Circuits of Recognition
Field-Building and the Politics of Community Wealth
Ahmed Mori (Johns Hopkins University/Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab, University of Miami)
Over the past two decades, community wealth building (CWB) has emerged as an anti-neoliberal development paradigm: democratize control over land, labor, and capital so that wealth is (re)produced in place rather than extracted. Formulated and popularized by The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) through its work in Cleveland and later adopted in cities around the world like Preston (UK), the model reorients economic development around alternative infrastructure like cooperatives, community land trusts, and mission-aligned anchor institutions. In practice, CWB takes the form of worker cooperatives, community-owned real estate, anchor procurement strategies, and forms of community ownership and community governance of resources, such as municipal ownership of utilities, and public banking (Guinan and O’Neill 2019; Howard and O’Neill 2018). Many of the CWB model’s theoretical underpinnings derive from TDC co-founder Gar Alperovitz’s efforts to envision a “pluralist commonwealth,” which advocates for clusters of hyperlocal, ecologically minded, and cooperatively owned businesses, run by other community-owned enterprises or community-governed nonprofits (Alperovitz 2017; Alperovitz and Dubb 2013).
Despite clear invocations to the model’s broader potential for systemic change (Guinan and O’Neill 2019), it is still too easy among practitioners to frame CWB in terms of projects – cooperatives launched, funds created, procurement pipelines established – rather than the fields of relationships, rules, and legitimacy that make such projects viable and transformative. It becomes tempting to measure transformation in deliverables, without systematizing the work it takes to reorganize power relations and paradigms. Such a project-level view risks reproducing the very technocratic logic of urban development it seeks to transcend (Peck and Theodore 2015).
CWB’s transformational horizon depends on field-building and, more specifically, recognition in the field: the evolving configurations of actors, rules, and relations that decide who counts as a credible developer and what counts as legitimate development. I treat community ownership (CO) — limited-equity housing co-ops, community land trusts, and related forms — as a laboratory for CWB. Drawing on an illustrative case drawing on 33 semi-structured, in-depth interviews and field notes with Chicago housing cooperative practitioners, city staff, lenders, and technical intermediaries, I argue that CO reorganizes circuits of recognition among community, finance, and the state.
The lesson for CWB is that durable transformation follows not just from multiplying CO projects but also from rewiring recognition infrastructures so that stewardship, permanence, and collective control become administratively and financially legible to capital and the state. In sum, community ownership, and CWB more broadly, can be understood as a relational project that reorganizes local economies by constructing new alliances, governance arrangements, and grammars of legitimacy around ownership and value.
From Institutional Design to Circuits of Recognition
Community wealth building is a means of implementing economic democracy at municipal scales, centering ownership and control over capital and economic assets among workers and communities. CWB aspires to remake urban political economies through local ownership, patient finance, and democratic governance. An approach that in practice demonstrates both predistributive and redistributive effects, CWB aims to shift decision-making power over investment away from distant owners and toward residents and workers.
Yet because CWB emphasizes concrete ownership models, it is tempting to treat it as a problem of institutional design: create new cooperatives, land trusts, or public ownership vehicles and connect them to local markets. From this view, change is assumed to follow once democratic ownership is embedded in procurement systems, lending programs, or development incentives.
This focus on design — even when redistributive — cannot explain why some efforts cohere into durable ecosystems while others struggle or disappear. It matters less whether an institutional alternative is democratic by design than whether it reconfigures the field of actors, norms, and power relations that define local economic development (Burawoy 2020; Fraser 2022). Across the U.S., community ownership models like land trusts or cooperatives produce very different outcomes depending on local context (Armeni and Lyon 2021; Beesing and Weber 2023; Louie 2016; DeFilippis 2004). Legal form and governance structure matter, but they do not determine whether these models become durable or transformative.
The missing piece is recognition. Alternative ownership models must be seen as credible, fundable, and development-worthy within systems that were built for conventional real estate and finance. Community ownership succeeds when community legitimacy can be converted into financing, policy support, and institutional acceptance.
At the community level, recognition involves trust, belonging, and shared commitments to permanence and care. At the institutional level, it involves being seen as competent, reliable, and compliant with professional norms. At the structural level, it involves access to the rules and programs that determine who can participate in economic life on equal footing (Honneth 1995; Fraser 1995; 2000). But note that recognition also works in exclusionary ways. Long-standing hierarchies often persist because they are treated as natural or inevitable, making alternative actors and models harder to see, support, or take seriously (Bourdieu 1990a; Parvez 2022).
