Where Urban Fault Lines Run Deep, Solidarity Cities Take Root  

Contemporary debates about capitalism and its alternatives often fall into two traps: either portraying economic life as so fully saturated by (racial) capitalism that alternatives are rendered insignificant, or idealizing these alternatives to the point of overlooking racial and economic divisions within social movement spaces. The new book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation (University of Minnesota Press, January 2025) seeks to navigate both pitfalls. Drawing on detailed geographic analysis of New York City, Philadelphia and Worcester, Massachusetts, the book argues that solidarity economies — often invisible in mainstream economic narratives — permeate urban landscapes. These economies have enabled many urban communities, particularly in historically Black and Brown neighborhoods, to endure the oppression wrought by racial capitalism, including the devastating impacts of redlining. By building urban life with economic solidarity, these communities have made place differently from racial capitalist logics. In the process, they have built what we call Solidarity Cities. The book abounds with examples illustrating how people actively build these Solidarity Cities, bridging racial and class fault lines, creating spatial imaginaries and placing solidarity economies at the forefront of urban life. This adapted excerpt is taken from the book’s introduction.

Two large, painted signs sit at the entrance to the César Andreu Iglesias Community Garden, a large community garden roughly the size of a city block located in North Philadelphia. “Welcome. bienvenidos. grow share gather,” reads the first in lavender and green. Beside it, in yellow and red, a second sign declares, “este terreno no esta en venta” (this land is not for sale). A raised fist — the universal symbol of solidarity — is painted beneath the text. Together, the two signs convey complementary messages about the garden. The first conveys an openness to others, a welcoming of neighbors and visitors into the garden space and into community. The second sign declares the community’s commitment to defending garden land from market forces. The signs are a welcome, a warning, and an invocation of communal intentions.

Positioned along the racially diverse western edge of the Norris Square neighborhood in North Philadelphia, where predominantly Latinx areas transition abruptly into predominantly Black ones, the garden is a hub of intercultural solidarity and intermingling. Formed in 2012 as a collaboration between the Philly Socialists and local residents, the garden is named after the playwright, journalist, labor organizer, and Communist political activist César Iglesias. Over time, Iglesias Garden has become a multigenerational prism of low-income, Latinx, Indigenous, and Black struggles for land rights, food justice, and community belonging, both in the neighborhood and citywide.

Despite its cultural riches, the Norris Square neighborhood is also a space that powerfully exemplifies the dialectics of urban abandonment. In the 1970s, at the height of deindustrialization, unemployment and abandoned properties and factories plagued Norris Square. A key part of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican barrio, Norris Square has long been one of the lowest-income neighborhoods in the city. In the 1980s and early 1990s, media outlets branded the area as “needle park” and the “badlands,” justifying a carceral crackdown as police waged their war on drugs in the community.

Back then, a different community garden project (today part of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project) located a few blocks northeast of Iglesias Garden’s current location provided a key rallying site of resistance and cultural affirmation. Community members were continuously lost to drugs, hospitals, and prison. In the face of such forces, a group of Puerto Rican women known as Grupo Motivos successfully mobilized around community gardening as a way to repurpose abandoned land so as to drive out drug markets, make the neighborhood safer for children, and educate the community about their Latinx and Afro-Caribbean heritage while providing food and beautiful gathering spaces for gardeners and the community as a whole.

Community gardens in and around the Norris Square neighborhood provided a bulwark against drugs, violence, and policing in the past. Today, gardens in the neighborhood have become a site of communal defense against gentrification and displacement. Like many other gardens, the Iglesias Garden struggles with land tenure insecurity. In recent years, it has lost land parcels to predatory developers who, unbeknownst to the gardeners, acquired land titles through municipal auctions of tax-delinquent land called sheriff’s sales. Hundreds of other gardens face similar risks. With Iglesias Garden in the lead, the city’s urban agriculture community has rallied around these land-precarious gardens, securing wins from the city as they resist gentrifying pressures that would push out the very communities that have tended the land and stabilized neighborhoods in the first place.

Taken together, the stories of the Iglesias Garden and other North Philadelphian gardens destabilize what can often seem like a template of uneven urban development under racial capitalism that produces polarized urban space in many U.S. cities and cities around the world. Within this space, we find areas catering to the economic and cultural elite. The world’s wealth is increasingly concentrated in their hands. These are parts of the city where life is good; where climate-controlled corporate offices alternate with luxury condominiums, and where boutique coffee shops seem to occupy every other corner, intermixed with upscale restaurants, theaters, and art galleries. Within the same cities, we find neighborhoods where poverty affects high proportions of residents, most often people of color, who struggle to meet their daily needs. A product of decades of disinvestment and organized abandonment, such neighborhoods are frequently defined by what they lack—e.g., jobs, decent housing, good schools, finance, safety, green space, fresh produce—and their struggles with poverty, police violence, and crime. Between these paired logics of what might be familiar to readers as the Gentrified City and the Disinvested City, North Philadelphia’s community gardens reveal a third dimension of city life that organizes urban space in a different way, one rooted in the ethics of economic cooperation, inclusion, mutuality, and democracy and in community struggles for racial and economic justice. We call this third dimension the “Solidarity City.”

