Solidarity Cities: Examining Solidarity Economies at the Urban Level with Maliha Safri

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0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts territory. Today we’re delighted to host Maliha Safri. Maliha is professor of Economics at Drew University. Her academic research focuses on collective economic practices, including worker food and housing cooperatives amidst other organizations. By teaching popular education seminars and courses with activists since 2000 and specifically with migrant workers at a variety of worker centers in the process of forming collectives, her research was based in concrete issues faced by participants of what some movement activists call solidarity economies, which are economies prioritizing cooperation and inclusion.

0:01:54.8 Julian Agyeman: She’s published articles in Signs, Antipode, Environmental Policy and Governance, the Economist’s Voice, Organization, among other journals and edited book collections. She has a new co-authored book, Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism and Mapping Transformation, and her talk today is Solidarity Examining Solidarity Economies at the Urban level. Maliha, a zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:26.7 Maliha Safri: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks. I’m gonna get started right away. Tom, thank you so much for helping with the tech today. And Julian, thank you so much for this invitation. I wanted to begin with this first slide. This is a painting done by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an indigenous artist. This is a painting called State Names. She quickly draws our eyes to all the state names that have directly taken their names from indigenous peoples that lived there. I offer that as a very brief land acknowledgement. If this was a city level map, then the island on which I live, Manhattan, comes from the word Manahatta, the Lenape word for this land. I just wanna talk a little bit about my background, popular education, because it is so important for the kind of work and the research that we’ve done. Popular education, let’s define it. It is not the banking model diagnosed by Paulo Freire, one of depositing knowledge into the passive vessel of the student. And I understood this in a much better way when I began to be teacher for the center for Popular Economics, devoted to a popular approach to economics, running six-week Train the Trainer summer institutes with labor organizers activists in different areas. We were always intentional to work with communities of activists on a particular issue.

0:03:49.9 Maliha Safri: I also became a member of the Community Economies collective and began to be involved with participatory action research. I’d been doing popular Econ classes with anybody that wanted to do it and one group in particular of ex-prisoners. We did a participatory action research project where they interviewed all the collectives, cooperatives, social enterprises, non-profits in their town in Asbury Park. The young men, they were all young men, talked to an ex-prisoner collective run by women who had said, after facing a great deal of discrimination in the labor market, they said to themselves, “Fuck it, they won’t give us jobs, we’ll make our own jobs”. So we did a community mapping of the solidarity economy of Asbury park. And when we got to talking about different ways of organizing work, they wanted to start a cooperative after this project and the young guys started a construction worker cooperative joined by undocumented immigrant workers who were very familiar with cooperatives already and joined this project. And the mapping exercise helped them see their own town differently, see their own role in that town differently.

0:04:58.5 Maliha Safri: And of course, I think there’s just a joy in sometimes showing up and doing the work. I saw that a little bit in Occupy. Right. And these are just some simple takeaways that I wanna stress. But that, of course, is also familiar to some of the people on this call. But I need to be explicit about why we did the research the way we did. Participatory action research is community-led in structure. It can be transformative. And I think that popular education plus participatory action research plus collaborative writing really colored everything in me towards collaboration. And in 2015, I started working with a group of people and that collaboration has now spanned over a decade. We’ve written multiple articles together and now a book. And this project had a lot of pieces. So let me start with one research component that I was a key organizer for in 2015. We surveyed all of the worker cooperatives in New York City, and this was the year before a city council funding initiative for worker cooperatives began. So in a way, this is a very good baseline of pre-city support.

0:06:15.8 Maliha Safri: Overwhelmingly Latinx people dominate as worker owners. And this is both including and excluding the major outlier. The major outlier in New York City being Cooperative Home Healthcare Associates, the largest in home health care cooperative in the country. It has since been superseded by a new cooperative that started after we’ve finished even gathering data in 2019. But let’s stick to this snapshot for just a moment and I’m happy to talk about where things have gone in questions too. In terms of industrial sector and gender composition breakdown of the cooperatives, we see some patterns. 98% are women, 70%… Sorry, two-thirds are in care work occupations, cleaning, child care, elder care, tutoring, in home health care doulas. These are some of the main categories. We spoke to dozens of workers directly for this project and probably hundreds over the years. Two who had started a cleaning cooperative described to me what they experienced in terms of trying to create a model for how to help others start cooperatives. We can see subjective transformation in what they told me, micro leading to meso level transformations. It’s a mode of politicization that has an expansive politics. Many others have written rich ethnographic work about this. Daphne Berry and Myrtle Bell leap to mind, as does Caroline Shenaz Hossein.

