New Books: Solidarity Cities
Featuring Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Craig Borowiak, and Stephen Healy, authors of Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation, published by University of Minnesota Press. Solidarity Cities explores the diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support as alternatives to racial capitalism through case studies of Philadelphia, Worcester, MA, and New York City.
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Maliha Safri
But also I see more people activated than ever before in my life. And so in this moment, and there are a lot of people, I want to say that I'm I can hold up like three, four books on solidarity in the solidarity is a political version of love, and there's a lot of people interested in solidarity in this moment and desperate to think about how to practice it better across big differences, and I think that one of the things that we also want to really uplift is the role that communities of color are playing in constructing these post capitalist worlds in our midst, not just the role that they played today, but the roles that they have played historically in positions of leadership, particularly women of color. This circle with whom you will declare solidarity, and then no one beyond it, so I think of this moment as a particularly fertile moment for this kind of work too, because people are also thinking about how to work at the local, very local urban level.
Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. That was Maliha Safri, co-author, along with Marianna Pavlovskaya, Craig Borowiak, and Stephen Healy, of Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation, published by University of Minnesota Press. I sat down with the authors to learn more about their long-term collaborative research on solidarity economies and their book, which analyzes and maps the rich, diverse, and resilient efforts of communities to build solidarity networks in the face of pervasive disinvestment and racism in three case studies: Philadelphia, New York City, and Worcester, Massachusetts.
Craig Borowiak
Hi, I'm Craig Borowiak, Professor of Political Science at Haverford College, where I do a lot of teaching and research related to the history of political economic thought, solidarity economies, grassroots economies, and global economy.
Marianna Pavlovskaya
My name is Marianna Pavlovskaya and I am professor of geography at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center and I am an urban geographer, also critical GIS scholar. Throughout my career, studied alternative economies in many different ways, including household economies in Moscow and in New York and over the course of the last several years, focusing on solidarity economies using mapping as a tool of analysis, but also as a way to produce social reality.
Stephen Healy
I'm Stephen Healy. I am an associate professor of geography in the geography and urban studies department at Western Sydney University. And I'm also a member of the Institute for Culture and Society.
In terms of my field, I have been involved with the diverse economies, solidarity geographies for many years and have used insights from that field certainly in this project on solidarity economy, but more recently on research into what circular economies look like or might be, and I'm currently working on a nationally funded project on climate adaptation and social housing.
Maliha Safri
My name is Maliha Safri. I am Professor of Economics at Drew University in Madison, NJ. And my research focus has been on cooperatives, collectives, solidarity economies, post capitalist politics, and I have published a number of articles and recently our co-authored book.
Emily
Thank you all for joining me, from across the world – Stephen, you especially deserve some kudos for being here, since it’s only 6am in Sydney right now. Now, you’ve all been working together for quite some time. Could you talk about how this collaboration developed, and how it led to this book? What really prompted this project?
Craig Borowiak
So speaking for myself, I came to this project from sort of a higher level, I was trying to map the solidarity economy movement across borders transnationally. It's a movement that has an existence in many other countries besides the US and out of that process I came to realize that I needed to actually know more about what was taking place in my own neck of the woods is in Philadelphia, where I live. And so I started this project of mapping this solidarity economy, I'd become aware of how important mapping was as a movement tool, as a way to visualize things that that are otherwise falling underneath the radar and through that, my own mapping using a simple sort of Google map, I came into contact with Maliha Safri, our co-author, and then Marianna and Stephen, who are also doing similar kind of work, and we found that we wanted to work together. I think for me the motivation was really twofold for this project: the first was to try to make visible things that are otherwise cast as small little niches in the economy or otherwise falling under the radar. I wanted to show that the solidarity economy has a significant footprint in the communities in which we live. That's maybe for an audience or readership that doesn't know about it, or it tends to sort of discount the solidarity economy. I think the second motive for me was about addressing people within the movement. People who care about alternatives but are maybe a little bit reluctant to address some of the fault lines that cut through the movement like these alternatives take place in the in economies and in cities and urban environments that that are riven with division of race, class, ethnicity, economic poverty and so forth. And there's been a tendency, I think, to either push that under the rug or to ignore that. And I think I really wanted to use some of these mapping tools and some of this research with these co-authors and colleagues, to really confront that head-on, to make this solidarity economy worth the name solidarity by addressing some of those divisions.
