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In cities powerfully shaped by racial capitalism and economic exclusion, communities have long fought to reclaim their futures through economic solidarity and cooperation. This has been the case through the darkest stages of racial capitalist urban history and remains especially important in the face of a resurgent patriarchal white supremacy today.
Our research, detailed in our new book “Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation,” reveals a striking pattern: The very neighborhoods redlined into disinvestment and organized abandonment decades ago have become hubs of worker cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens and mutual aid networks that, together, constitute the decentralized but vibrant solidarity economy movement.
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These solidarity economy institutions have predominantly developed in economic sectors that provide for core human needs such as food, housing, finance and carework. Built by and for those historically denied access to capital and opportunity (particularly in Black, Brown and low-income communities), these institutions challenge the logic of racialized extraction with alternatives rooted in economic democracy, ecological sustainability and shared prosperity.
A clear lesson emerges: When hegemonic capitalist systems fail communities, people find ways to build their own economic institutions based on solidarity instead of profit and competition.
Today, as we witness racial capitalist forces rapidly realigning, solidarity economies are once again positioned to play a paramount role as a community defense, or bulwark as we call it, against these forces. As before, multiplying the number of institutions and building further and stronger the ties between its different sectors will deepen and strengthen the ecosystem of economic solidarity.
Our book, “Solidarity Cities,” seeks to assist in this task by illuminating the joint geographies and dynamics of diverse urban solidarity economies. Largely invisible in mainstream economic narratives, they abound across New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester, Massachusetts, our three long-term research sites.
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Taken together, the stories of solidarity economy institutions and initiatives — community gardens, credit unions, worker cooperatives, affordable housing cooperatives, food coops, childcare coops and others — that we illustrate in this book destabilize what can often seem like a template of uneven urban development under racial capitalism that produces polarized urban space.
Within this space, we find both areas catering to the economic and cultural elite and neighborhoods where poverty affects high proportions of residents who struggle to meet their daily needs. Between these paired logics of what might be familiar to readers as the Gentrified City and the Disinvested City, solidarity economy institutions reveal a third dimension of city life that organizes urban space in a different way – one rooted in the ethics of economic cooperation, inclusion, mutuality, and democracy, and in community struggles for racial and economic justice.
This third dimension is what we term the “Solidarity City.” We introduce this idea to evoke an alternative spatial imaginary highlighting solidarity relations as definitional features of urban life. In general terms, solidarity names a sense of collective responsibility and shared purpose that connects an individual to a group or community. To be in solidarity entails both feeling a sense of common purpose with others and being willing to make sacrifices.
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For us, the Solidarity City names something that exists in the present (a diverse economy of cooperation) and can be found in the past (though traveling under other names). It also names an aspirational horizon for realizing more solidarist urban futures. The Solidarity City is thus a concept that harbors past, present and future tenses. It also extends across multiple social domains and scales of urban life: from caring for others, volunteering and single community projects to initiatives undertaken at the level of the neighborhood or of the entire city.
Our focus is on the economic domain and on initiatives, relationships and practices associated with a burgeoning global solidarity economy movement. This movement (a social movement in which we have each extensively participated and studied) seeks to create an economy for people and the planet and thereby works toward ending the dominance of capitalism. This, then, is a book about the constitution of solidarity cities in the spirit of this movement, as well as about the aspirations and challenges underlying efforts to construct postcapitalist solidarity economies at the urban scale.
While we focus on the role of solidarity in the creation of the cities, the book is equally a study of the enduring imprint of racial capitalism on urban geographies and how solidarity economies are affected by, respond to, and can transform entrenched racial and economic divides.
And while we focus on different aspects of solidarity economies in three U.S. urban areas, the truth is that elements of the Solidarity City exist the world over, in cities small and large, from Cochabamba in Bolivia, to Cape Town in South Africa.
The interest in solidarity-based alternatives to capitalism has indeed been fast-growing. In our own experiences as community-engaged researchers, we have witnessed remarkable grassroots ingenuity as communities worldwide innovate with economic initiatives that prioritize ethical considerations over profit maximization and inclusive well-being over individual wealth. Over the past decade, experiments with community gardens, cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, community finance and the like have proliferated, as has interest in economic democracy (or nonhierarchical workplaces) more generally.
