidarity economy initiatives find themselves. The evidence presented in chapter 5, focusing on Philadelphia cooperatives situated along demographic edge zones within a highly segregated city, underscores the significance of what we call the “edgework of solidarity.” Being located in rapidly changing neighborhoods has caught some of these cooperatives in intense dynamics of gentrification. But we also found that many cooperatives there explicitly pursue strategies to connect people with different economic and racial backgrounds. Cooperatives offer a space of meaningful encounter, an opening for transforming people’s lives and neighborhoods.

The last pattern of bulwarks led us to focus on cooperation in relation to work, housing, and credit in chapter 6 in New York City. Worker cooperatives have been effective in defending women of color against super-high rates of exploitation in labor markets, as seen in the case of Latina women in care-work industries. Credit unions have provided long-term defense against financial exclusion and predation, as we see in the historical and present-day work of Black church–based credit unions located in the heart of previously redlined Black communities. Limited-equity or permanently affordable housing cooperatives have successfully defended people with low incomes against slumlords and displacement through gentrification. In the process of acting as community bulwarks, worker co-ops, credit unions, and housing co-ops have also built and preserved different forms of sociality through the collective forms of solidarity. Historically, these three solidarity economy sectors have been supported through community mobilization and, at different points in time, through governmental policies at local, state, and federal levels. What we can see even in the case of New York, the veritable belly of the beast of capitalism, is that a solidarity city has long existed alongside the bright lights of the so-called capitalist city. This brings us to the question of what is to be done. What new horizons have yet to be dreamed of for solidarity cities?

The way forward is not always clear, and, of course, unexpected developments can radically alter material and social conditions. As we were writing this book, a pandemic unfolded, just when we had finished collecting data on thousands of initiatives in three cities. It was constantly on our mind—how are Covid impacts going to affect our initiatives? We saw firsthand in these cities the scale of the devastation in communities of color. Solidarity economies were profoundly affected. Some individual initiatives ceased operations, some moved, and some new ones started. As discussed in chapter 3, Stone Soup, a key institution in Worcester’s solidarity economy, was undone by a combination of pandemic pressures and tensions within the community over safety, harm reduction, and housing in a city undergoing accelerating gentrification. Several cooperatives, especially those reliant on public performance spaces, closed in Philadelphia as well. At the same time, mutual aid networks, community gardens, and community-supported agriculture all saw increased participation. Worker cooperatives have significantly grown in New York since we gathered data on them. Things in all three cities remain in flux, but people persist.

The patterns provide us with a way of describing and explaining what becomes visible when we map the solidarity economy, while understanding that what is patterned can be repatterned. What is stitched can be unstitched and put together differently, though it may take a while. In what follows, we offer some ideas for how to take this work and expand on it, extend it, and take it into directions that are needed.

When we were finalizing the manuscript for this book, the United Nations adopted a general resolution for all member states to “promote and implement national, local and regional strategies, policies and programs for supporting and enhancing the social and solidarity economy” as a model to meet sustainable development goals.5 The UN resolution itself notes the importance of a previous resolution passed by the International Labour Organization (ILO) on the connections between decent work and the social solidarity economy. Between 2010 and 2020, both the ILO and the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy facilitated an international exchange of ideas around expanding solidarity practices. All of this is to say that the UN resolution emerged from work taking place at multiple levels to support, nurture, and grow the social and solidarity economy. It was, in most respects, a derivative declaration, reflecting input from grassroots movements from around the world that have been busily functioning in most ways quite autonomously from all the international discussions. This pushes us to ask what it would mean for states and communities everywhere to embrace an economy that puts people and the planet first.

The UN declaration also contains a suggestion for all countries to make visible “the contribution of the social and solidarity economy in the compilation of national statistics” and, even more important, to ensure their participation in policy-making. This is an invitation for activist communities around the world to start, continue, or renew counter-mappings of solidarity economies (including other similar economies traveling under different names) at precisely a moment in world history when this commitment is most needed: right now.

We are both encouraged and humbled by the tireless work of activists we have encountered who are struggling to build solidarity economies. Our reflections on the movement come at a moment in time where movement leadership is increasingly coming from Black and Latinx communities and in a context where some cities have begun to see the powers of cooperation. One lesson from our work is that there can be important synergistic kinds of effects between different kinds of bulwarks. What would it be like to build a solidarity city agenda that amplified such connectivity among sectors, building up density and power via interlocking bulwarks like a strong defense? Perhaps examples like Co-op City won’t have to appear as “once upon a time” victories but could instead function as places where we might imagine, build, defend, and extend the solidarity city.

