East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Cooperatives in New Orleans, collective action and urban development, Anne Gessler

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

Cooperatives in New Orleans

bibliography

1153564388

Anne Gessler

collective action and urban development

"Cooperatives have been central to the development of New Orleans. Anne Gessler asserts that local cooperatives have reshaped its built environment by changing where people interact and with whom, helping them collapse social hierarchies and envision new political systems. Gessler tracks many neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of regional networks and stimulated urban growth in New Orleans. Studying alternative forms of social organization within the city's multiple integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal activism with international cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers' unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, these cooperative entities integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members. Besides economic development, neighborhood cooperatives participated in heady debates over urban land use, applying egalitarian cooperative principles to modernize New Orleans's crumbling infrastructure, monopolistic food distribution systems, and spotty welfare programs. As Gessler indicates, cooperative activists deployed street-level subsistence tactics to mobilize continual waves of ordinary people seizing control over mainstream economic and political institutions"--, Provided by publisher

Introduction: Unearthing a genealogy of grassroots economic development -- Section One: Utopian socialist cooperatives -- The Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonweath: modernizing infrastructure and public welfare at the dawn of the Twentieth Century -- Section Two: Rochdale cooperatives -- The New Orleans Housewives' League: white women's political equality and consumer reform -- The Consumers' Co-operative Union: embedding integrated popular front and war on poverty social programs in the South -- Section Three: Hybrid racial justice cooperatives -- Albert Dent and the Free Southern Theater: intergenerational civil rights cooperatives and the fight against racialized economic inequality -- The Louisiana Association of Cooperatives and Gathering Tree Growers' Collective: rebuilding a cooperative food economy in Katrina's aftermath -- Conclusion: Hope for a cooperative life: forecasting cooperative trends -- Notes -- Reference list -- Index