Maliha Safri et al., "Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation" (U of Minnesota Press, 2025)
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Toyota, let's go places. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books and Anthropology, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Elena Sobrino, a host on this channel. Today we'll be talking to Malia Safri, Mariana Pavlovska, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak, co-authors of Solidarity Cities, Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation.

This was published in 2024 by University of Minnesota Press. Malih Hasafri is professor of economics at Drew University. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Science, and Environmental Policy and Governance. Mariana Pavlovska is professor of geography at Hunter College and co-editor of Rethinking Neoliberalism, Resisting the Disciplinary Regime.

Stephen Healy is associate professor of geography at Western Sydney University and co-author of Take Back the Economy, an ethical guide for transforming our communities, also published by the University of Minnesota Press. And Craig Borowiak is professor of political science at Haverford College and author of Accountability and Democracy, the Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control.

So thank you so much to all four of you for being here today to talk about this book. And to get us started, I wonder if you can first tell us how you came together. You're from different disciplines, different parts of the world. And what led you to co-write this book together?

We were, we've been working together for a long time, but we were all separately working in different ways around mapping and mapping.

And Stephen had been working with mapping, asset mapping, community economies, diverse economies mapping. Mariana had, of course, been working with critical GIS, also community economies, also diverse economies. Myself as well, diverse economies, community economies. And so we all found ourselves in...

similar spaces. And then it kind of started to make sense that we work together on this project, particularly as we started picking up steam on a national level project, which was coordinated with the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network. And

and then helped us get together and get a grant to sort of study that a little bit more, create an openly accessible database and map that everybody can actually check out and use. So that was a little bit how we all got together on this. And I would say that...

In a way, there was a passion also in all of our work around building other worlds in different kinds of ways. And so all of our work had been touching on that. And so we got together. Yes, I think from my perspective, yes.

you know, I've been working and studying alternative economies, formal, informal, household, social reproduction, informal economy, you name it, for a very, very long time. And the

Then I met Stephen and Malika, and you guys also were engaged into this studying, understanding alternative economies. For me, this is when I met Craig, right? It was this clear connection from this to the Solidarity Economy Movement. So I think...

I would give Craig credit of kind of being really somebody who studied alternative and solidarity economy. Craig, maybe I'm not precise about it, but I thought that that was this kind of contribution. So it's good that we're all coming from different fields and even Stephen and I are geographers, but we still do different work together.

And then we all found synergy in our collaboration. You know, it was creating this new way to think about transforming the world and looking at solidarity economy as one of the forces that we think makes a contribution. I wanted to add an important prelude to this, at least from our perspective, which was that our interest in the solidarity economy was sort of

It meshed in the development of a U.S.-based solidarity economy movement. And for me, a pivotal moment there was the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007. And this is sort of the origin point for the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network. They came out of that conference and one of their objectives was to produce a national map of America.

solidarity practice. And in part, I think that was one of the things that inspired this collaboration initially in the context of a National Science Foundation grant and then onwards from there. So, you know, there sort of were multiple reasons why we came together as a group. You know, if I can say this is Craig, something briefly. So I came at this from a slightly different perspective initially. So I was studying the transnational issues

flow of the solidarity economy movement. I was tracing it across borders and I was really global and focused. And at some point I realized that I needed to know more about what's going on in the U.S. and needed to know more about what's going on in the cities where I live. And at that point, I was trying to map local solidarity economy stuff. And I encountered Malihah and then Stephen and Mariana. And just that there is some sort of magic that comes just from our personalities sort of

vibing off one another, but also the interdisciplinarity has been so magical. So I'm trained in political theory and political economy, political science, and geography have been an interest of mine, but just being able to build off that sort of sometimes friction, but sometimes that resonance and the excitement around that kind of collaboration is really what motivated me and I think all of us at some point.

Yeah, no, it is really such an interesting collaboration, you know, to produce such an interesting result. So thank you for that, for that background into your process and your origins with this. And for those listening who have not read the book, the book does look at solidarity economies. It looks at three specific cities, Worcester, New York City, and Philadelphia. And you're looking kind of broadly speaking, how...

the ways that alternatives to racial capitalism get organized. You're especially looking at these domains of food, finance, housing, and work. And we'll talk in more depth about all of those things. But for now, can you first say a bit about this? This book begins with this idea of mapping and counter mapping. And I think

People are probably somewhat familiar with this idea of trying to put, you know, things on a map and map things out and see them. But can you also say a bit about what is counter mapping? Why is that important?

