Putting Solidarity Economy on the Map

The Journal of Design Strategies Cooperative Cities Vol. 9, No. 1 | Fall 2017 VOL. 9, NO. 1 | FALL 2017 COOPERATIVE CITIES EDITORIAL STAFF The Journal of Design Strategies is published by The New School in association with the School of Design GUEST EDITORS Strategies at Parsons School of Design. Miodrag Mitrašinovic´and Gabriela Rendón The Stephan Weiss Lecture Series and Journal of EXECUTIVE EDITOR Design Strategies are made possible by an endowment Matthew Robb established by The Karan-Weiss Foundation, Donna Karan, Gabrielle Karan, Corey Weiss, and Lisa Weiss. GRAPHIC DESIGN HvADesign PARSONS Henk van Assen 2 West 13th Street, 9th floor Igor Korenfeld New York, NY 10011 Meghan Lynch Parsons focuses on creating engaged citizens and outstanding artists, designers, scholars, and business leaders through a design-based professional and liberal arts education. Parsons students learn to rise to the challenges of living, working, and creative decision-making in a world where human experience is increasingly designed. The school embraces curricular innovation, pioneering uses of technology, collaborative methods, and global perspectives on the future of design. © The New School 2017. All rights reserved. ISSN: 1935-0112. ISSN: 1935-0120 (online).  TABLE OF CONTENTS 3 LETTER FROM THE DEAN 4 STEPHAN WEISS LECTURE SERIES 5 LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Miodrag Mitrašinovic´ and Gabriela Rendón 18 Black Women, Cooperatives, and Community Jessica Gordon Nembhard 33 Commoning The City: From Survival to Resistance and Reclamation Silvia Federici 38 A Feminine Reinvention of the Commons Doina Petrescu 52 We Stay in San Roque! Fighting for the Right to the Territory in a Popular Market in the City of Quito, Ecuador Ana Rodríguez 62 Working Together: Toward Imagined Cooperation in Resistance Elke Krasny 71 Putting the Solidarity Economy on the Map Maliha Safri, Stephen Healy, Craig Borowiak, and Marianna Pavlovskaya 84 Building A Neighborhood Cooperative: Interview with Jeanne van Heeswijk Gabriela Rendón 108 CONTRIBUTORS PUTTING THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY ON THE MAP Maliha Safri, Stephen Healy, Craig Borowiak, and Marianna Pavlovskaya MAPPING ECONOMIES Over the past 20 years, the term “solidarity economy” (SE) has come to refer to eco- 1 See Duncan Fuller, Andrew E. G. Jonas, and nomic activities that seek to prioritize “people and planet,” as opposed to private Roger Lee, eds., Interrogating profit maximization over all else. The organizations, enterprises, and practices Alterity: Alternative Economic comprising the solidarity economy tend to be collectively and democratically run and Political Spaces (London: Ashgate, 2010). for the benefit of their members. While the activities associated with the solidarity economy do not preclude turning a profit (or generating surplus), nor do they necessarily require disengaging from market exchange, they do usually exhibit a substantial alignment with ethical principles of social equity and solidarity, environmental sustainability, and pluralist democracy. Put most simply, there is something we could characterize as non-capitalist about these organizations.1 The table in Figure 1 represents examples of typical SE organizational forms in the contexts of production, consumption, distribution and exchange, finance, and governance (see Figure 1). In many parts of the world, the SE has significant impacts on local and regional economies. However, these impacts have been largely unrecognized by policymakers and community members alike, since people are generally unfamiliar with the SE concept—and in some places are unaccustomed to seeing solidarity-based provisioning as economic activity at all. For example, SE initiatives are altering local economic landscapes in the United States (as elsewhere), yet they typically fall outside of mainstream studies of the economy, which tend to focus instead on federal and state budgets, for-profit capitalist enterprises, and the market economy. In the U.S. specifically, relatively little empirical research has been done to evaluate the PU T T IN G T HE S O LIDA RI T Y ECO N O MY O N T HE M A P 71 PRODUCTION CONSUMPTION DISTRIBUTION/ EXCHANGE FINANCE GOVERNANCE • Worker cooperatives • • Producer cooperatives Buying clubs Community development credit unions Participatory budgeting • • Volunteer collectives • • • • • Credit unions • • • Collective management of community resources • Community gardens • • Affordable housing cooperatives • Collectives of self-employed • Community land trusts Solidarity economy support organizations/ networks • • Unpaid care work Consumer cooperatives Co-housing Intentional communities Fair trade networks Community supported agriculture/ fisheries • Alternative currencies • • • Barter networks Free-cycle networks Time banks • Peer Lending Babysitting/ childcare clubs FIGURE 1: Solidarity Economy Typology. 