Taken together, this means that community ownership cannot rely on moral appeals for respect and dignity alone. It must build and institutionalize new circuits of recognition: pathways through which community legitimacy is translated into financial credibility and administrative acceptance. These circuits shape who counts as a competent economic actor and what counts as “real” development (Bourdieu 1990a; Piroddi 2022). Community ownership becomes transformative by changing how legitimacy itself is produced and circulated.
Understanding this process requires looking beyond individual projects to the broader environments in which development decisions are made. Local development operates as a structured field in which community groups, financiers, policymakers, and intermediaries compete to define what is normal, credible, and possible (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). These struggles are not neutral. They reflect power differences and determine whose models are supported, whose risks are tolerated, and whose work remains invisible.
Recognition plays a central role in sustaining these power dynamics. Dominant development models persist not only because they are enforced, but because they come to be taken for granted as hegemonic (Gramsci 1971; Jessop 1997). In practice, this agreement is expressed through routine mechanisms—loan underwriting standards, program guidelines, regulatory approvals—that quietly determine which forms of ownership are legitimate and which remain marginal. Development fields change when these routines change, often through political pressure, experimentation, and shifting alliances. To transform a field, then, is to rewire the infrastructures through which recognition circulates.[2]
Seen this way, circuits of recognition function much like flows of capital. Moral recognition is generated within communities through practices of belonging, care, and resistance to displacement. Technical recognition is conferred through financial and professional languages of risk, reserves, governance, and compliance. Administrative recognition flows through state mechanisms such as funding programs, procurement rules, and regulatory approvals that determine which ownership forms align with official development goals. Transformative change depends on whether community-based claims can move through these systems and reshape their criteria, rather than being filtered out by them. When this redirection succeeds, community ownership becomes a recognized mode of development rather than an exception to it.[3]
Civil society intermediaries — foundations, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), technical assistance providers, and cooperative developers — play a central role in this process. They broker recognition by translating community moral authority into administratively and financially legible terms. This work is double-edged. On one hand, it enables community ownership to circulate across domains, making it intelligible to bankers, policymakers, and regulators. On the other, this work risks reproducing dominant norms — such as efficiency, fiscal discipline, and growth — that community ownership, and CWB more broadly, seek to challenge (Laville 2023). Field-building, therefore, depends on intermediaries who can translate without erasing, sustaining the social and political meaning of community ownership while moving it through the institutional machinery of the state and the market.
For this reason, field-building is more than coordination. It is a political practice centered on the power to decide who and what can be seen as credible economic actors and activity. Every policy pilot, new legal template, and meeting with a lender is a small act of redefinition within a larger contest over legitimacy. When these infrastructures shift, so too do the meanings attached to development itself. Development can now mean preservation, stability can supplant growth, and capital can now be judged by its social utility rather than its rate of return. When cooperatives, CDFIs, and legal intermediaries succeed in making stewardship, permanence, and solidarity legible to capital and the state, they do more than implement new projects. They begin to reshape the “moral grammar” of development itself.
In the case that follows, these dynamics appear in concrete terms. Moral recognition emerges through community-facing practices of belonging and anti-displacement. Technical recognition takes shape in lender-facing budgets, reserve requirements, and share loan products. Administrative recognition appears when city programs or RFPs create formal containers that admit cooperative ownership. Tracing how recognition moves across these domains clarifies how community ownership shifts from experimentation to field transformation and why, in many places, that shift remains incomplete.
From Recognition in Theory to Recognition in Practice: Chicago’s New Generation Housing Co-ops
The argument so far has treated community wealth building as a struggle over recognition, over who counts as a legitimate economic actor, what forms of ownership are deemed fundable, and which practices of stewardship and collective governance can move through finance and the state without being disqualified. These dynamics are often difficult to observe once a field has stabilized. In mature ecosystems, recognition is embedded in standardized financial products, rules, routines, and relations that conceal the labor and politics that produced them.
Chicago’s new-generation housing cooperatives offer a rare opportunity to see recognition being built in real time. Unlike cities with long-standing cooperative infrastructures—such as New York, where organizations like the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) provide standardized technical assistance and institutional memory—Chicago’s housing co-op ecosystem remains unsettled and improvisational. Recognition here is still largely person-bound, carried by individual practitioners, organizers, and intermediaries rather than codified in widely shared rules or products. Precisely because the field is still in formation, the case makes visible the work required to translate community legitimacy into financial and administrative credibility.