0:08:00.8 Maliha Safri: There are many in this field of looking at the qualitative experiences. We wanted to actually add a different piece to this conversation. We wanted to look at one piece. What is the economic impact of all of the worker cooperatives together? Here I used input-output modeling to try to trace out the multiplier impact. Planners are more familiar with this method than economists. So when I was trying to teach myself this, the economists were like, “No, you should go to the planners”. And I learned the most common software program, IMPLAN, that’s like the Excel of input-output modeling, a package program software. So bear with me while we walk through this row by row. Let’s concentrate on the first line. We examined worker cooperatives, actual output, what they made in revenues. We had that information. We gathered that information. We also had what they pay in payroll, labor income. We also had the total number of workers employed. And here part-time and full-time are included and mixed. We, plus the coalition and a wider movement was always interested and remained so in this idea of what they call value chains and an academic literature might call supply chain effects.

0:09:25.8 Maliha Safri: That’s this second row. How much do they spend on supplies? Indirectly effect. How many jobs got supported. And inside the movement there is a particular emphasis. Can we be intentional about sourcing? And can we be intentional about building different kinds of supply chains which Support a further 101 jobs. Induced effects are what is the spending power of all these workers and jobs supported? Right. When the workers go out and spend their payroll, when they buy food, when they pay for their rent, the total that adds all this together and the total impact is 125 million. Now here is where I think there’s some harsh critique of worker cooperatives, that they only benefit those workers. And that’s actually not true. Right? They benefit local economies as well. But here’s where some interesting class analysis falls out of the way social accounting matrices are organized. Regional input-output models assume all firms are conventional employer owned capitalist firms. So we are using a technique that was never designed for cooperatives in the first place. So how do cooperatives compare using the same tool to conventional capitalist employer owned firms? Left side, you’ve already seen and now understood and are pros.

0:10:49.9 Maliha Safri: The right side, this is us comparing cooperatives real data with how conventional employer owned firms in the same industries with the same exact revenues, the same sized firms, basically. Right. What would their output be? Now let’s just look at that first row for a second for conventional capitalist firms. These firms have about the same revenues, right? The same prices as cooperatives. In fact, they’re probably the price setters in the market. A cooperative cannot realistically come in and charge double the price, that is actually set by the market. So the output across capitalist firms and cooperatives is roughly the same. What they do with it is different. Conventional firms of course have a payroll and importantly they hire less workers, almost half the workers. They probably have a different distribution across management and base workers in terms of pay, a more unequal payroll. But conventional firms importantly also cut a percentage of the revenues, the output to the proprietor. The gap between labor income and output is the return to the entrepreneur. Indirect effects. What do conventional firms spend on supplies? That’s about the same in materials. There’s some evidence to say that maybe cooperative firms do spend a little bit more.

0:12:25.2 Maliha Safri: I’ve talked to, for instance, cleaning firms that buy insist upon non-toxic cleaning products for workers. But the induced effect is where the picture gets very different. Because of the decisions made about how to distribute output across payroll, the money being spent by the workers is much higher in the cooperative model. Why? Because their payroll is higher, they do not have a return to the entrepreneur. What does this mean? That the final comparison between conventional firms and cooperatives is that conventional employer owned firms produce less total output than equivalent cooperatives in the city economy. The cooperatives have a bigger total economic impact than conventional firms of the same sizes in the same industries in the same city. Do you have to be a radical as a city councilor or a mayor to say you want job stability and more local growth? Not really. However, I do think this is an example of counter visioning the urban space. We have two options for urban economic planning, equity versus inequality. And surprise, equity turns out to be better for more local people.

0:13:47.8 Maliha Safri: At one level, this is so simple and intuitive. I am not sure we needed this proof. But it’s nice to have that proof, right, that cities are designed to be unequal. They can be made in other ways. They are already being made in other ways by people on the ground. Now, this was one piece of a much larger project that had many more people, more cities, more methods, more and more. And we had always wanted to concentrate on cities where we were working closely. But we were also working with solidarity economy activists. And at the national level there was a conversation about how far behind the US was in some ways in terms of organizing around another world, another economy, as possible politics. It is not shocking that the US would be behind other countries in many ways. And this is just one. The concept of a solidarity economy is not one we invent. It has instead been developed and theorized in context specific ways by scholars and practitioners spanning the globe of what has become a transnational solidarity economy movement. Although, practices of solidarity are foundational to all human societies, the term solidarity economies came up in at the same time, but separately in Chile and France in the 1980s to elevate economic initiatives that actively prioritize egalitarian and cooperative norms.