I can start us off. This is Mariana. And counter-maping, this is a concept that is very close to part of what critical human geographers do. So this is also looking at critical cartography and critical GIS. And the whole idea here is that maps are not just neutral instruments, as for a very long time people have understood them.

So they're not just factual statements. In fact, maps are imbued with social power.

And using my colleague Cindy Katz's words, they're oozing with social power. This is because it is very, very important who is the author of the map, who is included into the map, and who is excluded from the map. And so the maps, as a result, not just reflect the world, they actually create the world. They produce the world. That's why we think it is very, very important, you know, the role that they play in world making.

And maps can do good work in this world, but they also can do bad work in this world. And the history of cartography has numerous examples when maps were used to uphold hegemonic power.

think about colonial maps that erased indigenous peoples, for example, or maps of redline cities that kind of, you know, set the cities on this trajectory of disinvestment for decades to come. But maps also can contest those hierarchies

hierarchies, and this is what we call counter-mapping. And originally, it comes from the struggles of indigenous people to make visible their claims to land that is taken by colonial powers.

And today, counter-mapping refers to all kinds of mapping of, you know, alternatives and things that contest all kinds of hierarchical powers. So that's why you also think of our book as counter-mapping project.

something that really brings alternative to capitalism to light, makes it real, and engages people with solidarity economy. Yeah, and there's a lot of maps in the middle of the book, too, which are really good to see in interaction with the text. Yeah, Craig, did you want to add something? Yeah, this is Craig. I wanted to just build off what Mariana said. Yeah.

We had a couple of ambitions when we started this project. One of them was to show the abundance of the solidarity economy in these cities. There's a sense that people know about cooperatives, but they're kind of treated as this small little niche thing or they're thought of in silos separate from one another. And we wanted to use mapping to show the abundance of the solidarity economy. And then we superimposed those against cooperatives.

say, redlining maps, we see that some of the very spaces that are most abandoned and so scarce with capital or other resources are the spaces where the solidarity is most abundant. And conversely, in some of the most affluent neighborhoods, you find the scarcest solidarity in our maps. And so I think that was a powerful tool that we used our maps for. Yeah, I love that. Literally seeing something that perhaps looks empty in one kind of map. That's really powerful. And

I'm also wondering about, so Stephen mentioned this concept, this term, solidarity economies. And I know Chapter 2 has a lot of history and genealogy of some of these terms. So the title, of course, is Solidarity Cities. And

I'm wondering how do you define solidarity in this book? In each session, this has kind of come up. So for us, you know, solidarity is about mutuality in terms of human relationships. It's also about a willingness to make sacrifice and, and,

to connect with people who are different from ourselves. So there's something about solidarity that is extensive, as opposed to just sort of belonging to a group and having cohesion. As it's deployed in this context, solidarity really refers to forms of social organization. So commitment to cooperation, commitment to democratic inclusion,

A commitment to sustainability as it's broadly understood. So that would be solidarity with the more than human, if you will. And I think all of those things become operatives in the institutional forms of solidarity that we've mapped in this book. So worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, credit unions, in various ways, connect to that definition of solidarity. Do they do so perfectly? No. But on some level, yes.

Part of what defines the solidarity economy is the extent to which they really diverge from what we might think of as business as usual. That would be enterprises that prioritize profit over people and planet, broadly speaking, while that where the

People who are making decisions about surplus wealth that's generated are not the folks who produce it, and that is consequential in terms of how it's subsequently distributed. So the idea here is that solidarity economy institutions, as they practice in place, make a different set of decisions about how economy connects to the community context.

I'll be sure my colleagues will come in with a more precise and embracing definition. That's great. No, I think that there's just, I think there's a, this is an important idea and it's,

It's actually not even that well studied, although right now there is an explosion of actually interest and books coming out. Leah Hendricks and Astra Taylor have come out with Solidarity, the Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea. Sarah Shulman, Fantasies and the Fantasy in Necessity. I think that's coming out next week.

She that's an looks like an interesting book, right? Because it's it's thinking about solidarity can take place between people who are very similar, for instance, workers in in solidarity with one another throughout time. Solidarity has been, of course, an important, you know, cohesive force inside the labor struggle for hundreds of years. And so.