2 For a review of some recent mapping projects, see contribution of the SE to local economies. Our research deploys mixed methods at different scales to address and remediate this gap in our understanding. Maliha Safri, “The Politics of Mapping Solidarity Economies and Diverse Economies in Brazil and the Northeastern United States,” in Gerda Roelvink, ed., Making Other Worlds Possible: In recent years, practitioners and researchers of the solidarity economy have shown a great interest in the idea of “mapping.”2 One impetus for the new focus has come from a growing appreciation of mapping as a creative activity, as opposed to being a merely passive means for reflecting a preexistent reality. Geographic scholarship Performing Diverse Economies in particular has come to investigate the ontological power of mapping—that (Minneapolis: University is, the ways maps help to make specific human landscapes real by making them of Minnesota Press, 2015), 296–321; Craig Borowiak, “Mapping Social and Solidarity Economy: the Local and Translocal Evolution of a visible.3 Not being indicated within the mapped territory leads to conceptual obscurity and marginalization (besides the SE, examples include the invisibility, hence theoretical neglect, of the informal economy, domestic work, or indigenous Concept,” in P. Ngai, B. H. Ku, knowledge), whereas being on the map requires articulation in theory, policy, and H. Yan and A. Koo, eds., Social practice. As a consequence, solidarity economy practitioners and scholars around Economy in China and the World (New York: Routledge, the world are turning to mapping as a way to help constitute this economy, making 2015), 17–40. it visible and including it in our social imaginary. In our work, too, we seek to put 3 the solidarity economy of the U.S. “on the map,” constructing it ontologically and Marianna Pavlovskaya, “Theorizing with GIS: A tool for critical geographies?” opening up a terrain for theoretical examination and political action. Environment and Planning Vol. 38, no. 11 (2006): 2003–2020. Here, we report preliminary results of our National Science Foundation-funded 4 research projects in New York City, Philadelphia, Worcester, Massachusetts, rural NSF awards BCS 1339748 (PI Safri), BCS 1339846 (PI Healy), BCS 1339974 (PI Western Massachusetts, and nationally.4 In combination with other research Borowiak), BCS 1340030 (PI methods, mapping and spatial analysis can be used to reveal geographic patterns Pavlovskaya). in the solidarity economy. By identifying patterns in cities marked by race, income, 72 T HE JOURN A L OF DE SI G N S T R AT EG IE S Solidarity economy practitioners and scholars around the world are turning to mapping as a way to help make it visible and include it in our social imaginary. gender, and class divisions, we can then examine the economic and social relations that have shaped the geographies of the economic arrangements. Another of our goals has been to assess the regional economic impact of nonprofit SE entities. Finally, we have created and begun to populate an internet-based open access platform including an interactive mapping tool, thus establishing a repository of information for researchers and educators and contributing to the SE’s growing visibility and consolidation. To gain access to the diverse solidarity economy communities in New York, Philadelphia, and Worcester, we partnered with community-based organizations and networks working within these communities. Our participatory methodological approach transformed the composition of our research questions and accordingly shaped the results we obtained. In the remainder of this report, we concentrate on one interesting outcome from our nationwide study, as well as on a few preliminary place-based findings. RESEARCHING SOLIDARITY ECONOMIES IN NEW YORK CITY, PHILADELPHIA, AND WORCESTER, MASS: MULTIPLE SITES, MULTIPLE METHODS Our research includes several different components. First, as noted, we are creating a single, national-level spatial database of SE initiatives that can help researchers understand factors including the extent, composition, and geographic distribution of these initiatives in different parts of the country. This database will be used to contextualize our in-depth cases and to identify macro-level contours of the SE across the U.S. Second, we are generating detailed inventories and spatial databases of SE entities in three urban sites of different size, and in one rural area: New York City (pop. 8.2 million), Philadelphia (pop. 1.5 million), Worcester, Massachusetts (pop. 180,000), and rural Western Massachusetts. We also cross-checked the location of various SE enterprises with U.S. Census data to analyze the distribution of these organizations with respect to racial and income patterns. Third, we continue to conduct surveys and in-depth qualitative interviews with practitioners in different SE sectors in our research sites. The result of these multiple undertakings is a set of tools for raising the visibility of the spatial and economic footprint of diverse economic activities that prioritize social and environmental considerations at least as much as, if not more than, profit. PU T T IN G T HE S O LIDA RI T Y ECO N O MY O N T HE M A P 73 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF SE AND THE 5 Rob Eletto and Marianna MAPPING PLATFORM Pavlovskaya, “Geographies of Ethical Finance: Credit Unions At the national level, the sheer extent of some segments of the solidarity economy in New York City,” (unpub- can be astonishing. For example, the number of credit unions in the country is lished manuscript). 