0:15:20.4 Maliha Safri: Much of the energy of the movement has come from post colonial contexts. The network is global, but the work of defining solidarity economies has largely fallen to practitioners organizing at national, regional or local scales, which has led to considerable terminological and conceptual diversity. My co-author Craig Borowiak has written about this very lucidly. I already mentioned I was engaged in worker center kinds of education, right? Remember that Jersey Shore map that I was talking about created by ex-prisoners? And in that case, practically speaking, a lot of the social organizations and collectives they visited signed up to be their first customers, creating a different kind of solidarity-based supply chain. Even that one example shows how community mapping can be transformative. Maps don’t just represent the world. Once they are produced as part of our shared reality, they can help make new worlds. But before you can map, you have to make decisions about what to map. And we worked closely with activists over two years in the US Solidarity Economy Network and City Level Networks to produce this typology. Now, in determining what to include, many considerations were paramount. We aim to identify organizational forms that are substantially aligned with key solidarity economy values, including social equity, environmental sustainability, solidarity, pluralism and democracy.

0:16:58.0 Maliha Safri: No initiative is perfect on all counts, but we also did not want to include initiatives that are structured in ways that inherently violate particular solidarity economy norms. For this, the commitment to self management and democratic decision-making were non negotiable for most of the activists. For example, even though social enterprises seek to combine environmental and social concerns with their financial bottom lines, they are not part of the typology because most are structured in undemocratic ways, excluding workers from key economic decision making processes. Extremely important, the typology is by no means a rigid classification nor an exhaustive list, not at all, of informal economic practices of solidarity in families, neighborhoods, cities. It is not a blueprint, but an invitation to add to this, to take this, an invitation to thinking about how solidarity economy initiatives differ from conventional capitalist firms. One of the problems I mentioned was that US activists had no comparable map in the US at the national level. So we helped develop that as an openly accessible, interactive and searchable map and research database over, I think 26,000 entries, searchable by organizational type or function.

0:18:25.3 Maliha Safri: So, for instance, looking for credit unions in your city. This is a pragmatic tool for anybody who wants to know more about solidarity economies near them. Now there are other maps. The black socialists in America have produced one called the Black Dual Power Map. New Economy Coalition has also produced a national level directory. However, we turned most of our analytical attention to cities. We were working closely with networks in our own cities, so we dug in deeper there. We mapped all of the categories in the bottom right hand corner in all three cities in Philadelphia, New York City and Worcester, medium, the largest and small. But in all the cities, there are sizable footprints. And this simple mapping exercise transforms the common understanding of US cities as entirely shaped by capitalism and profit centered logics. The maps show that the same cities contain a large array of economic practices that follow ethics of solidarity and cooperation.

0:19:31.1 Tom Llewellyn: We see hundreds of community gardens, affordable housing cooperatives, cooperative enterprises, scores of credit unions, dozens of community supported agriculture programs, amongst many other initiatives. The maps provide a glimpse to the extent to which solidarity is woven into urban economies and invite us to consider more fully what role solidarity economy initiatives play in our cities, what they can offer to urban residents, especially in the disinvested neighborhoods where capitalism falls short to support life needs.

0:20:05.7 Maliha Safri: Our maps are partial. All of the maps represent formal initiatives with a defined location rather than informal or spatially diffused practices. One implication is that these maps actually under-represent solidarity economies because a wide range cannot be mapped. Some evade cartographic representation because they are informal, while others have a spatially diffuse character, no crisp boundaries. In other words, if it were possible to visualize the Solidarity City as composed of all forms of the solidarity economy and those who work to support it, its spatial contours would be even more expansive and diverse and extend beyond our maps. Even though we made this map, we technically don’t own it. Since it came out in our book on this just this month, we looked at three cities. As I’ve mentioned, we came from different disciplines. And we were also convinced that this project needed all of us and our expertise to work. So we use multiple methods, qualitative and quantitative prioritizing community formed questions in research, using geospatial analysis and input-output modeling. From the beginning, we wanted to look at race and racial segregation and deep poverty. We are in these circles and we understand the buzz of the believer who wants to convince others of the great potential right under our noses.