Stephen Healy
I just thought I might take the liberty of adding that we've been working together for quite a long time. So for me the origin point for our research together was the 2007 US Social Forum.
And that brought together in Atlanta, progressive organizations throughout the country, including people who were interested in organizing solidarity economies. And so from that meeting in Atlanta was born the US Solidarity Economy Network, which was really modeled after movements that Craig was keeping track of around the world. So one of the early imperatives of our research was to produce a national map for the solidarity economy, and there that map was composed in dialogue with similar efforts in Italy and Brazil and France and other places that were a bit ahead of us in terms of thinking self-consciously as a movement about transforming economic relations towards cooperation. And so I think that that early effort is really what prompted us to look for funding from the US National Science Foundation for sure, but also to begin to talk about what we were doing locally that intersected with this research agenda. So I joined the faculty at a state university in Worcester, MA in 2007 and then the global financial crisis hit. And so it was really in that context that people who were living in the Main South area in Worcester, a highly policed, racialized area with a fair bit of poverty and unemployment. So there was a real interest in trying to think about what another economy might do for people who have been pushed to the margins of the dominant economy. And so that's what led to our multiyear effort under the organization Worcester Roots to really think about the power of cooperation broadly as a vehicle for transformation.
And I feel like in each of the cities that we've been working in, we've tapped into people who are right there along with us thinking about these other possibilities.
Marianna Pavlovskaya
On my end I can add that since my dissertation at Clark University, right, so my kind of focus was on studying not mainstream socioeconomic systems, but the ones that are hidden from the view, but at the same time play a fundamental role in the functioning of society and human survival and in kind of giving people meaningful lives. So my dissertation research that long time ago was on social reproduction, and what I called multiple economies of households in Moscow, whose lives during the transition from state socialism to capitalism were totally ignored because this transition was always cast as macroeconomic, systemic, clearly defined transformation, while people's experiences were totally left out of the picture.
And I knew how much struggle people had to go through, and I wanted to understand this process. And also I wanted to make those struggles visible. So I did this interview with households in Moscow and then also I went out of my way trying to visualize those economies that nobody kind of has seen before and since then my work also as a professor included working on various kinds of mapping projects with the students, including the one in 2000. It was the project when we mapped vacant lots with New York City Environmental Justice Alliance in South Bronx with youths from the area who were actually going around the neighborhoods and using the maps that we printed on a piece of paper, marking whether this particular location is a vacant lot or not, so that was important for them to mount an advocacy campaign against threats to those vacant lots being turned into commercial properties as opposed to community gardens.
So and then, you know, I met Maliha. I don't think I met you, Craig at that time. And then we started talking about solidarity economy and then thinking, oh my God, this is the way to bring all those things together. And I also wanted to say that my work on Moscow and later on was also informed by this diverse economies perspective. So this is Julie Graham and Kat Gibson, who also are graduates of Clark University, actually who kind of really influenced my thinking about the world and still do.
Emily
So maybe, for listeners who might be less familiar with the term, it would be helpful if you could define and orient what you mean by solidarity cities and solidarity economies.
Stephen Healy
Broadly speaking, solidarity economies is a term that from my perspective and I think the perspective we articulated in the book is economic activity. So, relationships of production, exchange, and consumption are also organized on a cooperative basis, so worker cooperatives would be a good example of an organization that can mobilize the principles of solidarity. I think that's part of it. But there's more to it. It's about democratic inclusion. It's about making sure that there's a kind of a commitment to sustainability in place. There are a number of markers that differentiate solidarity economy from what we might think of as the dominant or mainstream capitalist economy. I think that line can get a little bit blurry, since of course lots of people are in a position to behave ethically in economy, but for us, I think the solidarity economy is also a tie to a deliberate social movement that is trying to reorganize economic relations so, and you know, as I said in the United States, there's a body, the US Solidarity Economy Network, that's trying to organize like-minded efforts in cities and other places across the country to learn from one another about what it is to organize an economy on a cooperative basis. But there's also a global organization, and the acronym is Rupesh which is I think from Portuguese. So, it's -- Craig will have to tell you what it means -- but it basically is an International Association of Solidarity economy moves. Since they've been working closely with the United Nations, which has a special task force for the social and solidarity economy, and you know most recently, the UN said that solidarity economies are the way in which countries around the world will realize some of the ambitions of the of the sustainable development goals.