I want to say that there's a lot of people who are right now very, very interested in how exactly solidarity across difference can be done and acted in imperfect ways, but in iterative ways. I do think that there's a sort of almost an aphorism that speaks a lot to the power of solidarity, solidarity not

charity. Right. So this idea that there is going to be another relationship that marks the interdependence between humans and makes it so that it's not just about me helping you. Right. I think Ruha Benjamin said it once really well. I don't need an ally. I need you to smell the smoke.

And so the smoke is going to affect me and you and we need to, this is going to be a struggle to save both of us. Not one that's based on charity, but Mariana.

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So I'll just briefly say some additional things. Those early chapters have a sort of strong historical elements to them. And I think for us, this solidarity economy or solidarity in the economy, economic solidarity are deep parts of our history, of humanity's history. They run throughout history. People survive by being in solidarity with one another. And for us, that's really important to acknowledge that.

especially in the face of historical hardships generated by racial capitalist forces. Solidarity is also part of the present. It's part of our work as a document, its presence, the map, solidarity, economies, economic solidarity in our communities today. And I think solidarity is also horizontal. There's aspirational. Solidarity is about building a different kind of future and thinking what I said earlier about how

These entities are often treated in siloed ways. So worker cooperatives are treated separate from credit unions and gardens are all separate. The idea of a solidarity economy is that we can build linkages amongst them and build a movement that is more expansive so that you don't get divided and conquered. You can actually sort of mobilize scale. Yes, excellent. And I just want to add to what Malika and Craig said earlier.

Two things. So one is to reinforce the fact that solidarity is not something new. This is something that have permeated human existence.

And it is not found only in solidarity economy institutions. What we do as human beings on a daily basis, how we engage in social reproduction, how we help each other, how we do a lot of things for which we are not get paid for, right? Care work that we do for others in the community, in households, in our institutions, right?

in our countries, right? All this part of human solidarity. So solidarity actually much bigger than the solidarity economy. And the solidarity is what feeds solidarity economy. And we use this metaphor in the book, like you can think about

a city having big trees, so that would be capitalist structures. And then there are many other trees and shrubs and everything, right? So those would be different solidarity institutions that we just kind of are not accustomed to see because we live in the society that prioritizes capitalist structures.

And then what feeds them all? So under the soil, there is this solidarity that actually a lot of it, mushrooms connecting the trees is the latest research in ecology shows us. So this is like a life nectar that feeds, you know, all our lives. So, and this is what we wanted to show also as existing in our cities. And usually cities,

in capitalist societies are thought of as being shaped exclusively by racial capitalism. So we kind of see disinvested parts of the city. So that would be low-income people, people of color, very heavily policed neighborhoods, lack of capital,

bad environments, poor quality housing. And then we have gentrified city. So this is the city of the rich, which coexists with disinvested city. But this is it. And what we are saying is that, yes, this is the case, but it's not the entire story. What also is present but invisible is the city which is built with human solidarity. And this is what we call solidarity cities.

As a result, we look like a segment of it, not the entire work of human solidarity, but that is the step that we make in order to bring it to light so that people could relate to it, make it part of their own life. Yeah, that's great. Stephen, did you want to add something to that?

Oh, yeah. No, look, I just, my colleagues have really said it all. But I was thinking about Malia's list of, partial list of all the books that are coming out about solidarity and then more broadly mutual aid. So Dean Spade's book, there's a number of other texts that are coming out. But it also makes me think of

and earlier one in the Diverse Economies Livable Worlds book series by Jean-Louis Lévy. And so he's a French historian of the movement, and so he wrote a book not about solidarity but about associationism where he reviews a kind of 400-year history of sort of the broader context in which the solidarity economy emerges as a more democratic alternative he traces elsewhere.

the social economy, which is very important in France. And he connects it to the experience in the Americas, including a chapter on Philadelphia's, um, mutuals as an early example of that. Um, and then to South America as well. Um,

But, you know, I think that for me, that points to the way in which the solidarity economy is a concept with long roots. But to bring it back to some points that Craig was making earlier, one of the things we were noticing in the early part of this century was the powerful role that maps were playing in the Brazilian, French and Italian contexts and that

some of our efforts were to try and connect with this contemporary movement, which is organized at the global scale by repress, which is a sort of an umbrella term that links different solidarity economy movements around the world. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you for that. And I think listeners will really appreciate also hearing these other literatures, past and present and forthcoming, to really, it really is a timely topic and something that we can all relate to, right? We can all see how we ourselves might fit in one way or another. And the way you're sort of making this visible through mapping and through this history, it's

It's at once this kind of organic thing that people always do. I think, you know, you really show that. And it's also something you can kind of use the tools of cartography and visualization to maybe link things together, which is really exciting to think about.