0:21:48.2 Maliha Safri: But sometimes that can lead to being so busy, trying to convince people of the value of the project that we do not face internal divisions of race and deep poverty. And that’s what we wanted to do, have this internal examination. Reminding you quickly from the footprint map, the distribution across these three cities is marked by patterns. And we were pattern investigators. The problem with dot maps is that they actually don’t give us an accurate measure of density, right, because dots can be on top of each other. So using kernel density estimation techniques, we wanted to look at what geographers call hotspots. And here I’m gonna stick to New York City for the sake of time as well, because the patterns are actually different across all three cities, and we cannot make easy generalizations about all these patterns. Now, there are important clusters across New York. The dense, what geographers call hotspots, you can call them clusters. And if you know these neighborhoods, you will also not be surprised by the next step where we examine who lives in these neighborhoods. So, on the left hand side we have income and poverty, and on the right hand side, we are examining the location of these clusters vis-à-vis race, the racial composition of the neighborhoods.

0:23:18.4 Maliha Safri: Let’s look at income first. Here we are using multiples of the official poverty line, because already so many activists, people, institutional bodies, have convinced us of the inadequacy of official poverty measures in the US as sufficient to measuring the problem. So we use guidelines of twice the poverty line for a lot of our work. And race, we wanted to see how these initiatives are distributed vis-à-vis the racial composition. Now New York city is a deeply hyper segregated city. Our city is about 31% white, 29% Latinx, 21% black and 14% Asian. For a neighborhood to be 100% white means it is significantly diverging from the normal population of New York. We are a hyper segregated city and that will affect solidarity economies. How could it not? So what does the data show? Significant clustering of solidarity economies in neighborhoods of color, which also have a significant overlap with high levels of poverty. Now I wanna connect this to this idea of racial capitalism. The term racial capitalism refers to a body of scholarship that emerged as an important corrective to earlier theorizations of class and capitalism.

0:24:39.8 Maliha Safri: Many liberal and Marxist accounts of capitalist economies tended to treat racial relations as peripheral to market logics and class antagonisms. Theorists of racial capitalism reveal how capitalist development in the US and elsewhere is fundamentally intertwined with processes of racialization. Racial capitalism is not one variation of capitalism, as if there could be processes of capitalism separate from race. Rather, capitalism has always operated through racial differentiation from its very beginnings. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s memorable phrasing, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it. In this respect, capitalism is racial capitalism, particularly in the US context. At the end, we see many examples of that for instance in redlining, which I’ll get back to in just a second. At the same time, black indigenous Latinx cartographies and scholarship teach us a lot. And one way is their critique of space is categorized as poor and assumed to be devoid of life. Racial capitalism literatures offer us rich historiographic accounts of the resistance and cooperation that weaken those absence narratives. You can see it inside the influential scholarship of Cedric Robinson, alongside his attention to the racialized processes of slavery, feudalism and capitalism.

0:26:12.4 Maliha Safri: He equally emphasized a long history and theory and practice where people unsettle exploitative economies, building up cooperative alternatives in peasant communes that rejected feudal hierarchies long before the emergence of Marxism and through maroon societies created by formerly enslaved peoples that both he and Du Bois examined in depth. Later RDG Kelly will look at freedom dreams as existing in reality, not only our imagination. So let’s focus something something concrete here, redlining. This is a crowd that knows this very well. The set of urban practices that shapes cities in powerful ways to this day. I’m not gonna go into depth because I assuming a lot of familiarity with this process. I am simply bringing this up because these maps represented one powerful way of coding the city by race from best to hazardous and dangerous. And for us, redlining is especially important because it exemplifies how maps have been deployed to sustain and consolidate hegemonic social orders. We wanted to see how the clusters of solidarity economies relate to this historical process. And our maps show the striking manner in which practically all contemporary solidarity economy hotspots coincide with formerly redlined areas, many of whom remain home to communities of color living at or below twice the poverty line.