So yeah, in a sense it names practices of cooperation, but it's also tied into a social movement that's operating on a global scale that has a transformative intention.
In relation to solidarity cities, I guess for us it's sort of when we think about how people have historically made sense of solidarity economies, they've often been focused on particular sectors like the food sector or community gardens or worker cooperatives. This was our chance to kind of think about what it would mean to make them visible in space in a particular city, what are the links of cooperation across those various activities and sectors?
So the solidarity city then becomes the name that we give to something that is more than the sum of its parts. But there's a possibility for this desire for cooperation to be generalized and even to be supported by the municipality, and that's really where we end. The book was seeing how New York and Philly and Worcester have begun to recognize the significance of the solidarity economy in their own cities and begin to make it sort of the locus or resources and support more broadly.
Marianna Pavlovskaya
I just would like to add one point, and it is in general, as a geographer, you know, making place is a fundamental human activity. This is something that everybody is engaged in, from an individual to neighborhood community organizations, regions, nations, the entire globe and what we are trying to show in this book is that solidarity economy makes place differently from racial capitalism. It produces urban spaces in urban life, which is not only has the capacity to resist marginalization by racial capitalism and counter its harms, but it also allows to create life which is not based on the principles and logics of exploitation and competition, but, as Stephen just mentioned, on the logics of cooperation, inclusion, human solidarity, interacting with your neighbors and family members in a way that does not involve profit. So that was very, very important for us because we also think that in this way, solidarity economy actually transforms the city and moves us a little bit closer to the city of tomorrow. The future city that will be primarily solidarity economy based hopefully.
Craig Borowiak
If I can add one point, I think we're responding in the construction of this idea of the Solidarity City, responding to a tendency to see the modern urban cities has either the disinvested city or as the gentrified city, and we were really unsatisfied with that characterization. There's so much more possibility there's so much more abundance of communal interactions and cooperation that we're just getting ignored by those two frames. And so we were constructing or characterizing the Solidarity City as this alternative social imaginary that is both part of the past and part of the present and beyond that also part of the future. So we have this expression where we talk about the past, present and future tenses of the Solidarity City as a way to reframe that there are our urban imaginary and think about other kinds of possibilities than what are presented to us when we just think about disinvestment and gentrification.
Emily
I know this is just pure coincidence, but I’ve actually lived in all three of these cities for at least a few years, so it was really exciting to see them all placed in dialogue with one another as interconnected case studies. What was the rationale behind these selections? Did you ever consider including others?
Craig Borowiak
I think the decision to choose these cities as sites of research had multiple motivations. The obvious one is that these are cities that we know intimately. We live and or work in these spaces and we recognize that the kind of work, the kind of research that we wanted to do required an in-depth personal knowledge and networks and community ties to get access to this data. We had created the national mapping platform using mostly aggregate data or not aggregate data but sort of data from national networks. And so we had information about where all the credit unions are, and a lot of the cooperatives were. But we realized a lot of the things that we're researching are not in those network databases, and this required personal knowledge and networks and a lot of the things we're studying, including for example, community gardens.
They maybe don't want to be part of those networks, they face certain risks about with publicity and we had to build trust, and trust is not something you build from afar; trust is something you have to build in relationship with others. So this is why this research took, you know over a decade, and it's why we chose these particular cities. I think another reason for these cities is we wanted it to demonstrate proof of concept across different scales. I mean, we could have chosen three cities that are really comparable in terms of size and composition, but we're trying to make an argument about the solidarity city more generally, and it was important for us to look at cities that are small, smaller regional city like Worcester, sort of a large major city like Philadelphia and in a city like New York. And that was really important for us, and as we're moving on, you know as we're talking about this, this book and our research with people in other cities, we're finding that there's a lot of variation in other cities, not the things that we're finding, don't necessarily map on to other cities exactly, but there's enough of a of a range that we're covering that that there's we're still finding resonance that and I think that's important and we love to see more cities explored in similar ways.