So looking at the middle chapters, so you have a variety of institutions you do look at and in different cities. And I'm wondering if you want to talk a bit about, so there's this idea of the commons and commoning, so not to throw another huge concept at you. I mean, it was wonderful to hear you all talk about the sort of roots and layers of meaning and solidarity there.

But there's this chapter about Worcester and this notion of the commons really looms large in that organization you talk about there. And I'm wondering if you want to talk a bit about that or if anyone else wants to chime in, if that was relevant in other analyses that you did in other cities. But yeah, what did you see at work in this idea of the commons and Worcester?

And how was that sort of brought to life in this work you did? Yeah, thanks for that question. And my colleagues are pointing at me. I'm trying to shake off my 5 a.m. voice. So I was living and working in Worcester around the time when we were first getting together in relation to this book. And so Stone Soup was one project of a

social movement organization in Worcester called Worcester Roots. And Worcester Roots actually has connections with Clark University where Mariana went to school. So it, you know, broadly speaking, was trying to create a coalitional politics around a number of issues, including migrant rights and environment and so on. In the context of a city that experienced deindustrialization early, that is

It's at first blush seemingly a very white working class community, but there's actually a large Latinx population and a number of other migrant groups. It's the largest Ghanaian community in the United States, for example. And it's one that has experienced a lot of the consequences of pollution that we would associate with industrial capitalism.

So they were dealing with a number of issues and they rented us or they bought a space in the heart of Worcester's main South community, King Street, Stone Soup.

which they ran as a common space for progressive organizations. They shared space, they all paid rent collectively, and they made decisions about what to do with that space. And so starting in about, well, the context of the global financial recession, they began to create a school and a series of programs to promote cooperative development. And they enrolled students

young people in particular in forming worker cooperatives. So one of their better efforts was a group called Toxic Soil Busters that would go out and do lead testing and remediation. And it was an early education for students, mostly in high school, about what does it mean to be a part of the economy? What does it mean to make decisions about wealth that's generated collectively?

And then that inspired other groups, including ex-offenders, to explore the role that cooperation could play in

in response to the conditions that they found themselves in. What was amazing about Stone Soup was the resilience of this effort. So there was a fire in 2009 that all but gutted that building. And it took them a number of years, but they used a lot of community input and diligence on their part to rebuild. And many of the same organizations came back and continued to work together and

really the pandemic was a context in which um that space ended up getting transformed for a number of reasons we detail in the book but um it still continues as a community space now under a different name our village um it is it is more afrocentric in terms of its focus but i think in broad strokes that commitment to solidarity is something that

persists in that space and in concert with a lot of movement spaces in Worcester. Yeah, thank you for describing that. Yeah, Craig, did you want to say something? So building off of what Stephen has said about Worcester and Stone Soup, I think another of our major objectives is...

To recognize that the legacy or the effects of solid racial capitalism on our cities create very difficult conditions. And solidarity can be hard. And I think the commons framework is one that is about, again, an aspirational kind of motive. Like, how can we build things in common? How can we build things in common through principles of solidarity?

with our differences, despite our differences, by our differences. And one thing that we really sort of emphasize is the importance of intentionality. Like, solidarity and commenting doesn't happen on its own. It's hard work. It's hard work to build comments. It's hard work to bridge differences. And while all the entities that we look at, the organizations we look at,

Not all of them do it as well as others. We believe that there are normative resources within these kinds of institutions, these cooperative institutions that can be mobilized. Those norms can be mobilized to help people do commoning better, to do solidarity better. Unlike sort of conventional investor-owned companies and more competitive capitalist frameworks, which don't do commoning very well at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mariana, did you want to add to this?

Yeah, I just wanted to add to it is that like, why is that in this book, we are looking at the city as the whole and also we are looking at one organization?

So for us, it is this kind of, you know, analytical approach that we wanted to show how solidarity economy operates at different scales. And our storytelling, our analysis occurs at different scales. For example, we look at legacy of redlining by looking at three cities at the same time.

right, showing how it kind of played out in all of those cities, looking at commonalities. Then we also analyze different sectors of solidarity economy at the scale of one city, right? We are looking at, let's say, the differences between community-supported agriculture and community gardens by looking at Philadelphia and New York as a whole.