0:27:49.1 Maliha Safri: Today, for example, we see clusters of solidarity economies in impoverished black and Latinx communities, informally redlined areas in New York’s Lower east side, northern Manhattan, Harlem, Washington Heights, North Brooklyn, and also the South Bronx. The cartographies of the solidarity economy that we overlay against the borders of redline neighborhoods make it clear that in the past, like today, urban space has been powerfully created through solidarity as well as through racist policies of capital. Now I know one critique I have heard people is that people are doing this out of deprivation. One woman asked me even, “Are you for redlining?” And “No, I’m not”. [laughter] But I want to look at how people have also created resistance based practices. So, for example, when you look at credit unions, in the majority of the US, most people like myself belong to professional credit unions. That’s not the case in New York City, where faith-based credit unions, and even more specifically black faith-based credit unions began operations at the very height of redlining in the 1930s. In the resistance to redlining itself, we see the seeds of not only what we want to build, but how we want to build in direct opposition to exclusion, predations of racial capitalism.

0:29:24.7 Maliha Safri: If we just look at those clusters in 3D format across New York City in Philadelphia, we have heard some people describe this as producing a kind of uncanny effect. Looking anew at our cities to see mountains and valleys, and many of those neighborhoods that were characterized as best on the redlining maps representing areas full of opportunities are actually valleys here. Places where solidarity economy initiatives are conspicuously scarce. By contrast, the neighborhoods categorized as hazardous and lacking in opportunity are mountains of urban economic solidarity. Counter mapping, I think if we think about mapping and counter mapping as a resistance practice, counter mapping can change the political horizon. Counter visioning. I chose this word because of the ways that emphasizes that the vision is rooted in real material ways people are disempowered, excluded, exploited. A lot of times people want to talk about empowerment without talking about all the ways that people have been made disempowered, and not dealing with that is not gonna get us anywhere. So we’re against something in the process of envisioning the future. And what are we against? And organizers always stress, it’s important to name what you’re against. Right? Because then it’s not just about making sure people survive racism, but constructing alternatives that oppose and build in ways that liberate communities and on their own terms.

0:31:00.6 Maliha Safri: We need vision, but one that is rooted and clear about what we’re against, but also not having that define what we are for. Very quickly, I just wanna talk and stress that when you look at how these initiatives are providing, what are they providing, what kinds of goods and services? These are not luxuries, which is actually sometimes what we hear from critics who don’t know necessarily so much about this, that this is just for people with privilege. But actually this shows the core industrial breakdown of what solidarity economies are providing. Housing, food, fair finance, and work. Now, we’re interested in the overall footprint because we wanted to challenge the representation of economic alternative… I promise I’m wrapping up. We want to challenge the representation of economic alternatives as marginal. One of our intentions in writing the book was to 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. 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? 

0:32:26.9 Maliha Safri: What if, amidst the towering trees of capitalist structures that dominate our horizons like urban skyscrapers, we could sense an expanding solidarity ecosystem growing in the understory? Using the metaphor of the forest, we could see a robust life. Many other trees, bushes, ferns, mushrooms that might be considered economic entities nurtured by underground root systems and the fungi that symbiotically connect trees. Visible above ground are the more formally organized parts of the Solidarity City. Housing and worker cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens, and more. And by the way, Solidarity City I think of as an imaginary right, as a way of thinking about the city below ground, the undercurrents of solidarity spread through the soil, nurturing informal economies and social practices, sustaining what lies above through the continual extension of goodwill, reciprocity, and care. Learning to see solidarity already operating within economies is a crucial step towards envisioning that solidarity cities have always been here. They are here. And what might they become? 

0:33:49.6 Maliha Safri: Second, we argued that many of the race and income divisions that underlie modern urban life are manifest within the geographies of the solidarity economy. This can be seen in the way solidarity economies concentrate in particular neighborhoods and the spatial patterns actually among the different sectors. In the book, we actually look at different sectors one by one, two as well as together. Some initiatives, for instance, tend to cluster in lower income neighborhoods of color, whereas others tend to map onto spaces of white middle class privilege. And in our field work, we frequently heard community partners use the term fault line to describe how divisions in the larger society also run through the movement spaces. We join them in adopting this fault line metaphor to characterize divided geographies of the city and use it carefully, acknowledging that the term fault line may evoke rigid or naturally occurring phenomena. And we do not suggest that at all, only that not that race or poverty are natural or inevitable, only that they are evident in spatial patterns we analyze and part of the truth that solidarity economy movements must bear.