We would like to offer a few suggestions on how what we have seen in our three cities could be extended elsewhere and give some sense of what that might look like in relation to the solidarity economy initiatives we have considered. Our objective here is to draw on the patterns identified in our research to consider possibilities for helping the Solidarity City to cohere and, more broadly, for extending solidarity economies beyond the borders of any given municipality. For us, the speculations that follow attempt to use our counter-mapping approach to chart a trajectory for future solidarities, plausible next steps that emerge from developments occurring within the movement as we finalized the pages of this book. As we have done throughout much of the book, here we emphasize the solidarity economy’s role in sustaining cities in core domains of life, including care work, housing, finance, and food. In the section that follows, we offer some insights in relation to these solidarity economy sectors before moving on to think about changes in the broader society that might help further realize the solidarity city.

In U.S. cities, worker cooperatives are gaining traction for addressing basic needs and employment, particularly in caregiving.6 In New York City, we saw how the cooperative form draws especially immigrant women workers who experience higher than average rates of wage discrimination and exploitation and who work in labor-intensive industries. Today, worker cooperatives exist in many service sectors of the city economy, from food to professional services, but with greater investment, more and larger worker cooperatives could arise in more economic sectors, helping to make the city into a space where workers share democratic workplaces, have control over their work lives, and can build cooperative economy together with other co-ops. For example, the Drivers Cooperative (launched in 2020 and currently the largest worker co-op) partners proudly with the Cooperative Home Care Associates (the second largest worker co-op) to provide nonemergency medical transport. Clearly, synergies that draw together these worker cooperatives from different industries are happening in the world and within the United States. The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives has been busy trying to support, train, change laws, and multiply synergies among cooperatives, and from the start it has centered leadership by people of color. These initiatives challenge racialized forms of exploitation by embodying an alternative model for collective worker operation.

We also uncovered a long and storied history of New York City’s cooperative housing sector. Although the sector is very large, the availability of cooperative housing units is currently inadequate to meet the overall need for affordable housing. Crucially, this is not just a New York problem; cities around the world are now experiencing severe shortages of affordable housing. We see this moment politically as an ideal time to expand permanently affordable housing through state and federal investment not only in conventional public housing but also in solidarity economy institutions such as community land trusts, public land banks, and affordable housing cooperatives for rent and ownership. Some cities are catching on to the potential of solidarity-based housing. There has, for instance, been a marked uptick in the number of community land trusts in the works in New York and Philadelphia, and there are also coordinated actions to pass legislation like New York City’s Community Land Act, which would grant first right of purchase of public land to community land trusts for housing. What is abundantly clear is that housing is going to require multiple actors and multiple types of refashioning and revisioning of relations to land and housing. In this way the Solidarity City, by design, focuses on shelter, not profit.

In chapter 6, we emphasized the work of faith-based credit unions due to the historic and ongoing role they play against racial capitalist forms of financial predation. Many other types of credit unions exist, particularly for workers in different areas of employment, and many also have radical historical roots. There is a history of such credit unions forming connections with other cooperative sectors. Credit union founders in the 1930s in New York, for instance, got into financing cooperative housing just by listening to the needs of their members. What if employment credit unions renewed their commitment to cooperation among cooperatives, supporting credit unions with lower-income members and fewer assets while also supporting other cooperatives (like worker and food cooperatives) in keeping with movement principles. We can find a suggestive example of this in the form of a nonprofit group called Inclusiv (formerly the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions), which supports community development credit unions that have explicit missions to serve low-income communities living in banking deserts. Headquartered in New York City but partnering with community development credit unions all over the United States and Puerto Rico, Inclusiv has come up with programs like Juntos Avanzamos (“Together We Advance”) so that credit unions can offer bilingual services to Spanish speakers and offer access to credit irrespective of immigration status. They also have another program called Inclusiv Black Communities, which shares resources among credit unions serving predominantly Black communities and tackles joint problems collectively. Inclusiv demonstrates that there are programs already in place that model alternative paths for credit unions to more explicitly fulfill their commitments to social equity through concrete actions. These can be enhanced, and new possibilities can be imagined for the credit union movement, which in the United States involves over 137 million members, to flex its financial muscle in order to repurpose their large assets to community uses on a greater scale.