And then we also are looking into different neighborhoods to reveal the dynamics of solidarity economy, how it works at that scale. And this is what in particular we call age work and using examples of Philadelphia. And then we also zoom in at one organization to show the microcosm of solidarity

you know, solidarity economy and how it is so human because it is enabled by people, by

human beings, right, who have so many energies and tensions and everything, but the ones that also get burned out, right, and can make mistakes and have to survive the failure and all this kind of stuff. So it is really showing how it works at different scales, humans, by producing, you know, that phenomena.

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Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow. I told you so. Styles and selections vary by store. Yeah, and you know, I really appreciate your comments because I think you really, that really shows the experience of reading this book, which for me was definitely, I did have that feeling of scaling in and out. And I think you described that really well, that you see...

the individuals and the particularities, and you also get a sense of comparisons and the sort of scope of all this. And you brought up this term that I wanted to ask a bit more about anyways, and it's kind of more towards the end of the book, you bring up these frameworks or concepts of edge work and bulwarks.

And I wondered if you could talk a bit more about what these terms mean for you. How do you use them? What do you use them to clarify and explain? This is Malia. I'll start. So one of the things that we were doing in all of this mapping work is constantly looking for patterns as well.

And so one kind of pattern that we see is clustering, right? All three cities had solidarity economy initiatives and many of them, but they were not distributed the same in all of these cities, not at all. And so we were looking at patterns that were unique and how did things cluster in particular spaces? We call when things clustered, we used the geography term hotspots.

right? As in dense clusters of solidarity economy activity, and where are those happening? So we looked at that pattern. But then we were also interested in how these other three patterns also mark solidarity economies. And here we look at this, we look at concepts of fault lines, right, and divides, and then edge work and bulwark. So I would say we kind of look at

at three, we use three metaphors or patterns, right, to describe what we saw happening.

And I'll say that each of these operates in different kinds of ways, even though we could see them operating in all of the cities. We don't necessarily look at each pattern specifically in each city, you know. So but one quick thing that I'll say about fault lines is that for sure we saw that these things are not are are distributed correctly.

In ways that also are marked by race and poverty. And so we wanted to look at, OK, and this is the kind of thing that works. This kind of analysis worked a little bit better when you did it sector by sector.

So how do, for instance, racial divides mark community gardens and community-supported agriculture? So that's one thing that we wanted to look at. And it turned out that they mark, actually, there are racial divides, but in very fascinating ways, it's almost like mirror opposites of one another in the sense that community gardens are, at least in New York and Philadelphia, many of them, and also in Worcester, are definitely food-producing gardens.

And those community gardens, the majority of them are located in communities of color. And then we looked at CSAs and that we had a flip pattern there, right? In the sense that a majority of CSA drop-off spots, exact proportion, almost, are located in majority white neighborhoods. So we wanted to see differences as they operate within a sector.

And then we also saw this other pattern, right, which is the one that we picked up in Philadelphia. And I'll turn it over a little bit to Craig to speak about Edgeworks before we come back and say something about Bulwarks. But Craig, maybe you could say something about Edgework. Sure. So we were looking at cooperatives in Philadelphia. So the cooperatives broadly understood, not credit unions, but other cooperatives,

And we were looking, you know, analyzing it relative to racial demographics. And we were surprised to see that the cooperatives are not located in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

And we also found that they were not located in predominantly Latinx neighborhoods. And even more surprising was that they're not predominantly located in majority white neighborhoods or predominantly white neighborhoods. They're more in white neighborhoods than the others, but they were still not really in the heart of some of those intensely white

And where are they then? We found that they were on the edges. And that was a really interesting, unexpected finding for us. What does this mean that co-ops are on the edges of these neighborhoods between highly segregated communities? And then we had to do some qualitative research to tell some stories about what this is. And we found that it's not...

It's a complex story. We looked in depth at three different neighborhoods in Philadelphia. And in one case, you have the cooperatives sort of emerging them kind of organically out of a diverse neighborhood. The neighborhood was diverse and out of that emerged these cooperatives. In another neighborhood is very much gentrification. The co-ops are moving in because of the low rent prices. And then when gentrification happens, most artists collectives sort of get pushed out.

