This volume on the solidarity economies of US cities has a deceptively simple premise. Even in the most capitalist of countries, if one analyzes economies at the city scale, one finds abundant, non-state economic activities and models that are not capitalistic. By measuring and analyzing patterns in the urban distribution of these solidarity economy initiatives, scholars can play a role in enabling their more effective use to realize a more inclusive and just economy. This is particularly the case if such analyses enable state power to be more effectively marshalled, to include the solidarity economy in policy frameworks alongside capitalist models.

The book, structured across eight chapters, begins with a broad introduction and overview of its scope and methods. The authors examine the solidarity economy of three old industrial Northeastern US cities: New York, Philadelphia, and Worcester. They catalogued and mapped solidarity economy activities, broadly defined to include community land trusts, housing cooperatives, credit unions, worker cooperatives, community gardens, and community-supported agriculture (CSA), among other initiatives. Using spatial statistical techniques, they identified patterns of clustering and co-location within neighborhoods. These analyses are supplemented with qualitative and quantitative data from interviews, participant observation, counter-mapping, surveys, economic impact analyses, and document analysis.

Following two introductory chapters (Introduction and Chapter 1), Chapter 2 presents a high-level spatial statistical overview of all three cities. The next four chapters vary in scale and level of analysis. Chapter 3 examines a “failed” urban commons organization in Worcester that still produced positive outcomes. Chapter 4 analyzes the food solidarity economy, observing severe race and class cleavages, contrasting predominantly White, wealthy CSAs and low-income, non-White/Latinx community gardens. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate spatial patterns identified in the earlier spatial analysis. Chapter 5 explores Philadelphia’s cooperatives concentrated in “edge zones” or ecotones—border areas between rich and poor, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and White neighborhoods—while Chapter 6 examines New York’s “bulwark” model, where solidarity economy initiatives like worker cooperatives, credit unions, and housing cooperatives defend low-income, non-White communities. Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing key findings and reviewing current and proposed policy actions at multiple scales to facilitate solidarity economy models.

In the hands of less-skilled authors, this highly varied analytical approach might not work. I am reminded of the old line from TV programs: “Don’t try this at home, kids!” Indeed, graduate students and early-career scholars might struggle to pull off this approach. It is a testament to the skill of these authors that the book reads cohesively, and is well-knit together, without leaving the reader with motion sickness, as the scales and units of analysis shift across chapters.

The chief value of the book is its “normal” social science approach to the US solidarity economy, which produces classificatory findings of patterns using methods recognizable to political scientists and others who operate in “normal” social science paradigms, including sociologists, economists, and interdisciplinary professional school scholars in public, international, and urban affairs. The authors, who hail from different disciplines—political science, economics, and geography—accordingly leverage multiple epistemological frameworks, including critical scholarship on racial capitalism from bell hooks, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Robin D.G. Kelley, among others. However, looming large in the background is the alternative, diverse, and community economies framework of economic geographer J.K. Gibson-Graham. The central point of that framework is that profit maximization (i.e., capitalism) has become so dominant that other economic activities are either rendered invisible or are not regarded as economic phenomena. Focused on cataloguing activities, that framework has long been useful for helping students and practitioners make this realization and move toward action. However, scholarship deploying this framework rarely conforms to “normal” hypothetico-deductive and inductive social science. It typically focuses on description, i.e., the first step of “normal” social science, at the expense of classification and explanation, which might produce “generalizable findings” or even explanatory “middle range theory.” This book moves us in these latter directions, that is, it adopts a “normal” social science approach. Given the outsized role social science research plays in policy, this is a valuable and impressive contribution.

Another strength is the book’s explicit acknowledgment of communities of faith—Black churches, faith-based credit unions, and the Catholic Workers’ movement—as critical players in the solidarity economy. Often, studies of solidarity economies overlook faith communities, implying a primary association with secular or nonreligious actors. In making this connection, the book calls to mind political scientist Hahrie Han’s work on how faith-based groups organize for progressive policy change. In an era of increasing polarization and skepticism toward academia, the book shows how social science analyses, which appropriately name these religious groups’ contributions, might be useful in bridging polarizing divides.

I offer three criticisms of the book. First is the under consideration of the generalizability implications of their case selection of three specific cities in the old industrial Northeast. The authors appear to have chosen a convenience sample of three cities where they have ties. It does not seem to be a representative sample with respect to the dynamics they analyze, nor do they seem to be outlier cases. It is not clear whether one can generalize from these three cities. Given the central role of racial dynamics at their analysis, one cannot help but wonder if these spatial patterns occur in cities located in former Confederate states, differentially shaped by the historical institutions of slavery and Jim Crow. Indeed, as political scientist Bensel asserted long ago, American political and economic development has exhibited persistent sectional effects; sectionalism might also specifically influence the solidarity economy. The authors do not address this, nor do they consider how their patterns may or may not apply to cities that did not develop until a later period in US history, such as those in the US West, where racialized institutional dynamics may also manifest differently. I would have appreciated more consideration of the generalizability and validity implications of this sampling choice, to enable future scholarship beyond these three cities.

My second concern relates to how the authors have operationalized their data. The authors’ use of count data treats organizations uniformly, regardless of size or scale—a worker co-op with 10 members is analyzed the same as one with 2,000. Similarly, community gardens are presumed to serve low-income households, but the extent of food provision is unclear. Some gardens might be central to household food security, while others contribute little. Additionally, a worker co-op with 2,000 distributed workers is treated similarly to a housing co-op with 2,000 single-site members. These data issues collectively could obscure heterogeneity within the “edge zone” and “bulwark” patterns in meaningful ways. While the authors acknowledge some of these complexities in their discussion of CSAs, they do not fully account for them in their broader analysis, which might have benefited from further analytical refinements, for example, by size-weighting some of their results or utilizing different outcome measures entirely.

My final criticism is that politics are given short shrift, surprising given the authors’ explicit statement that solidarity economies can challenge racial capitalism by enacting a different sort of politics. Political scientists from Rokkan to Hall and Manow have long asserted that both producer group politics and electoral politics interact to shape the national economies of rich democracies, and that cross-class coalitions have been key to state enabling of social welfare institutions by both tempering and partnering with producer groups (which, in theory, might include social economy actors). Similarly, urban-scaled political science by Imbroscio, Williamson, Alperovitz, Savitch, Kantor, and Pasotti, among others, building from Stone’s urban regimes, has explicitly considered how variations in urban political institutions might enable various outcomes, including solidarity economy prevalence. These topics were the subject of an APSA urban politics section award-winning book two decades ago by DeFilippis. This work is not considered.

This is not to say politics and policy get no mention. The authors do acknowledge the role of state action in shaping solidarity economy patterns, referencing policies, such as redlining, as well as organizing efforts to obtain city government support, as occurred in Philadelphia with community gardens’ land. They also briefly mention UN resolutions on solidarity economy models and proposed New York City legislation. However, given their goal of identifying patterns to enable change, it is surprising that they do not consider electoral and producer-group politics more systematically. For example, in their discussion of food solidarity economies, they highlight networked organizations that advocate for policy change but do not extrapolate broader political lessons. If cities and localities under federalism are to act as “laboratories of democracy,” as Justice Brandeis suggested, we need clearer insights into which policies work under what conditions, to facilitate the solidarity economy’s expansion.

Despite these three critiques, the book is valuable for wide-ranging audiences across multiple disciplines in making the urban solidarity economy visible and in identifying different patterns in its deployment and use. I hope that the book inspires further empirical work and enables more effective policy treatment and use of these models.