In all three of the cities we studied, there was some amazing synergistic work being done by organizations to advance food justice using solidarity economies. In Philadelphia, Soil Generation, a collective of Black and Brown women community gardeners and farmers dedicated to ensuring people of color regain community control of land and food, has worked closely with both the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance and a land trust called Neighborhood Gardens Trust. This collaboration leverages the strength of multiple solidarity economy sectors to actively promote community control. Likewise, Brooklyn Packers, a Black-led worker co-op in food packaging and distribution in New York, started their own CSA (sourcing from Black-owned farms) as well as another juice worker cooperative. Support organizations such as the Regional Economic Council in Worcester similarly work across sectors to help defend community-based approaches to food access and food security. We are aware of similar initiatives elsewhere in the country.7 Building and amplifying these sorts of connections around the provisioning of food, which is so central to both culture and survival, has the potential to open new pathways to address the inequities and food precarity generated by industrial food regimes.

We have focused on food, finance, housing, and work, but there are other domains of solidarity economies and other types of initiatives that should be woven into dreams of a solidarity city. There are, after all, so many problems generated by racial capitalism that the forms of defense will need to be multiple. We might think about examples like the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, which has taken the development of affordable housing via a land trust model and combined it with enterprise and community development focused on food security, all within a structure of direct democracy and accountability to a diverse community.8 What would it take to multiply an initiative like this in cities throughout the country? How, for instance, might we reconsider the role that credit unions could play in facilitating affordable housing or, for that matter, more worker cooperatives? These questions bring us to a central feature of the Solidarity City, which is how solidarity economy actors sit in relation to larger urban contexts: they are shaped by those contexts, but they also work hard together on building another, postcapitalist city.

In what follows, we take a bird’s-eye perspective to offer some more general ideas on how counter-mapping and the other techniques we have used can be taken up by others, researchers inside and outside the academy, to engage in the work of creation, protection, and transformation. Given that the book is centered on the United States, and thinking about how this work might travel, it is important to understand other countries will have different racial categories, different types of census data, and different definitions of solidarity economies. We have no doubt that the book would have been different in many ways had we instead written about Detroit, New Orleans, and Los Angeles or Sydney, Porto Alegre, and Manila, or any other combination of cities.9 Despite the fact that different places will have different challenges, we believe that the type of counter-mapping we have modeled (combining geospatial analysis, historical analysis, economic impact estimation, and qualitative research) can be adapted because two things are simultaneously true: racial capitalism has left an imprint on cities throughout the globe and economic solidarity can be found the world over.

Toward the Horizon: Create More, Protect, Transform

Given the complexities of urban economies, there is no singular, straightforward answer to the practical “what to do” question. The solidarity economy encompasses many different sectors and operates on multiple scales with diverse actors. It is part of a decentralized movement. Furthermore, as our study of three distinct cities hopefully makes clear, solidarity economies are variably tied to place with many context-specific elements that demand actions grounded in local conditions. For concrete answers, the most crucial expertise generally resides in communities themselves and in front-line organizers elbow-deep in on-the-ground struggles to improve people’s lives. Our work is at best a complement to theirs. While we have theorized the concept of the Solidarity City as an urban imaginary that would be meaningful in many places across the world because the work of solidarity is present everywhere, in reality there are only plural solidarity cities. Part of what it means, then, to realize the Solidarity City is to comprehend this diversity and to further activate local contexts while also establishing linkages and connections between individual solidarity cities. For these reasons, we are limited in our ability to make widely applicable, concrete, and specific recommendations. What we can do, however, is sketch out a set of concluding reflections around the imperatives to create, protect, and transform and describe how the methodologies we have developed in this book might be of use to communities in other cities.

Creating, maintaining, and nurturing solidarity economies all touch on a hopeful politics. But our work shows that this must be balanced against all of the racial capitalist forces that produce both multiple and specific harms. Creation needs to be structured by the need to protect, repair, and transform everything, everywhere, all at once—or, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words, “change everything” in society to achieve abolition.10 This sounds daunting, we know, but human interdependence is going to ultimately require that level of transformation achieved through many efforts in multiple locations. The good news is, from all of what we uncovered in this book, there is much to build from, and so many activists and movements have long been doing this work already.