6 about the same as the number of private banks. Moreover, the U.S. has the world’s Craig Borowiak, Maliha highest level of credit union membership, encompassing almost two-thirds of the Safri, Stephen Healy, working age population.5 In one form or another, the SE is present in all parts of Marianna Pavlovskaya, “Navigating the Fault the U.S., despite remaining largely unacknowledged. As mentioned above, one Lines: Race and Class in Philadelphia's Solidarity significant aim of our research has been to develop a national SE mapping plat- Economy,” Antipode (forth- form that is publicly available and practically useful for a variety of purposes. This coming); see also Craig platform launched in June 2015 (see Figure 2). Borowiak, “Mapping the Social Demographics of Cooperatives in Philadelphia and Madison,” The mapping platform draws on and represents data from our national spatial in Craig Borowiak, Richardson Dilworth, and Anne Reynolds, database of the SE, itself built from several national and local datasets provided eds., Exploring Cooperatives: by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Credit Union Association, Economic Democracy and and several other local research partners. The mapping platform is designed to Community Development in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin provide a user-friendly way to search for and find solidarity economy initiatives (Madison, WI: University of all across the country. Hence, the platform was designed both for local consum- Wisconsin-Extension, 2015), ers, businesses, and organizations and for academic researchers. Local users 13–23. can search for specific organizations in a particular area, while researchers can analyze geographic patterns exhibited by the SE at different scales. The map is thus intended to serve multiple functions: first, to make various SE activities visible to consumers, businesses, activists, and policy-makers; second, to contribute to the construction of supply chains in which economic actors intentionally source from one another in order to foster alternative development relations A national database and map provides a user-friendly (e.g. cooperatives sourcing from one another); and third, to provide comprehensive data for researchers interested in analyzing the organizations and practices of the solidarity economy. way to search for and find solidarity economy initiatives PHILADELPHIA all across the country. Philadelphia is the site in which the highest number of unique organizational forms were mapped. Borowiak’s research in that city finds over 470 community gardens, two community land trusts, nine time banks and alternative exchange networks, 18 housing cooperatives and intentional communities, nine worker cooperatives, seven consumer cooperatives, 107 credit union branches, 17 community supported agricultural farms having 149 pick-up locations, one fair trade organization, and over 30 other cooperatives and collectives.6 In conducting his research, Borowiak partnered with local organizations, including the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA), The Reinvestment Fund, and the Garden Justice Legal Initiative, as well as with other 74 T HE JOURN A L OF DE SI G N S T R AT EG IE S FIGURE 2: Internet-based mapping platform indicating select sectors of the national U.S. solidarity economy. Clusters of SE enterprises are represented by circle icons with numbers; the color and size of the icon changes with the number of organizations contained in each cluster. Individual organizations are marked with icons that represent various economic sectors, although users can search by many other criteria in addition to these sector categories. Source: Solidarity Economy Mapping Project. local researchers. Using Geographic Information Systems methods, he spatially analyzed the SE entities’ locations against demographic data on race and class. 7 Borowiak et al., “Navigating the Fault Lines.” The resulting maps yield some interesting discoveries, one being that the solidarity economy as a whole has a significant footprint in Philadelphia. Arguably more important, however, are the ways that the maps illuminate social relations in the city—a key issue for social movement actors. For instance, once the credit unions are separated out from the rest of the analysis, housing, worker, food, artist, and childcare cooperatives are virtually absent from neighborhoods with the deepest poverty, and from those with the highest concentrations of racial minorities. However, neither do these SE organizations cluster in the higher-income, predominantly white neighborhoods. The maps instead reveal patterns of cooperatives clustering within border zones between rich and poor, and between white, Black, and Latino neighborhoods.7 PU T T IN G T HE S O LIDA RI T Y ECO N O MY O N T HE M A P 75 FIGURE 3: Philadelphia map showing residential distribution of Black population and presence of cooperatives and collectives (excluding credit unions). Source: Borowiak et al., “Navigating the Fault Lines.” 