Marianna Pavlovskaya
Our work is not just data. It's not mapping. It is also understanding why, because the solidarity economies have come to be, in this particular way, in urban spaces. we believe that the way they study those cities also has implications for other urban areas, not only within the United States, but also around the world. And it has to do with the fact that all cities are not shaped exclusively by racial capitalist forces, one can say, and this is what we believe. That's why we wrote this book, that cities are also shaped by human solidarity and unfortunately this part of the equation is not as clear as racial capitalist side of it. And this is not really that we think that racial capitalist side is not important. It is very important, but it's not the entire story.
Stephen Healy
I'm just reminded here of the feminist axiomatic that JK Gibson Graham talks about all the time. It is to start where you are. So you know, for me that's an ethical principle that the kind of work that we're doing about solidarity is also done in solidarity with the movement. So for me, you know, the organizations I was working with and writing about in Worcester, I was a part of it. And certainly in the context of the global financial crisis, I felt implicated in the work that I was doing. And here we are nearly two decades later, and we're still in the kinds of economic crisis that seemed to require solidaristic responses.
So for me, like if we're really, we're really demonstrating a different mode of engagement with place in an effort to both understand and transform it with others.
And you know, we could have written a book about Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles, but, you know, it would have been a different process. A and B, you know, it's probably better left to people who live there to do that work. And so, you know, I think it's really been important for us that when we publish with University of Minnesota press, we have the book for sale and paperback at a good price point but it's also online for free through their Manifold publication platform so you know it's there for others who would like to do similar kind of work.
Emily
That all makes sense, and I think this kind of multiscalar analysis is so helpful for sussing out the distinctions between different kinds and sizes of cities, but also honing in on the continuities between them. Could you share some highlights from each city, what really stood out to you about each of them?
Stephen Healy
Sure. So I think my real interlocutor in this project was an organization called Stone Soup and it was a product of Worcester Roots and Worcester Roots was a kind of social justice coalition building organizations started, in fact by three Clarkies, which seems to be a big theme here in our discussion. And they eventually acquired a building in on King Street in Worcester that was an old Funeral Home and then they transformed it into a space that was like a common area for all kinds of progressive organizations, from the ACLU to refugee rights organizations to groups that eventually became especially after the GFC, interested in cooperation as a as an alternative mode of economy.
And that organization persisted for nearly two decades trying to do solidarity economy style organizing. They survived a fire and a five-year process of rebuilding, and it was a space that was intergenerational and multiracial. And so, figuring out how to get along and to work across difference to, in other words, how to practice solidarity. It's easy when everyone is like you; it's more difficult when you're dealing with differences in age or disability or lots of other things. And yet for me, the story here is about persistence and the fact that human beings are quite capable of cooperation. We're not all selfish and self-interested; that we're that we are those things, but we're more than that. And so for me that organization or that form disappeared, but it's been replaced by a new group of committed actors who are running the space as an Afrocentric organization called Our Village. So, you know, even if things fall apart, they also persist. That would be what I learned from Worcester.
Craig Borowiak
In our book we identify several patterns in the solidarity economy in our cities. Part of that is showing the overall footprint, but another part is looking at what we call fault lines and edge zones and bulwarks. And I think for me some of the fault lines that I see in Philadelphia and some of the edge zones that we identified in Philadelphia that really stand out for me and with regard to sectors, really, the urban agricultural sector, like especially community gardens and then the cooperative sectors and they have different sort of footprint and spatial footprints and when it comes to fault lines, it was really pronounced for me, seeing the contrast between community supported agricultural pickup spots, which are, you know, CSA's are part of a the alternative food movement. And they have a geography for the pickup spots that is almost inverse to the geography of the community gardens in in the city, which suggests that there's really a sort of economic divide and also a racial divide, because Philadelphia is a highly segregated city and just sort of thinking through what that what that signifies and as well as thinking through how the low income communities of color, where community gardens are predominantly located, are full of abundant solidarity. There's a counter mapping, that a model of showing solidarity where people are accustomed to seeing of absence and lack, I think was really potent for me as something defined in Philadelphia and with regard to cooperatives.