Chicago has experienced a surge of activity under the banner of “community ownership” since the late 2010s, including community land trusts, commercial community investment vehicles, and housing cooperatives. A handful of these new-generation housing cooperatives — Logan Square Cooperative (LSC), Pilsen Housing Cooperative (PiHCO), and La Villita Cooperative (LVC) — provides a focused lens on how recognition circulates, stalls, and occasionally consolidates. Unlike legacy HUD-era cooperatives, which operate through federally scripted financing, these co-ops emerged from anti-displacement struggles and mutualist aspirations in neighborhoods facing intense real estate pressure. Beyond financial survival, their central challenge has been institutional visibility – the effort to become recognizable as legitimate organizations within a development system oriented toward transactional value.
Based on 33 in-depth interviews with community ownership practitioners and ecosystem actors, I argue that Chicago is analytically useful because recognition there is still being shaped and claimed from below. Practices are improvisational, person-bound, and only partially inscribed in rules. The case helps reveal how field-building is a political practice of redefining what, and who, counts in the urban economy. Seeing how recognition is built clarifies what community ownership must do to become field-transforming.
Co-ops as Organizations, Not Just Projects
At their most pragmatic, co-ops appear as discrete projects to funders and policymakers, e.g., acquisitions closed, units preserved, and/or dollars deployed, because finance and policy frequently measure worth in transactional terms. Yet co-ops function primarily as organizations by also building community, stewarding property, training members, and sustaining collective governance. Tenant engagement, property maintenance, board training, and conflict mediation are forms of labor that infrequently register as value. This is so ingrained that even co-ops themselves sometimes downplay the effort. As one founding board member of one co-op admitted, “We didn’t realize how much work it was going to be – maintenance, on-call, all these pieces.”
Because they are resourced as projects rather than as organizations, co-ops must translate themselves into legible categories or risk invisibility. They improvise financial and legal workarounds to fit systems that cannot see them, converting moral and relational capital into the procedural forms institutions require. They adapt their structures, budgets, and narratives to fit systems that were not designed to see them, converting moral commitments to permanence and collective control into procedural forms that lenders, funders, and regulators require.
Under these conditions, launch strategies become institutional performances of credibility. Adaptive ownership structures, patchwork capital stacks, and intensive translation between the priorities of communities and institutions are ways of demonstrating that cooperative ownership can meet institutional expectations without abandoning community priorities. These practices move recognition between domains, allowing co-ops to remain accountable to their communities while becoming legible to finance and the state.
The Repertoires that Make Community Ownership Legible
Three distinctive repertoires redefine what development recognizes as real work. By insisting—often implicitly—that stewardship, governance, and collective care are forms of value, co-ops challenge a development system that treats ownership as a transaction rather than a responsibility.
Co-ops adapt and iterate on models in response to the search for resources, i.e., making co-ops legible to funders, lenders, and other key actors, and attempting to do so without losing the trust of their communities and the co-ops’ self-determination. This dynamic of adaptive model design enablesco-ops to speak multiple institutional languages. PiHCO’s scattered-site model, for instance, combines elements of a land trust with a cooperative structure. Each building has its own member-led decision-making, while all properties are connected under one co-op with a board that includes both residents and non-residents. This setup gives members real control on the ground while also meeting the expectations of lenders and other institutional partners. Adaptive design then translates moral recognition — community priorities of permanence — into technical recognition, or lender-recognizable governance and operations.
Patchwork financing stitches together grants, CDFI loans, seller financing, and personal bridge capital, often turning social capital into financial traction. “Sometimes the funds that emerge can’t support the need,” admitted one Chicago Community Loan Fund staffer, “but you make them work together.” This improvised patchwork — akin to what Claude Levi-Strauss (1962) called “bricolage” — is necessary because standardized financial products for co-ops are difficult to come by. And it’s important because co-ops are trying to create lasting community stability with temporary or fragile tools — a built-in tension between mission and means. Patchwork financing, such as the stack of grants, CDFI loans, and personal bridge funds at LVC, converts moral recognition into financial recognition, that is, relationship capital into bankable capital stacks.
The labor of translators — individuals attached to each project who translate between community goals and institutional demands — shows how co-opstranslate between moral and technical logics. Overburdened translators spend countless unpaid hours recruiting and training members, rewriting budgets, educating lenders, and even providing peer mentorship to younger cooperative projects. Their emotional and administrative labor keeps the field coherent and moves projects into eligible policy categories, even as institutions under-resource it.