76 T HE JOURN A L OF DE SI G N S T R AT EG IE S Borowiak’s important work raises more questions than can be currently answered: Why do SE enterprises tend to locate in these border areas? What supportive conditions may exist in these neighborhoods, helping to elicit such practices? Meanwhile, some racial patterns were to be expected in Philadelphia, given its deeply segregated city structure, but the results serve both to neutralize some criticisms of the SE movement, while also raising some troubling new questions 8 Borowiak et al., “Navigating the Fault Lines.” 9 Marianna Pavlovskaya, “To be or not to be on the map? Visibility and secrecy within the solidarity economy” (paper presentation for the movement. The formal SE’s absence in the most racially homogenous for the annual meeting of neighborhoods—whether Black, Latino, or white—suggests that it is not sim- the American Association of ply a movement that primarily helps white people (as is sometimes alleged by Geographers, Chicago, IL, April 21–25, 2015). critics from the political left), but neither is it a movement that to date has been successfully extended into the poorest and most homogenously Black and Latino neighborhoods. While the former point bolsters defenses against critique or dismissal of the SE, the latter finding is a source of some concern to a movement having stated goals of equity and pluralism. If social action and public policy are to help redress racial and class inequities, the absence of these organizations across large swaths of Philadelphia is not a good sign. It is important not to overinterpret the geographical data. The specific locations of some SE organizations, for example, may not accurately reflect their effective geographic reach (think of a home care cooperative that delivers services to customers in their homes across a wide area, or a large community garden that draws participants from across the city). We may also be missing solidarity economy, or non-capitalist, practices that occur more routinely in communities of color. For example, Borowiak finds more community gardens growing edible crops in poorer (and also in Latino) communities than in medium and high-income communities.8 Furthermore, there is reason to believe that some nonmarket practices, such as informal childcare networks and cooperatives, and alternative practices such as the zero-interest lending arrangements maintained by certain immigrant groups, may generate significant but difficult-to-quantify positive impacts on their participants’ lives. The informality of these practices makes them more challenging to capture in our research. Additionally, when the practices skirt boundaries of formality or legality, outright identification can sometimes actually jeopardize participants. This has meant that our mapping project necessarily and intentionally refrains from visualizing certain activities and enterprises. For instance, we know there are at least some community gardens on squatted or illegally occupied land—gardens which could be endangered if their legal status were made clearly visible. To map in this case might actually undermine the goal of social empowerment. Hence, we are careful to represent only those sites that would not be put into legal jeopardy by being made public, even though incomplete maps occlude some SE practices, perhaps especially in certain low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.9 PU T T IN G T HE S O LIDA RI T Y ECO N O MY O N T HE M A P 77 WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS 10 See Suzanne Bergeron and Stephen Healy, “Beyond In Worcester, Healy deployed an in-depth interview approach to illuminate solidarity the Business Case: A economy practices and participant motivations there. Using a purposive sampling Community Economics technique, he conducted 30 interviews with representatives from worker coopera- Approach to Gender, Development and Social tives, housing cooperatives, community governance organizations, and volunteer Economy,” in Peter Utting, ed., collectives, in addition to representatives from community supported agriculture Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe? (London: Zed Books, 2015). initiatives, time banks and community gardens. Worcester has been an epicenter for solidarity economy organizing statewide, hosting annual organizing conferences since 2011 as well as the 2015 East Coast Work Place Democracy Conference. Our research identified Worcester Roots, an organization created a decade ago by graduates of Clark