In the spirit of everything, everywhere all at once, growing, protecting, and transforming are not chronological interventions but simultaneous and intertwined. As we suggested earlier in this conclusion, to be worthy of its name, the solidarity city must not serve to protect privileged space but rather seek to directly address the harms of racial capitalism through their functioning. In fact, to build the solidarity economy at all entails taking into account what it means to protect those who are vulnerable, to protect against exploitation and predation. Our evidence showing the tendency of solidarity economies to concentrate within low-income neighborhoods of color is an indication that such economies are responsive to needs of vulnerable populations and that communities of color have long been enacting the change they wish to see. In the previous chapter, we extensively discussed cooperatives as bulwarks, as a way to build and defend. But in a larger sense, the whole point of solidarity is to provide protection through mutual, collective support while extending this care and protection to one another as the basis for transformation.

We have created the following list of reflections that emanate from our research. It is not meant to be comprehensive or limiting of thought or action. It is, rather, a series of points we have learned from our research as to how things could be made better.

• Recognizing patterns, naming the problems

  An important step toward more fully realizing the solidarity city is learning to see vulnerability in the first place and to name the problems with clarity. Maps such as the ones we generated are one way to identify spaces and populations marginalized by inequality, poverty, and racialized exclusion. This mode of analysis needs to be complemented with qualitative modes of learning, given that vulnerability looks different for different communities. For many, danger looks like gentrification and displacement, whereas protection looks like having neighbors who care looking out for one another. If solidarity economies are to be a genuine means for unmaking racial capitalism, then attunement to vulnerability and its causes within the movement has to be more than a tacked-on consideration. It needs to be baked into the functioning of solidarity economy initiatives with community-oriented approaches that entail active listening.

  It is one thing for individual initiatives to take seriously their own stated commitments to pluralism and equity. But a whole other terrain of struggle opens up when many conditions and challenges to be contended with (like segregation in labor markets and housing) are actually the outcome of larger racial capitalist forces operating in and beyond the city. Their operation extends beyond individual organizations, emphasizing the need to view initiatives within a broader urban system and the need for initiatives to address those larger common problems. The solidarity city and solidarity economy concepts create the space for counterhegemonic collective action that unites individual initiatives into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

• Forging solidarity economy identities and constituencies

  In order to advance solidarity economy agendas in public policy and within society, as well as to hold officials accountable, it is important for community members to continue the work of organizing themselves as solidarity economy constituencies. This involves developing further coalitional identities around economic solidarity by movement activists and actively participating in city affairs, articulating demands, staying informed, and becoming a significant force that cannot be dismissed or marginalized.

  It takes vision to transform siloed modes of thinking into solidarist ones, especially in urban contexts marked by incessantly cultivated competition and division. In this respect, solidarity economies thrive on the efforts of community members who envision, incubate, and contribute to solidarity economy organizations and practices. As discussed previously, inspiration can come from a great number of sources, ranging from old traditions rooted in communities to education that introduces these initiatives and possibilities to the uninitiated. One major way to build solidarity cities is to name and celebrate solidaristic practices, such as we have attempted to do in this book, with compelling stories and creative examples that spark the imagination and expand the horizon of perceived possibility across sectors and at different scales.

• Living with the discomfort of encountering others and continuing edgework

  Forging solidarity across major racial and socioeconomic divides is not easy. It makes for uncomfortable encounters in which opposing identities and interests come into contact and where the very meaning of solidarity is called into question as privilege and disadvantage are exposed. It is often hard for solidarity economy practitioners to engage across major racial and socioeconomic divides where trust is lacking. We saw this with the fraught relations between Kensington-area cooperatives and local populations of unhoused drug users. For difficult conversations that participants are unaccustomed to having, anti-oppression training by solidarity economy organizations becomes all the more important.11 Making encounters transformative through solidarity edgework requires receptivity and generosity toward the other and accepting that one’s sense of self and of one’s responsibility might be altered as a result. To be viable as progressive actors, solidarity economy initiatives need to be accountable for their behavior, including the ways they do or do not engage across differences. Discomfort can be generative by compelling action in the service of transformative justice.