And in the third case, people were drawn to the neighborhood because of its deep history of activism. And so it was sort of a magnet. This neighborhood was a magnet for cooperatives. But in all these cases, we're finding that something about having edges where people

people are intermingling, is generative for cooperatives. And we actually use this term ecotone, which we take from ecobiology. And ecotone is a transitional ecosystem, say, between a forest ecosystem and a water ecosystem. You have a marsh. And the marsh or mangrove forest, these ecotones are known to have more biodiversity than either of the other ecosystems. And so we actually like that idea that these edge zones are spaces of diversity.

of some friction, but also a lot of regenerative possibility. So the last pattern that we kind of looked at was this, we were really using this metaphor of the bulwark, which was really cute because we did a lecture with some students the other day. They were like, they never heard of this word. What does this mean? Right. Bulwark. And so,

It actually is a little bit of an archaic architectural feature of fortresses and ships. It basically, I think, stands for a man-made defense to protect, in the case of city fortresses, against assaults from other armies, right? So there's this idea of

protect, defend, defend. And what are we defending then, right, inside solidarity economies and cities? And what does that mean? And so there we were looking at really three sectors, worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, and credit unions. And how do each of these three things in different ways protect, defend,

against exploitation

And predation. Marxists like to distinguish between exploitation, direct exploitation of workers and what's called secondary exploitation, which is when you have to pay too much money for rent or you have to pay too much money to just access a bank account. So predation and extraction through means of through other processes other than just exploiting a worker in the place of work.

So the work, how do worker cooperatives help protect and defend? We looked at how it is that worker cooperatives, and this chapter was all about New York City, how it is that worker cooperatives are...

from our data, from the snapshot that we were looking at, majority female, majority people of color working in caring labor industries known for high exploitation. And so why are these people forming these kinds of worker cooperatives in those industries to protect themselves from really severe,

racially discriminatory high rates of exploitation, right? And so we looked at that piece, how and why are people... And there's a lot of actually literature that looks at worker cooperatives. And we wanted to look in particular at this piece. And we added this other part about how do worker cooperatives make place differently than conventional capitalist firms?

What is the difference that it makes when worker cooperatives make these kinds of choices about how much money to devote to profit versus payroll? Right. And then the other parts, housing and credit unions. Right. How do how do housing cooperatives, which are a dominant kind of sector?

sector in solidarity economies. They are the majority of the kinds of solidarity economy entities in New York City, not in all the cities. But this also shows you the sort of deep housing precarity that marks New York City and makes this a fundamental need for shelter and housing that cannot be gotten through the private sector alone. And so there we looked at housing cooperatives and two types of housing cooperatives that

And really how we try to tell a history of how they came up in two different eras. And they are born from two very different relations to the state. One is an active state involvement and the other is actually an active state that's withdrawing from responsibility inside the city.

But in both cases, we also try to show how those housing cooperatives are helping to protect and defend their majority residents of color from gentrification, right? And how they allow people to stay in place despite rising housing costs.

And lastly, of course, credit unions as well. Maybe Mariana can jump in here and talk a little bit about credit unions and how they – well, one particular piece of our argument there.

Yeah, credit unions are also part of a solidarity economy. They are financial cooperatives. And people don't understand that in the United States today, there are 150 million members of financial cooperatives. Like when we just think about it, it is stunning. But we don't talk about them. We don't know about them. However, credit unions have...

some of the very radical history because a lot of them were created after Great Depression and as banks for the poor, as financial institutions that would specifically provide fairer services to low-income people. So working-class communities created credit unions, but also what we found was

Particularly stunning, it is black churches in New York City that created a very large number of credit unions. And when did they do that? That was exactly during the time of great migration. And that was the time when cities were red-lined.

And this is when communities of color and especially black communities as well as immigrant communities were deprived of any credit by mainstream banks. They just refused to provide any financial resources to those communities. So what did the communities do? A lot of social life was organized around churches and churches created communities

credit unions by parish members pulling together their very modest financial resources. But as a result, somebody could get a loan to put food on the table, to pay rent, let's say, maybe to start some little business and to kind of let, they became kind of little economic engines for black communities and for those parishes. So that radical history is very, very important because it really

reveals the radical potential of credit unions today that actually is there and needs to be tapped into and needs to be realized. But I also wanted to mention, like, you know, why are we talking about specific solidarity economy sectors when we discuss different case studies?

And in particular, we are talking about food solidarity economy, like in case of CSA's community-supported agriculture and community gardens.