University’s International Development Community and Environment program, as a solidarity economy hub. Founder Matt Feinstein explained how the organization’s focus has evolved from environmental justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color to cooperative economic development. Central to its expanding mission was the establishment of Stone Soup, a community center that provides a collaborative space for progressive organizing in the city. As part of its commitment to providing space for some 15 other cooperatives and political action groups, Stone Soup created a community land trust, securing below-market rents for its tenants. In turn, these successes have contributed to the proliferation of other solidarity economy activities in the area. Three encountered in our research were a live-in artisan collective which houses 40 artists including metal and ceramic workers; a carpentry The solidarity economy may in effect shop; and a commercial greenhouse. It is obvious, therefore, that “incubating spaces” such as Worcester Roots produce a moment of democratic and Stone Soup can play an important role in cooperative “dissensus”: an interruption of the development and generation within a community. received ideology, pervasive in the U.S., that expert-led economic While Worcester presents exciting possibilities, there growth, neoliberalism, and austerity is also a concern articulated by some practitioners and are all that is reasonable because academics that cooperative development may come to they are all that is possible. be deployed as a conventional tool in poverty reduction efforts, either being confined to those areas experiencing a market failure, or, even worse, becoming part of a process of “responsibilization” in impoverished communities.10 In this scenario, poverty increasingly comes to be treated as the personal responsibility of individuals, rather than a structural outcome produced by the economic system. (The widespread practice known as “lunch shaming,” in which children receiving subsidized or free lunch at their public schools are forced to clean the cafeterias, or are stigmatized in other ways, illustrates this phenomenon.) However, it is crucial to understand how radically the solidarity economy can democratize economic 78 T HE JOURN A L OF DE SI G N S T R AT EG IE S development, since non-experts determine the organization of production, exchange, consumption, investment, and the management of common resources. 11 Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Following Rancière, we therefore suggest that SE actors in effect produce a Politics,” Critical Horizons moment of democratic “dissensus”: an interruption of the received ideology, per- Vol. 7, no. 1, (2006): 1–20; vasive in the U.S., that expert-led economic growth, neoliberalism, and austerity Mark Purcell, “Rancière and Revolution,” Space and Polity are all that is reasonable because they are all that is possible.11 Continual dissen- Vol. 18, no. 2, (2013): 161–181. sus might allow the SE to escape domestication as a “development” strategy; in 12 this connection a promising trend is the way in which concerns about racial and Shear, “Solidarity Economy postcolonial justice have become more central to SE discussions.12 Our research in New York suggests still other ways that we might ensure the democratic vitality of the solidarity economy by continuing to examine precisely how such entities, organizations, and practices contribute to a broader sense of well-being within the communities they serve. Penn Loh and Boone and Community Development: Emerging Cases in Three Massachusetts Cities,” Community Development Vol. 46 no. 3 (2015): 244–260. 13 See Amanda Huron, “Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming NEW YORK CITY and Maintaining the Urban In New York City, Safri and Pavlovskaya limited their initial round of research to no. 4 (2015): 963–79; James cooperatives, including worker cooperatives, limited equity housing cooperatives, DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath: food co-ops, and credit unions—all of them formal economic entities engaged in their respective markets. We also formed partnerships with community organizations and networks that form part of the SE there. The National Credit Union Commons,” Antipode Vol. 47, Community Control in The Face of Global Capital (London: Routledge, 2004); Jane Leavitt and Susan Saegert, From Abandonment to Hope: Association, for example, shared data on all the credit unions within New York, Community-Households in and indeed throughout the U.S. We benefitted immensely from the advice and Harlem (New York: Columbia participation of local activist group SolidarityNYC to access and survey food coop- University Press, 1990). eratives. SolidarityNYC further aided in connecting us to a multi-member worker cooperative coalition that included the Federation for Protestant Welfare Agencies, the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, the Working World, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Center