Between Community and Institutional Legitimacy
More broadly, Chicago’s new generation housing co-ops reveal a community ownership ecosystem that is still taking shape rather than fully institutionalized. Unlike older HUD-era cooperatives, which operate within established federal financing and support structures, these co-ops lack a stable institutional backbone. As a result, these co-ops are entrepreneurial and resourceful, relying on experimentation, improvisation, and relationship-building to survive. When any one of these co-ops falters or exits, the fragile network that supports other current and future co-ops weakens as well. Our data show that these organizations play an outsized role in holding the ecosystem together, connecting otherwise disparate groups, increasing the speed and ease of collaboration, and generating influence and credibility. Formal intermediary organizations exist but are not yet mature, and as such, are only connected indirectly through co-op projects.
In practice, Chicago’s housing co-ops must navigate two different kinds of legitimacy at the same time. Community legitimacy is derived from place, mission, and people. For instance, PiHCO’s founding ethos—“Stay in Pilsen”—similarly reflects a place-based commitment to community continuity. Meanwhile, institutional legitimacy is earned through procedural markers such as incorporation, loan readiness, governance training, and participation in city programs. These institutional requirements often move faster than community-based organizing processes, forcing co-ops to accelerate their formalization to access resources. As one La Villita organizer explained, “We probably would still be in the visioning stage. All of a sudden, we’re now an organization.” Co-ops must constantly translate between these two logics, remaining accountable to their communites while meeting the expectations of lenders, funders, and public agencies.
Here, the city enters the picture. Recognition from the City of Chicago has been uneven but highly consequential. Through its $15 million Community Wealth Building pilot, funded by federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds distributed as economic relief stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing and Office of Equity and Racial Justice began to formally engage with community ownership models. As one official put it, “We adapted infrastructure to fund those models more formally — $3.5 million to underwrite cooperatives and land trusts.” Another explained that city involvement “can push risk-averse funders to take a risk.”
Rather than fully absorbing co-ops into standard development programs or leaving them unsupported, the city played a middle role. It piloted new funding mechanisms, paused programs to gather feedback, revised share loan designs in collaboration with community partners, and invested in legal clinics, incubators, and intermediaries. These actions expanded what the city could “see” as legitimate development while reducing perceived risk for private lenders. In practical terms, the city’s involvement signaled that cooperative projects were underwriteable. Over time, these pilots and revisions began to generate reusable templates rather than one-off exceptions, allowing community ownership to move from special accommodation toward recognized precedent.
Field Dynamics and the Politics of Recognition
Recognition among Chicago’s housing co-op space remains uneven and tied to specific people rather than stable networks. Some co-ops gain a foothold with lenders or city agencies while others may remain invisible. But collectively, these projects are beginning to shift what is legitimate development in the city. They compel finance, philanthropy, and government to consider criteria such as permanence, stability, and collective care, alongside, or even in place of, asset appreciation and scale. Closed loans, acquired buildings, and preserved units make co-ops legible to finance. ember education, governance training, and cultural stewardship make them visible to their communities. The challenge is that often the first kind of visibility is more likely to be funded than the second.
Because of this constant balancing act, co-ops are doing more than just building housing. They are building a field and slowly reshaping the local development landscape. Each adaptive model design, each unconventional capital stack, and each city pilot creates a small precedent that makes community ownership easier to acknowledge, fund, and repeat. These changes rarely happen all at once. Instead, they accumulate through everyday work, like budget negotiations, policy pilots, and community meetings, that gradually expand what counts as legitimate development and who is authorized to carry it out. This is resistance, only it is often fought in spreadsheets, RFPs, and community meetings.
The Chicago case highlights three practical lessons about how this shift happens:
First, change takes hold when exceptions become standard practice. Field transformation occurs when community ownership’s requirements and practices are written into underwriting criteria, program guidelines, and eligibility rules. The City’s cooperative/CLT underwriting pool formalized eligibility and documentation standards, turning one-off accommodations into reusable frameworks. Where Chicago’s co-ops have won, it is because practices (such as adaptive design, patchwork finance, mediation) were inscribed as lender expectations and city program rules rather than remaining informal workarounds.
Second, recognition initially depends on people but lasts only when it becomes portable. In Chicago, much of the work of making community ownership legible has relied on individual mediators who carry relationships, explain models, and troubleshoot problems across institutions. This “people-infrastructure,” while fragile, is essential early on. Durable transformation depends on embedding recognition in tools that others can use without relying on the same individuals to broker every deal. The city’s revisions to share loan designs and its acceptance of PiHCO’s scattered-site model suggest how recognition can begin to move independently of its original champions.