We are talking about housing cooperatives, right, in case of ball marks in New York City. We are talking about care work when we are talking about worker cooperatives. And we are talking about what is the fourth sector? Credit unions, finance. Finance, exactly. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, to come back. Yeah.

When we are talking about finance, financial sector, why those specific sectors? Again, these findings also came from our analysis of the data. So when we looked at different solidarity economy institutions and initiatives, we

By grouping them into economic sectors, we realize that in all three cities, those particular four sectors were very prominent in terms of concentrating solidarity economy institutions in those sectors. And when you think about them, what are they? This is food,

This is credit, this is shelter, and this is care work, right? Worker cooperatives and care work were very, very much represented, as Malika just explained to us. So these are economic institutions and initiatives that respond to the most basic human needs.

So these are the ones that protect communities from harms of racial capitalism in all the different ways they did it in the past. They're doing it today. They're bulwarks against those harms in the future. But they're also kind of, you know, institutions that allow people to reorganize their social and economic life on the basis of solidarity and cooperation as opposed to exploitation and competition.

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and what GMC has done for over 100. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. Assembled in Flint and Hamtramck, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana of U.S. and globally sourced parts. Yeah, that is fascinating. That's fascinating. Just everything you've laid out and the data that just really shows

shifts and the patterns and the size, you know, of all these, the scope of all these kind of non-capitalist or sort of non or less exploitative, right, ways of meeting those needs, like you said, like these incredibly elemental needs and social, you know, socially valuable things. So

Yeah, I appreciate hearing some of the context of how that you got to those analytics and thought about the data that you were seeing. And I also just appreciate, too, I think this book, a lot of the joy and hopefulness of solidarity, economy, activities, and all that can encompass, the diversity that can encompass, that really comes through that kind of

And it also, I appreciate you talking your conclusion, among other things, but you speak about the discomfort of encountering others. And I think this came up even in our conversation a bit. And I think that's really a helpful point.

Thing to to address, you know, that solidarity is this exciting and really valuable thing. It's it's important and it's also tricky and difficult and uncomfortable at times. And I see. Yeah. Yeah. Like in real life, it turns out that it's really messy and it's not going to work out perfectly. It takes practice. It takes repetition. Yeah.

So, you know, there there. So I want to say that we we are we are trying to think about, right, these as as spaces to protect and grow. But we are also very much aware and understand how much they are under assault and attack.

Historically speaking, in the current moment, in the current climate and context as well, I mean, we just talked about this yesterday, right? The sort of criminalization of solidarity activists in Atlanta, right? Right.

who were 61 activists who were trying to stop Cop City were arrested. And the explicit terms, I think Astra Taylor wrote a nice article about this. Seldom do our enemies actually so explicitly name solidarity as the evil that needs to be criminalized. And that was done in that context. And so I bring that up only because it we

We are under in a position where we have to think about that attack, how we have to build and defend. Right. But these things will require defense, collective defense in order for them to exist in into the future. And these are some of the institutions that we have to not just that we just we have to protect in the in the current moment.

Sorry, I was... Yeah, no, thank you for that. I hear you. And I think that's a really important thing to be aware of and think about as we bring this conversation to a close. And I just appreciate so much of your time already. You know, I know we've taken a lot of your time, but I wonder before we go, are there any...

projects, future projects, upcoming things you're working on now, either individually or collectively? Is there anything you'd like to talk about that's coming up in the pipeline for y'all?

I'll go, you know, but I'm sure all my colleagues are. We're thinking a lot about how will solidarity cities connect to the current moment? And here I feel like I've been doing a lot of work

including just like the day before yesterday, spending it all day at a mutual aid and legal aid clinic for undocumented migrants. Right. And how do we how are we going to think about sanctuary cities solid? So sanctuary city, solidarity city, solidarity

How do we think about the, you know, one of the things that solidarity that excites me about the idea and the practice of solidarity is that it is actually an open ontological category in that we will never actually just define this is it. These are the people we are in solidarity with.

So how will solidarity work to expand and include the most vulnerable people under attack in a fascist regime today? This is one of the things that I'm really thinking about all the time, and it is definitely the next project. This is Craig. This book that we wrote together was really deeply, profoundly transformative.

transformative, you know, in our relationships to one another. We became a we in important respects and in relationship to speaking for myself, my community in Philadelphia. And it's hard to imagine going back to not having some of these relationships we developed over these years. And for me, a deep part of a deep relationship I've been building is with the urban agricultural movement in Philadelphia.