for Family Life, Green Workers’ Cooperative, and others. Lastly, we partnered with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) to learn more about affordable housing cooperatives in the city. We have become deeply involved with these community partners, especially since our research was in part guided by their own goals. Here we report some findings from the research on cooperative forms of housing. Obviously, housing plays a paramount role in the political economy of New York City, given its large population and high cost of real estate. The stock of affordable housing has been declining for decades, with waves of gentrification leading to the displacement of longstanding residential populations in many neighborhoods. Limited equity cooperative housing is one of the few affordable-housing options falling under community control.13 In New York City, there are two primary types of limited equity housing cooperatives: housing development fund corporations (HDFC), and limited profit housing companies (known as Mitchell-Lama PU T T IN G T HE S O LIDA RI T Y ECO N O MY O N T HE M A P 79 Legend UHAB_geocode Median Income 0.0000 - 48724.4000 48724.4000 - 97448.8000 97448.8000 - 146173.2000 146173.2000 - 194897.6000 194897.6000 - 243622.0000 0 1 2 3 4 miles FIGURE 4: Northern New York City clustering of HDFC limited equity housing cooperatives in census tracts orga- nized by household median income. Source: Christian Siener, Marianna Pavlovskaya, and Maliha Safri. cooperatives). Both are designed to keep housing affordable by exchanging tax 14 Alexander Roesch, “The Urban Homesteading breaks for an agreement to rent or sell only to those whose income falls under a Assistance Board (UHAB) limit set by the city (typically no higher than the median income for the area). Some and Affordable Housing of the HDFCs, and all of the Mitchell-Lama housing co-ops, also have price limits Cooperatives in NYC” (presentation at Parsons School of on housing units (specified either by number of bedrooms or by unit size in square Design, New York, NY, Sept 14, feet). In total, there are approximately 1,300 HDFCs in New York City, comprising 2015). 31,000 units of housing with an average size of 24 apartments per building.14 The 88 current Mitchell-Lama cooperatives, which are generally much larger than the HDFC buildings, create another 64,669 units of housing for moderate income families. The maps in Figures 4 and 5 show the geographic distribution of HDFCs throughout New York City in the context of median income at the census tract level. The clustering of HDFCs in low-income areas is clearly visible. Most of these cooperatives came into existence during the 1970’s and 80’s, primarily through three city programs (Tenant Interim Lease, Community Management Program, and Third Party Transfer) in which the city turned over ownership of the buildings to collectives of tenants who could demonstrate capable self-management. UHAB was the 80 T HE JOURN A L OF DE SI G N S T R AT EG IE S Legend UHAB_geocode Median Income 0.0000 - 48724.4000 48724.4000 - 97448.8000 97448.8000 - 146173.2000 146173.2000 - 194897.6000 194897.6000 - 243622.0000 0 1 2 3 4 miles FIGURE 5: Southern New York City clustering of HDFC limited equity housing cooperatives in census tracts orga- nized by household median income. Source: Christian Siener, Marianna Pavlovskaya, and Maliha Safri. primary organization helping residents navigate this transition, sometimes becoming an interim landlord itself. Tenants not only managed the residences, but also invested any “sweat equity” needed to bring their buildings up to code.15 Hence 15 See Leavitt and Saegert, From Abandonment to Hope; DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath. these maps can be read as showing areas that experienced serious disinvestment during the 1970’s and 1980’s and in which collective self-management schemes arose as a survival strategy. Our work with UHAB shaped both our thinking and subsequent research on housing in New York. We added research questions we had previously not thought to ask. For instance, we knew that all affordable housing co-ops had income limits for owners—and, at least officially, sale price limits as well. But through UHAB, we learned of serious disagreements around price limits, and how some buildings were actually failing to maintain such limits in practice, allowing apartment prices in these buildings to creep up toward market rates. This development threatens to make the apartments unaffordable for many people after all, thus undermining the goals of the city program in which the buildings are enrolled. Meanwhile, during the Fall of 2015, graduate students in the Design and Urban Ecologies PU T T IN G T HE S O LIDA RI T Y ECO N O MY O N T HE M A P 81 Program at Parsons School of Design in New York conducted a series of inter16 For more on the wide range of value-creating activ- views with local housing cooperative residents, yielding a different perspective on ities that are inadequately