What We Bring With Us and What We Leave Behind: Six Months in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The authors, a family, reflect on their experiences living, volunteering, and going to school in South Africa for six months. They sought to live in a society in which white people were not the majority and to experience the transformation of the new South Africa, not as tourists, but as participants

The Operation was Successful but the Patient Died: The Politics of Crisis and Homelessness in Post-Katrina New Orleans

On July 4th, 2007, a small group of housing activists set up a tent city encampment in a plaza adjacent to New Orleans City Hall. The action resulted in the creation of Homeless Pride, a small group of politicized Plaza residents. Six months later, hundreds of homeless people were moved from the park, and it was fenced off. Using archival videos, interviews, and news media, this thesis analyzes the opportunities and constraints that activists, service providers, and local officials faced in light of two intersecting and overlapping contexts. The first context is the immediate crisis of the levee failures after Hurricane Katrina, and the second is the longer-term national political-economic context of “neoliberal urbanism”. Because of dire short-term circumstances, Homeless Pride articulated a message of homelessness as a “crisis” even though they had larger structural goals and vision. In light of recent “Occupy” movements, this case study addresses crucial questions for organizers and policymakers attempting to combat poverty and wealth inequality

The Operation was Successful but the Patient Died: The Politics of Crisis and Homelessness in Post-Katrina New Orleans

On July 4th, 2007, a small group of housing activists set up a tent city encampment in a plaza adjacent to New Orleans City Hall. The action resulted in the creation of Homeless Pride, a small group of politicized Plaza residents. Six months later, hundreds of homeless people were moved from the park, and it was fenced off. Using archival videos, interviews, and news media, this thesis analyzes the opportunities and constraints that activists, service providers, and local officials faced in light of two intersecting and overlapping contexts. The first context is the immediate crisis of the levee failures after Hurricane Katrina, and the second is the longer-term national political-economic context of “neoliberal urbanism”. Because of dire short-term circumstances, Homeless Pride articulated a message of homelessness as a “crisis” even though they had larger structural goals and vision. In light of recent “Occupy” movements, this case study addresses crucial questions for organizers and policymakers attempting to combat poverty and wealth inequality

We Are What Comes Next: Organizing Economic Democracy in the Bronx

Economic democracy is a framework for the cooperative configuration of society, from daily interpersonal relational practice to institutional governance, to a reconstructed set of state-market relationships and political economy. As such an overarching framework, economic democracy has many movement mothers. It is politically pluralistic and even ambiguous. This dissertation examines the work of the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, founded by community organizers in the Bronx in response to ongoing frustration with the process and results of planning, housing, and economic development theory and practice in the Bronx dating back decades. Rather than pursuing a strategy of cooperative enterprise development, the group is pursuing a strategy of creating a community enterprise network. This focuses on the incubation of institutional infrastructure to shift the Bronx political and economically towards economic democracy. These projects envision capacities of community-led planning and policy development, high-road small business development, advanced manufacturing and digital fabrication, education and training, as well as civic action coordination and a fund for capitalizing, investing in, and sustaining the network of institutions in the borough. Through semi-structured interviews, document analysis and participant observation, this dissertation seeks to understand how this group of people understand and define economic in this case, and secondly, how does this group of people propose to operationalize that vision of economic democracy in the Bronx? Through a multi-year embedded research process, the dissertation sketches out several core themes for how economic democracy is being developed here as a framework for shared or collective ownership of economic assets and their democratic management. This working definition arises from, challenges, and is applicable but not confined to, urban community organizing and economic development practice. It both intersects with and parallels from global anti-capitalist development frameworks and movements. Core themes arise in regard to challenging assumptions and practices of community organizing, anchor institution procurement initiatives, cooperative enterprise development, scale and scalability, and the construction of durable urban governing regimes. In the final instance, rather than a cooperative enterprise development network, BCDI’s work is seen as attempting to construct an “equity regime” for economic democracy, drawing on the lessons and failures of the progressive cities movement. This dissertation contributes to literatures of equity planning, community organizing, economic democracy, the challenges of and obstacles to constructing durable political and economic power for people of color in the United States, community-labor coalitions and alliances, and freedom struggle in the United States

Back to (Non)Basics: Worker Cooperatives as Economic Development

Here was no mere Ideology. [Cooperatives] seemed to offer a peaceable way of achieving democratic control over the means of production and distribution. To many who wondered what they might do to transform the profit system, with its cruelties and hardships and the constant threat of breakdown, cooperation appeared as a heaven-sent answer. [...] At any rate, the cooperative movement in America is an actuality, complete with lunatic fringe. Some observers have discounted it as merely another passing fad, like technocracy. And while it is true that past depressions have called forth an interest in cooperation which [sic] has subsided with a rising tide of prosperity, I believe this time it is here to stay.—Marquis W. Childs, The North American Review (1937

Back to (Non)Basics: Worker Cooperatives as Economic Development

Here was no mere Ideology. [Cooperatives] seemed to offer a peaceable way of achieving democratic control over the means of production and distribution. To many who wondered what they might do to transform the profit system, with its cruelties and hardships and the constant threat of breakdown, cooperation appeared as a heaven-sent answer. [...] At any rate, the cooperative movement in America is an actuality, complete with lunatic fringe. Some observers have discounted it as merely another passing fad, like technocracy. And while it is true that past depressions have called forth an interest in cooperation which [sic] has subsided with a rising tide of prosperity, I believe this time it is here to stay.—Marquis W. Childs, The North American Review (1937