• Repair

  To acknowledge and mend the harms done by racial capitalism, to seriously engage in reparations of many kinds that are necessary, is no easy task either.12 As alluded to above, one of the things most in need of repair is trust. Trust is a necessary condition for collective edgework between people with different backgrounds for repairing the fault lines. It takes time to build both the relations and the trust required to try to repair fault lines that etch through urban geographies and in the distribution of solidarity economies displayed in our maps. There is also a more intimate need for repair stemming from the exhaustion and burnout experienced by movement practitioners and activists working on the front lines of racial justice and economic solidarity. Part of protecting solidarity economies is supporting the participants, often women of color, who represent a lion’s share of those involved.13 Solidarity economies, which rely on trust and committed participants, are also potentially vital sources for collective healing and recovery. We saw evidence of this in the transformation of Stone Soup into the Village, an Afrocentric cultural, learning, and healing center. Other examples from our work show that Black churches helped repair and protect communities in the face of redlining through solidarity economy practices including credit unions and that community gardens worked to repair neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment and carceral politics. One larger point to be made is that reparations (at a global and macro level) are going to at least in part need to support all the solidarity-based initiatives that have been doing the work of repair in communities of color all these decades.

• Putting demands on and engaging government

  Although grassroots movements often take pride in accomplishing a lot without government support, the project of building solidarity cities requires urban residents to demand with their votes and tax dollars that urban administrations and federal governments take responsibility for their roles in harm done to urban low-income communities and communities of color (e.g., through disinvestment, organized abandonment enacted by redlining and related policies, displacement through urban renewal and gentrification, police violence, and many other practices). This could take forms of restoration to services and repairing infrastructures in those communities while assuring that it does not lead to their displacement. In addition, urban residents can demand that the government supports, through policy and committed financing, the solidarity economy instead of routinely supporting private capitalist development through various financial instruments and tax breaks.14 Fostering collaboration between solidarity economies and governments to create inclusive, supportive urban environments is particularly challenging in contexts, as discussed in chapter 2, where solidarity economies have typically emerged in opposition to governmental policies and practices rather than through them. Yet, in other moments, the government has a record of enabling many forms of the solidarity economy at a large scale. Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and France provide sound examples, but even in the United States many widely spread solidarity economy institutions have been created with direct government support. That is the case for credit unions that were chartered in the thousands as “banks for the poor” and for limited-equity housing cooperatives that were created in the 1930s and 1950s with government-backed financing. Most recently, New York City’s mayor’s office has committed funds to incubate worker cooperatives as opposed to private enterprises, and it has supported community gardens and citizen involvement in greening open space, as have administrations in Philadelphia and Worcester.15

  Clearly, it is in the hands of governments to decide whether to support the solidarity economy with taxpayer money. In many instances, municipalities must be dragged into being investors and supporters of solidarity economies, sometimes kicking and screaming. Overwhelmingly, however, municipal regulations favor capitalist firms and routinely fund capitalist projects and public–private partnerships that inevitably intensify precarity and undermine community resilience. Solidarity economy organizations continue to struggle with laws that stifle cooperative forms, long waits for permits, and a lack of financing. In fact, governments have many tools at their disposal that can equalize opportunities for solidarity economy organizations through regulations, reparations, tax benefits, subsidies, grants, land access, and direct investments, among others. Maps such as we have produced, which establish both patterns of government-induced harms (e.g., redlining) and the significant presence of solidarity economy initiatives in cities, can be vital rhetorical tools for making the solidarity economy legible and worthwhile to policymakers. Supported by persuasive narratives and metrics, they can enroll progressive officials in the name of local economic well-being. On a broader scale, governments can adopt holistic approaches to back solidarity cities, such as exemplified by Cooperation Jackson’s integrated vision of city planning that links various solidarity economy initiatives and sectors.16 These and other models, tailored to particular contexts, would be of great help for enlisting the government and its resources into the project of building solidarity cities.

• Connecting and cross-fertilizing

  The sanctuary city movement, an alliance of diverse groups in many cities around the world seeking to provide sanctuary for refugees, can also be an example for how to think about connecting urban agendas.17 Another example is C40, a global network of the world’s largest cities that has formed an alliance in support of climate action. As inspiring as both kinds of networks are, we wonder what it would mean for cities to unite specifically on the basis of solidarity economies, as solidarity cities. What would it look like for solidarity cities to connect to one another, to engage in concerted action as self-identified, organized solidarity city constituencies, engaged in forming a regional economic approach that privileges their development rather than capitalist development? Perhaps solidarity cities can facilitate connections, allowing constituencies to borrow and aim for best practices from sister cities.