0:35:03.3 Maliha Safri: Third, we contend that solidarity economy initiatives and the movement and large, while being affected by racial and economic divisions, possess many of the normative and practical resources for confronting and transforming these fractured landscapes. Here other metaphors emerged through our engagement with movement practitioners that helped us make sense of how solidarity economies produce urban space. Ecotones refers to the ecosystem needed to nurture these initiatives, and we do a deep dive in Philadelphia to examine the variety of ways neighborhoods come to be ecosystems. Another, and one that I’ve already seeded with a little bit of my work on the worker cooperatives is what we call bulwarks that successfully form patterns of defense and resistance to racialized forms of disinvestment or exploitation. Bulwarks are echoes of what Cooperation Jackson calls the build and fight strategy.

0:36:11.5 Maliha Safri: For Cooperation Jackson fight refers to a long history of resistance in Mississippi against the disposability of black life, which Cooperation Jackson seeks to confront and defeat as part of any urban human rights agenda. Build refers to a multi part expansive regional plan and Corporation Jackson offers one instantiation of a theme that has shown up in multiple social struggles places. Build and fight, oppose and propose, resist and build. Similar expressions have become mottos for campaigns that combine anti capitalist politics with post capitalist world building. And there are shades of meaning separating these expressions. There are many ways to resist, not all of which involve fighting. And all of these mottos and campaigns are rooted in opposition and defined by visions of solidarity as a generative power. To these we add the reframed expression build and defend, to draw greater attention to the needs and creative forces of communities to emphasize and the imperative to not only build for the future, but recognize that which has already been built. Like the worker cooperatives or some of our work on housing cooperatives and faith-based credit unions in need of support and protection. I’ll end with this. I know we’re in a fight for our lives mode and I very much understand that. But there is something very powerful about the resist and build axiomatic politics because it focuses attention on the means and the ends. I’ll stop there, and thank you very much.

0:37:58.6 Julian Agyeman: Wow. I’m still processing. Maliha, that was fantastic. And I note your book is open access and I’m just thinking, how could it be otherwise [laughter] given the nature of what you’re talking about? I’d also like…

0:38:11.3 Maliha Safri: That’s what we aimed for. We thought that that should not be the reason that anybody should not be able to read this. We can arrange for that. Right.

0:38:18.8 Julian Agyeman: I’d just like to acknowledge that my colleague and friend Penlo has just joined us after having been at a rather essential faculty meeting. So I wanna give space to Penn if he wants to say something. But we’ve got a whole welter of questions here. First is from Nancy in Quebec. Is there a reason for not including mutuals in Europe? And here in Quebec, they are included.

0:38:44.8 Maliha Safri: Mutual insurance and mutual… Is that what you… Mutual insurance associations or in other…

0:38:56.5 Nancy: Yeah, that’s one form but it’s being renewed now. So they, historically, it’s the big mutuals but there’s now new forms of mutualization that are emerging, and actually this one is coming back but in new forms.

0:39:12.3 Maliha Safri: Yes, we mutual aid networks. I understand your question to also but I will say that to a certain extent we had very small team, how can we also deal with the universe of what exists in our cities? 

0:39:35.6 Nancy: No, it was just around the tableau that I was reacting. But for the rest, obviously you’ve got to look at what’s going on in your own community and it’s very interesting by the way. Thank you.

0:39:43.5 Maliha Safri: And I think that’s something to be considered. I do think of the topology that the US Solidarity Economy Network that we helped develop has already actually transformed and changed and now different people are adding different terms to it and I think of it as not a set thing, but is something for everyone to take, to use, to modify and especially in ways that make sense in their location.

0:40:08.9 Nancy: Yeah, no, and this is not the time and the subject of the… But there’s a whole evolution and hybridization in terms of public and collective and the commons and so on. So even the definitions and the forms are rapidly evolving as well. But anyhow, so sorry. Thank you. And this is very interesting.

0:40:26.7 Julian Agyeman: Thank you, Nancy. Renee asks I’d love to hear more about how the indirect effects whats measured in this project.

0:40:34.9 Maliha Safri: For cooperatives that is actually information that we had in terms of what cooperatives spent on means of production supplies. We asked them that question.

0:40:53.6 Julian Agyeman: Michelle asks will there be a continuum of what a community can do to help grow a solidarity economy at the urban level? So a continuum idea.

0:41:05.8 Maliha Safri: Continuum about what are the possibilities if I’m reading that correctly.

0:41:10.6 Julian Agyeman: Oh are you in the house still? 