We mapped the cooperatives in the city and I don't think we knew what patterns we would find but when we when we did it we saw this really interesting pattern that that the coops are not found in the predominantly black neighborhoods and not found in the predominantly mixed neighborhoods, and not even found in in in the densest, the white neighborhoods; and we actually found them on these edge spaces. And that was really profound thinking. What is an edge space? What does that mean? And we did some in depth work kept trying to study and it means different things in slightly different contexts, but for us it's like these edge zones are really rich spaces of intermingling, and cooperatives gravitate towards them. They emerge out of those spaces, and it suggests to me the possibility of building a solidarity city. It's about building an ecosystem. And I think that those edge spaces are cooperative ecosystems and maybe that's a place where we need to begin when we're trying to expand the solidarity city in other cities and in our own.
Maliha Safri
Craig mentioned that in each city we're looking for patterns. Why are these things where they are? How did they get there? I want to emphasize that we decided to focus on one pattern per city, but we weren't trying to say that these patterns are only in these cities, but for the sake of empirical complexity, we wanted to talk about New York City and how we saw this, what we call the bulwark pattern, where the solidarity economy allows a community to defend against a particular racial capitalist harm, force, modality, and build something else right opposed to let's say, the form of exploitation. And here we tried to look at various types of exploitation. Sometimes people think about exploitation only in terms of work, what is called direct exploitation. So, we looked at that work, worker cooperatives, and then we wanted to look at how do people build bulwarks in housing, to defend against extraction, predation in real estate and also gentrification and displacement too.
And then how do people protect against predation and extraction in finance through credit unions? So, we looked at all three of those sectors and tried to show how it was that communities of color were dominant players in all three, in housing, in worker cooperatives and in credit unions, in particular, different kinds of ways for different reasons.
And so we sought to show how it was that worker cooperatives could defend against exploitation, particularly in caring labor industries, and construct another form of working that is diametrically opposed or baked into the architecture of the cooperative.
And so, in a way, what we sought to do was invite people, because we are entirely sure that this way of thinking about defending against a harm and building something else is that obviously not just happening in New York, it's happening in all of these three cities, but it's also happening in pretty much every city that we can think of.
And I suppose in a way we end the entire book with an invitation for people to think about. How would you look for entities doing this very same work inside your cities, your communities?
Marianna Pavlovskaya
Drawing connections between the cities because as my colleagues just explained, we looked at different dynamics and different aspects of solidarity economy in each city. So we're not comparing them one to one in everything, right. But we were choosing a particular dynamic or particular aspect, particular dimension that would be best explained using the empirical material in this particular city.
And this also allowed us to look at solidarity economy in these urban areas at different scales that were are also conducive to exhibiting a particular dynamic. So initially we also compared all three cities together and there were different insights that we got from it. Just making solidarity economy in those cities that nobody has seen before. And looking at them together and seeing them as solidarity cities, we also found, for example, that the highest densities, the clusters of solidarity economy correspond to the areas that were extensively redlined in the first third of the 20th century, and this process as we know was not just ending them. The consequences of them, of those redlining practices, they are felt today in all cities and in many neighborhoods and that process served visitors in different parts of the cities on particular trajectories. So in all three cities, we found that solidarity economy actually is right there playing this bulwark role, as Maliha was just explaining, historically and also today.
Emily
Writing a book is hard enough, I don’t know how you managed to write this collectively, across multiple time zones. What was that like? How did you figure out who would write what, how did you edit and revise? Even on a practical level, how does a process like that work?
Maliha Safri
I'm sure that everybody has a lot to say about this for sure. I had always joked about how many times we wrote Chapter 3, so I tried to go back and do an honest count.