We introduce the idea of the Solidarity City to evoke an alternative spatial imaginary highlighting solidarity relations as definitional features of urban life. In general terms, solidarity names a sense of collective responsibility and shared purpose that connects an individual to a group or community. To be in solidarity entails both feeling a sense of common purpose with others and being willing to make sacrifices. For us, the Solidarity City names something that exists in the present (a diverse economy of cooperation) and can be found in the past (though traveling under other names). It also names an aspirational horizon for realizing more solidarist urban futures. The Solidarity City is thus a concept that harbors past, present, and future tenses. It also extends across multiple social domains and scales of urban life: from caring for others, volunteering, and single community projects to initiatives undertaken at the level of the neighborhood or of the entire city.

Although we have opened with a story of gardens set in Philadelphia, Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation deals with far more than urban agriculture in one city. It examines in depth the different aspects of solidarity economies in three U.S. urban areas: New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester, Massachusetts, our long-term research sites. But the truth is that elements of the Solidarity City exist the world over, in cities both small and large, from Cochabamba in Bolivia, to Cape Town in South Africa.

The interest in solidarity-based alternatives to capitalism has indeed been fast growing. In our own experiences as community-engaged researchers, we have witnessed remarkable grassroots ingenuity as communities innovate with economic initiatives that prioritize ethical considerations over profit maximization and inclusive well-being over individual wealth. Over the past decade, experiments with community gardens, cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, community finance, and the like have proliferated, as has interest in economic democracy (or nonhierarchical workplaces) more generally.

Some of these practices and initiatives are older, while others have developed more recently in response to the cascade of economic, ecological, and geopolitical crises sweeping the world — crises that have left populations feeling more economically precarious, more vulnerable to climate emergency, more skeptical about capitalist institutions, and more open to alternatives. New or old, many tap into long cross-cultural traditions of mutual aid that have sustained communities in the face of many forms of systemic economic, racial, gender, and heteronormative oppression.

As important as such initiatives are for many communities, they nevertheless typically fall out of mainstream studies of the economy, which focus instead on for-profit enterprises, capitalist markets, and state budgets. Moreover, to the extent that such initiatives are studied, they have generally been treated in isolation from one another. Thus, consumer cooperatives are studied independently from worker cooperatives, which are studied separately from community gardens, credit unions, and so forth. This piecemeal approach reinforces what J. K. Gibson-Graham term a capitalocentric worldview, which a priori asserts capitalism as the dominant form of economy, while alternatives are presumed to occupy only small niches in society and are accordingly pushed to the periphery, to the extent they are acknowledged at all. For those looking for a way beyond capitalism, possibilities become difficult to imagine under such a worldview.

We counteract these limiting habits of thought by exploring the geographies that emerge when diverse initiatives are brought out of their silos and conceived together as facets of a shared solidarity economy capable of transforming cities and ways of urban living.

What if we could learn to see the examples all around us not as scattered exceptions but as constitutive elements of the vital networks of human solidarity that support urban life? What if, amid the towering trees of capitalist structures that seem to dominate our horizons, we could sense an expanding solidarity ecosystem growing in the understory and composing the Solidarity City?

We would see a robust life in the forest—many other trees, as well as bushes, ferns, mushrooms, etc.—that might be considered noncapitalist forms nurtured by the underground root systems and the fungi symbiotically connecting trees. Visible above ground are the more formally organized parts of the Solidarity City — housing and worker cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens, and more.

Below ground, the undercurrents of solidarity spread through the soil, nurturing informal economies and social practices, while sustaining what lies above through the continual extension of goodwill, reciprocity, and care. Learning to see the solidarity already operating within economies is a crucial step toward envisioning what solidarity cities have been and might become.

At the same time as our research elevates aspirational elements of the solidarity economy, we are also wary of certain forms of advocacy that cast noncapitalist alternatives in an optimistic glow while ignoring where and when they fall short of movement ideals. Working within activist spaces has sensitized us to the adversity that grassroots initiatives often face when familiar forms of exclusion and marginalization — along lines of race, poverty, gender, sexuality, ability, and other differences — feature in movement spaces as they do in broader society. For proponents striving to establish the credibility of progressive initiatives, choosing to highlight challenges can feel counterproductive, especially when there is a prevailing skepticism about the viability of economic alternatives. But not acknowledging challenges is also a problem.

In these lights, three central contentions organize our thinking. Our first contention is that the scale of the solidarity economy is bigger than commonly thought (see Map 1).

Second, we argue that many of the race and income divisions that underlie modern urban life in the United States are also manifest within the geographies of the solidarity economy.

Third, following from this observation, we contend that solidarity economy initiatives and the movement at large, while being affected by these racial and economic divisions, themselves possess many of the normative and practical resources for confronting and ultimately transforming these fractured landscapes. And indeed, the cities we study provide abundant examples of noncapitalist initiatives working toward racial and economic justice by means of trial and error, experimentation, failure, setback, and persistence. These offer a practical toolbox of beautiful experiments capable of spreading justice rather than toxicity from one place to the next.