We thank Jason Spicer for his thoughtful and generous review, which appreciates our efforts to make the abundance of solidarity economies visible within US cities shaped by racial and economic division. Below, we address his three primary critiques.

First, Spicer questions the generalizability of our findings. He asks, for example, how solidarity economy patterns might look in Southern or Western cities with different racial and economic histories. We wonder the same. We selected our case-study cities—New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester—both because we were well-positioned in them for sustained collaboration with local community partners over many years and because the cities’ different sizes allowed us to capture important variations in solidarity economy geographies. While our sample is not fully representative, our place-based research enabled us to identify recurring spatial patterns, which we then theorized as fault lines, bulwarks, and edge zones—concepts that could provide crucial insights into the placemaking role of urban solidarity economies elsewhere. Our case studies share experiences of migration, redlining, organized abandonment, and gentrification with many other cities deeply divided by racial capitalist forces. We would love nothing more than to see similar research carried out in other contexts where these patterns, as well as others, would be brought to light. For this, we hope our mixed-methods approach—combining spatial, quantitative, and qualitative analysis—provides useful tools.

Second, Spicer observes that our locational data flattens organizational differences by representing all entities with the same-sized dots. We agree this is a limitation. In one case—limited equity housing co-ops—we were able to map unit size, but comparable data across all solidarity economy sectors simply does not exist, even in the disparate datasets we painstakingly compiled. This is one reason why we found it so important to integrate qualitative research in our study: to illuminate some of the complexity and human experiences underlying our data and its spatial representations. Mapping thousands of solidarity economy locations did help us analyze the spatial footprints of Solidarity Cities, our primary goal. We see potential to expand this work by collecting more data through surveys, using creative mapping techniques, and adding layers such as membership numbers or network dynamics.

Finally, Spicer states that our analysis could better support inclusive economic transformation by more fully engaging state power. For this, he suggests, there are many resources within the urban politics literature that were left untapped, including by authors sympathetic to our line of reasoning. This is fair criticism. While we do touch on policy throughout the book, it was not a central focus. This might have been a missed opportunity, but our priority was to analyze geographic patterns and social contexts of the solidarity economy. To do so, the book already knits so many threads together—spanning disciplines, research sites, mixed methods, and diverse community partnerships. That said, we agree that engaging municipal politics is critical for further research and action. For this, Spicer’s own work on policy frameworks for cooperative development complements ours, and future collaborations could extend both approaches.