0:41:16.9 Maliha Safri: I can only… So I’m gonna guess a little bit at what continuum or possible of what concrete communities can do to grow solidarity economies. Right. And I think of that as a very expansive range, perhaps one that I can’t even imagine the ends to it. One of the things that we really stress and this kind of comes back maybe to Nancy’s question is that this, we have to have an open ontological approach to understanding solidarity. We cannot think about this as, “This is it. These are the only people I will have solidarity with”. It is an ever porous boundary that actually requires us to be thinking about the exclusions that we have made and how can they also be brought into a project of thinking about or thinking about urban planning but with community well-being at the center and forefront, that is going to ever evolve because even our understandings of community well-being will shift as new demands are made, for instance for the peoplehood and rights of our trans kind of brothers and sisters. So, that is absolutely I think an open process.

0:42:51.8 Julian Agyeman: Tom Llewellyn asks what advice do you have for organizers or researchers interested in doing similar mapping work in their communities? 

0:43:00.7 Maliha Safri: Thanks. And I get asked that a lot. My first thing is gonna be please look to actually make sure that someone has already… So for instance, someone from San Francisco was like, “How can I do this?” And I said, “At first you should… ” I’m very certain there’s already an existing solidarity economy map in San Francisco. So you don’t need to duplicate work. Look for already existing networks, city level networks in your city and in all the major cities. I wanna say there’s this bubbling happening in this this area for sure. And so one is all hook into already existing efforts. Second, there are many organizers that are very skilled in terms of leading mapping workshops for people who are trying to get efforts off the ground in their cities. In case you don’t have one already, you can contact me. There are other people inside the Solidarity Economy activist movement that are very skilled in leading some of these workshops. And it can be done… So I would say that there’s a variety of ways that people can do this. And we really considered the entire book itself as a little bit of a how to do this, as a set of techniques and tools that can be used in many places.

0:44:33.5 Maliha Safri: I know we wrote this about the… Primarily about these cities, but this is actually not just about these cities. And this is about seeing anew inside the cities in which you live to look for these things. Because I almost guarantee you that these things already exist, a good number of them. Right.

0:44:58.7 Julian Agyeman: John asks how has the Solidarity economy evolved since the 1980s, especially since the rise of neoliberalism? I think you’ve… With this in a non-explicit way, but if you can give us a quick.

0:45:10.7 Maliha Safri: Yeah, it’s a big question a little bit. Right. And I’m sure you already, you can please also help in this as well, because I know you. Penn has worked on this for sure. So I wanna say that I think in some ways the rise of the Solidarity Economy movement was in opposition to the neoliberal sort of discourse of power. If the neoliberal discourse of power could be contained in the phrasing of Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative. Then the very first World Social Forum that designed itself in opposition to the World Economic Forum, their slogan was another world is possible and then the sub-slogan was Another economy is possible and then it proliferated another knowledge is possible. And that that opposition is there from the beginning. How has it evolved? It’s also, we’re talking about a set of social movements. We have Nancy Neemtan from Quebec here as well. I think it’s going to be different in different countries, to be honest. And I think there are different relations to the state in different countries.

0:46:30.7 Maliha Safri: If you’re in Canada, then and/or in Brazil, we could think about official state support in the form of agencies, in the form of procurement contracts which designate Solidarity Economy institutions as privileged sources for contracting for the government. You know, that is… So that’s one possibility there and then that’s much… That is likely but on a much more local city level scale inside the US. So I suppose I’m a little wary of talking about the Solidarity economy movement as a unified movement because I don’t think that is the case. It is a decentralized social movement. But it at its core, many of the constituents do have an oppositional relationship and continue to have an oppositional relationship to neoliberal processes. Absolutely. Do you wanna add anything to that, Julian? 

0:47:42.7 Julian Agyeman: Sorry? 

0:47:43.8 Maliha Safri: I said if you wanted to add anything to that, Julian.

0:47:45.6 Julian Agyeman: Oh, I’m good. We’ve got… Questions are coming in thick and fast now and we’ve got about seven minutes. So really quick answers. And this one, how can solidarity economies counteract the financialization of our land economy? There are two responses to it. This is from Zvi. But do you have a quick answer to that? How can solidarity economies counteract the financialization of our land? 