Lastly, recognition politics shows the potential to displace neoliberal “growth” logics with a moral code of responsibility, centering stewardship, permanence, and care as a new common sense of legitimate development. This shift can broaden inclusion, but it does not automatically produce redistribution. Unless field-building is intentionally designed to reach Black-, brown-, and working class-led groups – and linked to material supports such as public land transfer or dedicated cooperative finance—new standards risk reproducing inequality under a more inclusive label. The political stakes of CWB thus lie in deciding whose priorities are written into the templates that guide knowable, fundable development, because that is where hegemony is either reproduced as “inclusive responsibility” or bent toward democratic control.
From Community Projects to Field Consciousness
Viewing CWB through the lens of field-building clarifies both its promise and its limits. Transformation does not result from multiplying projects but from reorganizing the infrastructure of recognitionthat binds them. Practitioners often describe their work in infrastructural terms — ecosystems, pipelines, scaffolds — yet do not always stop to analyze the power dynamics embedded in those infrastructures. Politicizing field-building makes these dynamics explicit.
For practitioners, the implication is to cultivate field consciousness. This underscores an awareness that every project is embedded in, and helps reproduce, a wider configuration of power and meaning. Cooperative developers, funders, and policymakers alike act as field strategists whether they are conscious of it or not. Decisions about language, metrics, and partnerships determine whether the field stabilizes as an affirmative technocracy or transforms into a wellspring for transformation.
For scholars, treating CWB as a field-building process bridges the gap between micro-level institutional analyses and macro-level political economy. It repositions community development as a site where neoliberal governance can be reproduced through the rhetoric of inclusion or rearticulated through collective ownership and democratic control. In this sense, CWB is a contemporary form of what Karl Polanyi (1944) called the double movement – a social response to disembedded markets – but one mediated through civil society infrastructures rather than states or mass parties.
The challenge, then, is not only to proliferate cooperative and other community-owned institutions but to build the fields capable of sustaining them. This requires investment in intermediaries as political actors, long-term funding for stewardship rather than transactions, and critical reflexivity about how legitimacy is produced. Without such attention to field dynamics, CWB and other similar paradigms risk becoming yet another iteration of “inclusive growth.”
Community wealth building is rightfully celebrated for its pragmatic radicalism, the ability to anchor alternative ownership within the institutions of everyday life. But if we center pragmatism without politics, we risk yielding accommodation. To fulfill its transformative promise, CWB must be understood not as a discrete model, but as a sustained struggle to reorganize the social, financial, and ideological infrastructures of urban development.
The illustrative case of cooperatives in Chicago reveals that transformation occurs not when projects proliferate or scale, but when the meaning of ownership, risk, and value shifts across institutions. Community wealth, in this sense, is not an outcome of model-based successes but of relational processes: the collective construction of a field in which community control becomes common sense. To build community wealth, then, is to build the field capable of recognizing it.
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Notes
[1] I want to thank the interviewees that lent their time and energy to our project, the Community Ownership Learning and Action Lab (COLA Lab), based at the University of Miami’s School of Education and Human Development. I want to also thank my partners in this work, De’Sean Weber, Gretchen Beesing, Dr. Scotney Evans, Carolina Fernandez, and Deborah Perez.
[2] In Fligstein and McAdam’s (2012) account, Not all fields are long-standing. New fields can emerge, often on the interstices of the old, although they may take years or even decades. Field “projects” convert to fully formed fields if a relatively fixed set of actors mobilize to create new lines of interactions with other actors, arrive at a shared understanding of what is at stake in the field and its rules, and internal governance units emerge to maintain order in the field.
[3] This is not to say that recognition politics are linear. Once new forms of ownership gain technical and administrative standing, recognition itself must be reproduced through ongoing moral and professional performance. Community ownership fields evolve through cycles of recognition, e.g., formation, codification, and reproduction. Recognition is never secured once and for all. It must be continually enacted and defended across moral, financial, and bureaucratic domains.
Ahmed Mori is a PhD candidate in sociology at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Community Ownership Learning and Action Lab at the University of Miami. Grounded in experience with worker and community ownership, he researches how economic and extra-economic institutions and organizations impact cooperativism. Ahmed earned a JD from Columbia Law School and an MA in Political Science from Columbia University.