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Some of these practices and initiatives are older, while others have developed more recently in response to the cascade of economic, ecological and geopolitical crises sweeping the world — crises that have left populations feeling more economically precarious, more vulnerable to climate emergency, more skeptical about capitalist institutions and more open to alternatives. New or old, many tap into long cross-cultural traditions of mutual aid that have sustained communities in the face of many forms of systemic economic, racial, gender and heteronormative oppression. They constitute a basis for solidarity economies as well.
As important as such initiatives are for many communities, they nevertheless typically fall out of mainstream studies of the economy, which focus instead on for-profit enterprises, capitalist markets and state budgets. Moreover, to the extent that such initiatives are studied, they have generally been treated in isolation from one another. Thus, consumer cooperatives are studied independently from worker cooperatives, which are studied separately from community gardens, credit unions and so forth.
This piecemeal approach reinforces what J. K. Gibson-Graham term a capitalocentric worldview, which a priori asserts capitalism as the dominant (if not singular) form of economy. Alternatives are presumed to occupy only small niches in society and are accordingly pushed to the periphery, to the extent they are acknowledged at all. For those looking for a way beyond capitalism, possibilities become difficult to imagine under such a worldview.
In writing this book, we aim to counteract these limiting habits of thought by exploring the geographies that emerge when diverse initiatives are brought out of their silos and conceived together as facets of a shared solidarity economy capable of transforming cities and ways of urban living.
What if we could learn to see the examples all around us not as scattered exceptions but as constitutive elements of the vital networks of human solidarity that support urban life? What if, amid the towering trees of capitalist structures that seem to dominate our horizons, we could sense an expanding solidarity ecosystem growing in the understory and composing the Solidarity City?
We would see a robust life in the forest — many other trees, as well as bushes, ferns, mushrooms, etc. — that might be considered noncapitalist forms nurtured by the underground root systems and the fungi symbiotically connecting trees. Visible above ground are the more formally organized parts of the Solidarity City: housing and worker cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens and more. Below ground, the undercurrents of solidarity spread through the soil, nurturing informal economies and social practices, while sustaining what lies above through the continual extension of goodwill, reciprocity and care.
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Learning to see the solidarity already operating within economies is a crucial step toward envisioning what solidarity cities have been and might become.
We write not only for insiders of the burgeoning global solidarity economy movement but also for academics and general readers who are unfamiliar with the solidarity economy concept and its associated practices and may wonder about its size and significance. While learning about the workings of urban solidarity economies, these readers will also hopefully draw inspiration from communities that ingeniously and collectively have been meeting core human needs —food, housing, dignified work, fair finance, cultural production and more — through practices set in opposition to capitalist ways of providing goods and services.
Unlike most scholarship on the solidarity economy, which largely focuses on local and national projects, our inquiry proceeds at the scale of cities. We do not regard urban solidarity economies as activities that just happen to take place in cities. Rather, we see them as mutually constitutive of cities and urban geographies. We hope this book helps to inaugurate such ways of thinking.
Three central contentions organize our thinking. First, the scale of the solidarity economy is bigger than commonly thought. Second, many of the race and income divisions that underlie American urban life today are also manifest within the geographies of the solidarity economy.
Lastly, solidarity economy initiatives and the movement at large, while being affected by these racial and economic divisions, themselves possess many of the normative and practical resources for confronting and ultimately transforming these fractured landscapes. Indeed, the cities we study provide abundant examples of noncapitalist initiatives working toward racial and economic justice by means of trial and error, experimentation, failure, setback and persistence.
These offer, using the words of Ruha Benjamin, a practical toolbox of beautiful experiments capable of spreading justice rather than toxicity from one place to the next. In all those instances, solidarity economies build livelihoods, defend them and resist the workings of brutal racial capitalist forces — all the while also building pathways to the cities of the future made for people and the planet.
Adapted from Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation by Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, Craig Borowiak. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2024 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Used with permission.