And what I found was this. We had 3.1, then 3.11. We went from 3.1 multiple times to then 3.23 all the way to 3.6. 3.6 had multiple times as well.
After that I think I got a little punchy and I said this is Chapter 3, version 500. We stuck with that notation for a while. We went from 500 to 506. Then we still went to October. We started naming it by the month. I'm giving you maybe more detail than you wanted, but all this to say that we changed hands many, many, many times.
There were important, for instance, that was an important chapter because we are trying to say some things about the relationship between racial capitalism and solidarity economies, and that itself took us a long time for us to articulate in very precise ways that all of us felt comfortable with.
And so, I really think that this was a matter of a collective writing that really prioritized shared understanding. there were definitely, let's say empirical portions where one person or two people would have taken the lead, for so there's that part of it. But then in the writing process, especially in terms of the chapters, what they actually became, I do think it's a collective process and not a lot of people engage in collective writing. And it sounds hard and perhaps it is time intensive, but it is also incredibly rich because you learn a lot from one another and I genuinely felt convinced and illuminated and persuaded not just giving in. So there's that there's a difference between those things.
Stephen Healy
I can remember when I felt like we really committed to doing this book and I was talking to you all on the phone while driving around in Delaware looking for a hotel. This was back in 2017.
I mean, so it felt like a really long process and what that meant for me as someone who's been living in Australia since 2014, is getting up early in the morning as early as 5, have weekly phone calls.
But I think for me anyways, the process of writing and rewriting, always working with somebody else as a kind of interlocutor on each of the chapters.
The end result was that as we which chapter we were working on that collective authorship translated into collective ownership and I feel as invested in the chapters on Philadelphia and New York as I am in the chapter on Worcester, and I'm sure that that's true for each of the each of the people in the group and my son's also been a big part of this process.
Emily
Listeners, since you can’t see what we’re seeing now – Stephen's son has been hovering in the background for the last few minutes and has also joined the call!
Marianna Pavlovskaya
I would like to add to it that we come from different disciplines. So Maliha, who is an economist, Craig is a political scientist. Stephen and I are human geographers, critical human geographers. But we do very different work. So writing about the same subject involved a lot of kind of negotiation of disciplinary perspectives. So, like geographers, think that this matters, Economists think that that matters. Political scientists think that matters a lot. And so for us, because it wasn't possible to embrace everything from all these different expansive disciplines, we kind of really had to boil down and crystallize the way we think about solidarity economy, solidarity cities, and then you know, while we kind of took turns on working on drafts of different chapters.
It was never like one person wrote the whole chapter and then other people didn't rewrite.
Craig Borowiak
There was a lot of growth, tremendous amount of growth through this process. Intellectual growth. I'm a better thinker, I'm a better scholar because of it. It was a very laborious process. Thank God for Google Docs, which enable us to work on things at the same time, I don't know how we could have done it if we were circulating word documents without sort of a simultaneous writing capacity but I just feel like we are all better because of it. I don't know if I'd have gone through 10 years of it again, but I feel much better because of it. I can't tell my words from the others, my co-authors words in this text anymore. We're all over the place, throughout the text.
Marianna Pavlovskaya
The project was so multifaceted and embraced so many different sides of the solidarity economy that we were researching while we were writing at the same time, so writing for us was also a way to produce research and this is what I always say about maps. Like mapping was a very important methodology that we used but understood not as just creating a map is a process during which a lot of work and research, negotiation of concepts and whatever goes into creating every single map, explaining it right, the map becomes not the end result but yet another point of conversation that brings us further and further in our research process.
Emily
Thank you all so much for sharing that! Now, I should note that we’re recording this interview in May 2025, and the speed of the news cycle certainly outpaces the production schedule of our very small editorial team here at UAR. But it’s hard not to mull over the significance or potential of your research in the face of what US politics has been like over the last several months – really, for longer than that, but this winter and spring have been particularly demoralizing. What’s your perspective on your work, on this book, in the months since it’s been published?
Stephen Healy
I just looking at the United States from 14,000 miles away, it looks like a very different country than the one that I left. It feels that once again, we're in really dark times where kind of the racial part of racial capitalism has manifested itself in really overtly white supremacist form.