the issues facing limited equity housing cooperatives. The interviews make clear understood in mainstream that being shareholders in a co-op can profoundly affect residents’ approaches economic theory, and on the need to develop alternatives to life decisions both large and small, in very positive ways. One co-op owner, for to market capitalism, see J. K. example, claimed that without her apartment, retirement would have been incon- Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A ceivable. Another shared that being a member of an affordable housing co-op had Feminist Critique of Political changed the career decisions both he and his wife were able to make, allowing his Economy (Minneapolis: wife to work on climate justice issues in which she earned a relatively low income. University of Minnesota Press, 1996); J. K. Gibson-Graham, Others simply reported that they were able to travel, or “go to a movie.” Overall, Post-Capitalist Politics the interviews with housing co-op residents reveal that they are able to exert more (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). control over their own economic lives and decision-making because of their access to a secure and affordable place to live. We interpret the reports by residents as evidence of a broader well-being in which income is not the sole yardstick. Such a finding is significant for anyone interested in designing economic development outside of conventional parameters that privilege increasing overall economic production over distributional concerns. Yet at the same time, our findings also demonstrate that this practice is coming under serious threat: all the housing co-ops we studied had chosen to continue observing income limits for eligibility, but none had maintained price limits on sales of the apartments themselves. CONCLUSION Our ambitious collaborative research on the solidarity economy has already generated interesting insights nationally and about each location focused on to date. At the national level, it is clear that the SE has a strong presence in the United States, even if we typically take note only of its formal components such as credit unions, worker cooperatives, and food and housing co-ops. Therefore, demonstrating the ontological presence of the solidarity economy is vital to the task of developing working alternatives to capitalism, both those already existing, and those yet to be imagined.16 In Philadelphia, we are made conscious of critical geography’s debates on the politics of visibility. Visibility can both empower and disempower, and researchers must always be aware of this knife’s edge. As important as what the maps reveal is what they conceal: we must pay attention to the blank spots on these maps, and remember that they can’t tell us everything we need to know. In Worcester and New York City, our results reveal the importance of incubating and supporting organizations, showing that SE entities do best when they exist in a kind of ecosystem of organizations all pursuing similar goals. Worcester’s results in particular indicate a growth of the SE there, built around key actors such as Stone Soup and Worcester Roots. 82 T HE JOURN A L OF DE SI G N S T R AT EG IE S Solidarity economy entities do best when they exist in a kind of ecosystem of organizations all pursuing similar goals. It is important to remain aware of the pressures to domesticate or tame the radical potential of projects like these. If cooperatives are allowed to become a conventional 17 DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath, 111. strategy of poverty alleviation or containment, or a pathway to entrepreneurial initiatives, they will make it harder to address more challenging, structural impediments to enacting social solidarity and progressive economic transformation. On the other hand, our results suggest that we should read dissensus into the current functioning of SE entities, appreciating the way they expand the political terrain. If non-experts are allowed to guide economic decisions about production, finance, investment, and management, what kinds of different decisions might they make? At least one possibility is analogous to what we have observed in our interviews in New York City’s limited equity housing co-ops: people with secure housing have more freedom to engage in other solidarity-oriented activities and practices (e.g. devoting one’s career to social or justice-related issues at comparatively low levels of remuneration). In this way, solidarity economy practices can actually shape the people participating in them, as well as the larger communities in which they are located. In the case of the housing co-ops discussed above, even if these entities are facing pressures from the mainstream real estate market, “they have given residents a degree of control over their own lives that would not be possible otherwise.”17 Ultimately, this is perhaps the most powerful argument in their favor. PU T T IN G T HE S O LIDA RI T Y ECO N O MY O N T HE M A P View publication stats 83