0:48:09.6 Maliha Safri: If we think about the financialization of the economy as moving increasingly the center of the entire economy towards the financial sector and the health of the financial sector, then I think everything about, first of all, even the financial sector inside the solidarity economy, if we think about credit unions, community development credit unions and public banks and rotating savings and credit associations that are zero interest, that is a very different model of the entire financial sector by design. And that the financial sector should be organized by either nonprofit or zero interest principles. Already inside that financial sector we see a financial sector that sees itself in direct opposition to the capitalist financial sector. And then, if you step outside just the financial sector of the solidarity economy itself, definitely I would say that the center of gravity for solidarity economies is towards production, towards the primacy of labor over capital. And it is about shifting towards satisfying core human needs, housing, food. So it’s not just the financial sector that is counteracting, let’s say, the financialization. I would say the entirety, the entire spectrum is counteracting that kind of drive.

0:49:52.6 Julian Agyeman: Crystal asks, can you talk a little bit more about your positionality within the participatory action research and how you navigated challenges that came up? 

0:50:04.4 Maliha Safri: You should contact me, please. I attached my msafri@drew.edu. If you’re interested in doing some of this work yourself, I think you have to think… And it’s a continual process. You have to think about your positionality and you have to be willing to let that research be community-led and relinquish the position of the masterful expert. There was this one great check a little bit for me because I’d been so integral in helping one worker cooperative get off the ground. And we do a whole workshop with organizers that are really trained in how… In decision-making in collectives, especially navigating conflict and how to decide on how to make decisions itself. And anyway, there was this moment where I’d been part of the group, but I am not part of the worker cooperative. I was there for the participatory action research part, but I wasn’t going to be a construction worker in the worker cooperative. And so, there was this moment where the consultant is asking us, “So who’s gonna vote?” And I rose, I raised my hand and it was a check because I don’t have a vote in that cooperative.

0:51:31.0 Maliha Safri: That would be a separate entity and the workers will have a vote, not me. So all this to say that I think you have to be thinking about that. But it is extremely important to also bring in experienced community organizers and experienced people who will also be able to help you see things that you could not see.

0:51:57.8 Julian Agyeman: Final question goes to Neil Garenflo. What’s next for your research? 

0:52:03.2 Maliha Safri: Thank you. So I’ve been thinking about, I’ve been attending many community defense trainings, especially around ICEWatch. Some of you are familiar with, with CopWatch, and CopWatch was… And I remember participating in that too, although that strangely was not as active in Harlem when I moved here. But now, ICEWatch kinds of community defense trainings. And I am going to all these trainings and at the end of them, they’re always ending. By the third meeting, the organizers were ending with, “Do your mapping. And here I am doing all this mapping stuff”. And I felt confused in the first. I said there hasn’t been a single map. What, there’s no maps in there to do your mapping. But I understood do your mapping is also in a different way. How do community organizers do mapping? How do you suggest undocumented people do mapping for safety and security? And this is one thing that we were not able to get into too much. But Solidarity Cities actually has many valences. In this country, we use the terminology sanctuary city, but actually in Europe, sanctuary cities are called solidarity cities. And so how do we think about community organizations mapping for community defense of undocumented immigrants and mapping not to make visible, but mapping for internal organizing purposes.

0:53:37.3 Maliha Safri: So a lot of this work was about visibility, but that is not gonna be the tack in this next four years. So how do we think about mapping for strength? Not visibility. Mapping that is going on inside communities. So that is really making, drawing me in terms of my labor, in terms of my time and my thinking now as well. And I really wanna push on that. And in addition, I would say there have been all these questions raised about the relationship between racial capitalism and post capitalism. And I know this conversation is one piece of that, but there is more to say about that. And so, I definitely see my future research being pulled there as well.

0:54:27.8 Julian Agyeman: Maliha, we’re gonna have to leave it there. What a fantastic presentation. I’m sorry I couldn’t get to all the questions. You have started a conversation and you can expect the server with your book on it to be over downloaded. It’ll break down I am sure. Can we give…

0:54:45.7 Maliha Safri: You can go to the Manifold edition of University of Minnesota to get to the open access version.

0:54:51.6 Julian Agyeman: Sure. Can we give Maliha a warm Cities@Tufts thank you. Thank you so much Maliha. Our next Cities@Tufts Colloquium is on February 19th where Duncan McLaren will talk about From City to Sink, Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice. Thank you so much again, Maliha.

0:55:11.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and Communications Manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.