  There have indeed been sustained regional, national, and global efforts to connect solidarity economy constituencies, advocating on the behalf of solidarity economies, to engage in different visions for urban and regional planning. There are already international examples where regional development is being shaped by priorities set by a multiscalar and multisectoral social/solidarity economy network, such as the Chantier de l’économie sociale in Quebec, in which a grassroots emphasis on deliberative democracy has come to be known as the “Quebec model.” RIPESS (Red Intercontinental de Promoción para la Economía Social y Solidaria; Réseau Intercontinental de Promotion de l’Économie Sociale Solidaire; the Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy) is busy working at the global scale, helping bring about things like the UN resolution we mentioned earlier and forming a comprehensive global map of best practice social and solidarity economy policies. In addition, efforts to build regional networks in the Northeast of the United States are also underway.18 We hope the comparative approach we have developed here can inform these efforts at both understanding and developing solidarity economies elsewhere and at the municipal, national, and global scales.

• Showing up: Solidarity is bottom-up not top-down

  So much evidence from our book has shown that communities of color have inspiringly led the way in forming, maintaining, and protecting solidarity economy initiatives. So first and foremost, there should be a rejection of any narratives that erase or marginalize the contributions of communities of color, who are active subjects shaping economies. For anyone inspired enough to enter the field, deference to local communities will be vital to ensuring that power remains within communities. This is connected to a model of participatory democracy that hovers over many of the initiatives we studied. One important thing to do is simply to acknowledge, amplify, and support all of the leadership from below that we see in neighborhoods but that seldom makes it to the headline news.

  Part of protecting communities and the solidarity economy is showing up when needed. It can take so many forms involving time, money, labor, and even simple presence. It begins humbly, though, with listening to other people seriously engaged on the ground and participating in what they say they need in the way of solidarity. However, it also requires people to have the mindset that “solidarity is not about charity” but rather about understanding the interdependence that binds people in projects of joint liberation, not saviorism.

In the course of doing this work, we have been inspired by people we have met in the solidarity economy movement, both for their commitment and efforts and for their shared understanding that even partial transformation, whether personal or political, is important. If it’s true that what’s required now is to “change everything,” then what that means is that little changes and system changes are interconnected. Especially as solidarity economies cohere more and lend collective power to one another’s struggles, relating partial changes and transformations to systemic transformation will hopefully become both more legible and more possible.19

Solidarity dreams are going to need to aim high, encompassing many other forms of economic solidarity we are unable to cover substantively in one book due to the limitations of space. Many forms of solidarity economy keep emerging, and there is much room for future research to bridge these gaps. For instance, the exploration of environmental justice has been only briefly touched upon in this book, even though many of the actors we do investigate—including Worcester’s Regional Environmental Council, Brooklyn Packers, many CSAs, community gardens and their support organizations, and a great many other solidarity economy organizations—have long histories of linking social justice concerns with environmental justice. Climate justice has been quickly emerging as a critical concern for vulnerable communities as well. Another crucial theme deserving further development is an examination of the solidarity economy through the lenses of gender and heteronormativity. This holds particular relevance for movement dynamics, given that a substantial number of solidarity economy participants, often leading grassroots initiatives, are women, while queer people play an increasing role too.20 Additionally, the Solidarity City will only be a good and fulsome place to live if it is also a place that works to extend solidarity to the more-than-human world and if it deals with the most pressing problems generated through racial capitalist forces, including war and displacement. Within the scope of one book, we did not have the capacity to consider these things in detail, but this is where research, both academic and activist, can help fill in the picture and generate new lines of thinking and experimenting.

We end by inviting all readers to discover, study, teach, and spread the word about, as well as engage with, the solidarity economy in all locations so that initiatives can flourish with support instead of struggling in isolation. We hope others find resonance with our work while engaging with other domains of the solidarity economy. This book examines its role with respect to the paramount social problems created by racial capitalist forces acting in housing, food, and fair finance. Certainly, there remain crucial challenges like militarism and the climate emergency that will require deep and different questions about and perhaps other methods for researching how solidarity cities are going to connect and agitate through networked practices. This would require additional theoretical perspectives and explanations. In short, this book is a step on the path toward social transformation that we hope will continue, since our shared survival is at stake.

There are many ways we can extend who (and what) we are in solidarity with. But what this means for us is that the work of solidarity—the effort to build the solidarity city, to realize it more fully, and in so doing give expression to the best part of our humanity—is ongoing and necessarily incomplete. This book represents our contribution.