Experimenting with alternative economies: four emergent counter-narratives of urban economic development

Neoliberalism is a powerful narrative that has shaped processes
of urban economic development across the globe. This paper
reports on four nascent ‘new economic’ narratives which
represent fundamentally different imaginaries of the urban
economy. Experiments informed by these narratives challenge
the dominant neoliberal logic in four key dimensions: What is the
purpose of economic development? What are the preferred
distributive mechanisms? Who governs the economy? What is
the preferred form of economic organisation? The emergence of
these experiments illustrates that cities are spaces where
counter-narratives canemerge and circulate. Acknowledgingthe
existence of these alternative visions opens up a wider set of
possibilities for future urban transitions.