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.
Borowiak et al. (Sun,) studied this question.