Session 5: Affordability as Community Resistance for Public Health Regeneration

Описание: This week we are joined by Drs. Renee Hatcher and Stacey Sutton (she/they).

Renee Hatcher is a human rights and community development lawyer. She is an Assistant Professor of Law and the Director of the Community Enterprise & Solidarity Economy Clinic at UIC Law School. Prior to joining UIC Law School, Hatcher taught in the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law and served a post-doctoral appointment at the University of Texas-Austin's Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. Previously, Professor Hatcher served as a staff attorney and project director for the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights (CLC), where she directed a community development law project providing legal services to entrepreneurs, community-based organizations, and individuals interested in expunging their criminal history to create better opportunities for local marginalized communities. During her time at CLC, Hatcher also served as lead counsel on community benefit agreement campaigns and matters of regional equity, and represented individuals in matters of employment discrimination and prisoners' rights in the U.S. Northern District Court of Illinois.

Hatcher currently serves as a board member for the New Economy Coalition, co-chair of the AALS Clinicians of Color Subcommittee, and a member of the Law for Black Lives Clinic Cohort Development Team. She received her law degree from New York University School of Law and her B.A. in Political Science from Indiana University-Bloomington. Her work and research focus on solidarity economy theory/practice and the law.


Stacey Sutton, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, and the Director of Applied Research and Strategic Partnerships at UIC’s Social Justice Initiative. She recently launched the Solidarity Economy Research, Policy & Law Project which aims to advance interdisciplinary research, critical analysis, enabling policy, popular education, and community alliances that fortify solidarity economy ecosystems, and highlights the transformative potential of projects operating at the intersection of social movement and prefigurative politics.

Sutton's scholarship and teaching are in community economic development, with a central focus on racial and economic justice; economic democracy and worker-owned cooperatives; movement building and the solidarity economy; gentrification and dispossession; neighborhood small business dynamics; and disparate effects of punitive policy. Her frameworks for research and community engagement entail advancing “cooperative cities” and the solidarity economy and critiquing “punitive cities.”

In a recent study of cooperative cities, Sutton examines how local governments in 12 cities are creating enabling environments for worker cooperatives and community wealth building, by supporting the development and sustainability of worker-owned enterprises and deepening the cooperative ecosystem. Local governments can play an important supportive role, the cooperative movement is principally grassroots-led. Through Sutton’s new body of cooperative city research, Real Black Utopias, she examines the infrastructure and ideology of Black-led cooperatives and solidarity economy ecosystems in multiple cities.

“Punitive cities” encapsulates Sutton’s diverse research on racially disparate effects of universal city policies and place-based initiatives. This includes studies such as the distributional effects of automated enforcement red-light and speed cameras and the economic burden of ticket fines and fees for Black, Latinx, and low-income Chicago residents; racial transition amid gentrification; the impact of business improvement districts for small businesses in New York City; and the effects of municipal enforcement of mundane land-use rules, building codes, and zoning rules for Black-owned neighborhood businesses.