Marianna was mentioning red lining. The United States has been through dark times before. Like all the credit unions that we see in New York, a lot of them came out of moments of real repression in US society. So I feel like now is the moment when solidarity economy is really going to become incredibly relevant to people's lives as a space for organizing and imagining other alternatives, but also for resisting a reality, sort of a capitalist formation desperately trying to hold itself together as the world changes around it.
I see Trump as a kind of a gasp of a system that's in decline and that there's a strong connection to be made between the Solidarity City and a city that's more accommodating to refugees or to people who have been marginalized in various ways. And you know, that link is not hypothetical, it's actual and practical. And we saw evidence of that in each of the cities we've looked at.
Maliha Safri
I just want to jump in and add, you know that there's this sort of extraordinary, also abundance of actual activity. Resistance. I understand this current moment and what exactly what Steven has said. But also I see more people activated than ever before in my life. And so in this moment, and there are a lot of people, I want to say that I'm I can hold up like three, four books on solidarity in the solidarity is a political version of love, and there's a lot of people interested in solidarity in this moment and desperate to think about how to practice it better across big differences and I think that one of the things that we also want to really uplift is the role that communities of color are playing in constructing these post capitalist worlds in our midst, not just the role that they played today, but the roles that they have played historically in positions of leadership, particularly women of color. We saw that in all of this stuff that we were looking at on the ground certainly in New York City, but in all of our cities so while things are sort of dark, I also see resistances and networks coming together, seeking out what, how to think about solidarity and expansive terms, not closed minded, and determines terms because everyone who holds on to even this language pretty much understands the impossibility of closing. Finally this circle with whom you will declare solidarity, and then no one beyond it so I think of this moment as a particularly fertile moment for this kind of work too, because people are also thinking about how to work at the local, very local urban level.
Marianna Pavlovskaya
I would like to add that using mapping was a way to make people aware about the existence of Solidarity City and in geography. Critical joy. Yes. We think of mapping not as just reflecting facts, but as creating social reality that we visualize using maps.
And maps are so important because people relate to them immediately. So once you see the place in which you live, presented in a new way, you start wondering about and we hope that people who are going to read this book and see our maps, sometimes very detailed waves of neighborhoods, like in Philadelphia, for example, they are going to establish this connection between themselves and solidarity economy around them. So solidarity economy means solidarity city is not going to be for them something that exists elsewhere and has no relevance to me. Solidarity City will be this the place where they walk every single day and the place that they can relate to and also start participating in transforming it on the basis of solidarity.
We hope that by creating through mapping, revealing the anthologies of solidarity economy, we hope that that connection between people and their place and solidarity city will be made easier and more direct and powerful.
Stephen Healy
I just wanted to say very, very quickly that it is interesting that Atlanta sort of bookends the story like that the US social form in 2007 was, for me, anyways, the beginning to the solidarity economy movement in its formal incarnation in the US. And here we are almost 20 years later. And that and, you know, we have another colleague, Boone, who went down to that conference and he just said it was the level of energy in Atlanta was incredible that the groups all around the world and kind of extending that conversation on solidarity to thinking about what? What do human beings owe to the more than human world? What does it mean to be in solidarity there? What's the role of land back, the connection with indigenous rights and refugee movements? Despite what Trump says, it's all happening.
Emily
Thank you all for sharing all of that! It was such a pleasure to learn more about your work together. Any closing thoughts?
Craig Borowiak
I'd like to just express my gratitude, obviously to my coauthors, but, especially to the communities that we worked with and in some ways, I feel like we're uplifting their stories. These are not our stories. There are their stories, and there are many stories we could tell, and they could tell. And, you know, as authors, as academic authors, It can be a challenge to write for nonacademic audience and we have done our best to make this a book that's useful for practitioners, but with a sense of gratitude that I want to end this conversation, that gratitude towards of their work and all of their stories.
Emily
My thanks to Craig Borowiak, Maliha Safri, Stephen Healy, and Marianna Pavlovskaya, co-authors of Solidarity Cities, which is available Open Access from the University of Minnesota Press. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.