And part of the book project was about acquiring data, getting data, creating database, including about community gardens. And I've now found that that data is really valuable for the community gardening movement, the urban agriculture movement. And we're using that data to alert gardens that are facing risk of damage.

of losing their land to development and we're using it as a way to notify them, "Hey, there's this developer who's going to make a move on your land." And because we have that data, we're able to do that, but we also need to protect that data. So it's like being in relationship with these community partners about how to acquire the data, how to mobilize the data, and how to protect the data with an eye towards the solidarity and towards preserving these spaces and these growers.

So for me, it's something that arose directly out of the book. And it's something that I feel like I'm deeply invested in. I'm moving forward. And I also say just finally that

This is a fun moment for the book, as terrible as the world is. You finish a book, you put a lot of years into this, and now's the time we get to talk about it. And we get to spread it and have these conversations. It's just so wonderful. And also to see the relevance of this in a current moment. So that's been a really high point for me right now.

It's very relevant, very, very much a book we need and can use right now. So thank you for that. Mariana, Stephen, did you have anything? So look, this book came in an interesting time in my life. I actually did the research for the book in Worcester and then moved continents. I'm now living in Australia and I have been for the last 11 years. I've got a family here.

Um, and you know, I have had to find my place in this, in this new, um,

new context over the last decade. And I think one thing that has made it bearable has been to extend some of the insights of this book into other work that I'm doing. So I'm working with a large group of colleagues right now thinking about the question of how do we live on a much hotter planet, something that Sydney brings to our attention every summer. There have been suburbs that have hit 50 degrees centigrade here in the last few years. And

What I found is that air conditioning in the built environment can only take you so far and that once again, the powers of neighborliness, of mutuality, of thinking about the space of the city is one that we need to live in together, not only with one another, but in solidarity with the more than human world is super important. And unless urban planners take that into account.

We end up producing cities where people live 90% of their life inside and they don't know the neighbors. And so I think there's a way in which the question of how we think about climate justice and who and what we're in solidarity with really resonate. And in the Australian context, there's been

powerful movements around um first nations around aboriginal sovereignty and and certainly this has been one step forward two steps back in this context too but there's a lot of insight there about um how do you live um live well and look at what they call care for country here um i think those things are connected um

So, yeah, I feel like, um, it, you know, no matter where we are, there's opportunities to build connections with other people, um, and with the place that we care for. Yeah. Wonderful, uh, ideas, wonderful, uh, thoughts. Um, and, um,

What I'm thinking about, which I think is absolutely desperately needed as a continuation of this project, one thing is climate crisis. As Stephen mentioned, this is just so important. And my thought is that what is kind of not happening is that we are not imagining resolutions to climate crisis as solutions

like outside of capitalism. So no matter what is being provided, it's all about market incentives. It is about very short horizon of the profit and all this kind of stuff. What we need to do, we need to think about how to address it by transforming social relations of production, forgive me Marxist language, into solidarity economy at the same time.

So I think that is like very big idea that needs a lot of work. And it also kind of has to...

two things related to it. One is that solidarity economy in general and related non-exploitative economic practices should not be thought of as something you do on the side, something voluntary or whatever it is. Solidarity economy has to be a livelihood for people. This is what is very important. And our work does show it in many different ways.

And it has to be such to become like, you know, widely practiced economy in all different assets and dimensions.

And related to that is that in order to move to it, we need to produce new common sense in our society. And that new common sense would be that what we really need is solidarity economy, as opposed to thinking what we think now, what we really need is capitalism with all its limitations and all this kind of stuff. And we should say, no, this is not what we need. We need solidarity economy as a big thing.

idea that would move our societies forward. So a lot of work in this direction, obviously, including education, working with students, you know, explaining how it works. So hopefully our book makes a contribution.

Yeah, thank you for all that. I know there's so much to learn in the book. And like I think one of you said earlier, just bringing some of these places and cooperatives and organizations to life, we have so much to learn from those different norms that we might just take a second nature or we might overlook that there's so much going on that does sustain life that is not capitalist, that sort of thrives even in exploitation. So...

It's really fascinating to hear these sort of four different directions these questions are taking you in. So thank you again for being here, for talking about the book. I really enjoyed this conversation and take care. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you. And that was great. Thanks so much.