Local Democracy, Community Culture, and the Non-sexist City

For more on local democracy and its relationship to the Pluralist Commonwealth, see Chapter 12 of American Beyond Capitalism.
In the spirit of traditional theorists like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill—and modern writers like Benjamin Barber, Jane Mansbridge (and, in certain areas, anarchist-oriented theorists like Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky)—the Pluralist Commonwealth vision rests firmly on the principle that over the long haul rebuilding local democracy with a ‘small d,’ from the bottom up, is a necessary requirement of renewing the basis of meaningful Democracy with a ‘big D’ in the political-economic system as a whole.  It also is based on the principle that reconstituting a culture of community—that “we are all in it together”—is a necessary precondition of solving many of our national problems. This in turn requires recognition that it is not enough to simply move in the direction of new, democratic economic institutions. The entire community also includes stay-at-home spouses, the elderly, the young, the infirm and many other members of the community not defined simply by their role at the workplace.
A classic study of the plywood cooperatives is: Edward Greenberg, Workplace Democracy: The Political Effects of Participation (1986).
Attention must also be paid to how communities are stabilized in any larger system, and how a culture of common responsibility and community participation can be nurtured institutionally. (The latter also requires attention to whether the institutional design of communities may permit or nurture different forms of development than those associated with traditional capitalism, traditional socialism and models based primarily on worker-owned or self-managed enterprise—especially in the case of larger scale enterprise that may severely impact overall community functioning, politics and culture.) Another name for the Pluralist Commonwealth model might be “A Community-Sustaining System.”
Studies of American worker-owned plywood cooperatives also suggest the importance of exploring different community-integrated models for larger firms that may move in such a direction—and they pose additional questions concerning the cultural implications of some forms of worker-ownership which may generate narrowly focused political and cultural norms that do not necessarily support a larger community-sustaining culture. 
A critical element of a community-sustaining system is also its capacity to nurture new roles for men, women and people of different sexual orientation—and especially those who wish to raise families and participate in community life. This is not simply a matter of attitude; it is a matter of altering the spatial and institutional way in which communities are oriented—a subject rarely explored in narrowly ‘economic’ models.
For more on community and the non-sexist city, see Chapter 13 of America Beyond Capitalism. See also: Making a Place for Community.

More work on local democracy, community culture, and the non-sexist city