ABSTRACT
This chapter will introduce and analyse the relationship of social movements to ‘regeneration’. It will chart the recent emergence of a genuinely global civil society, within which the global and the local interpolate each other in complex ways, and it will focus upon the actions of networked movements with the capacity to shape and contest our understanding of social, economic and environmental change. It explains why these developments are important for those working on the management of regeneration processes and gives some examples of how a sensibility to the issues raised by social movements might allow for critical refl ection on the ideological and normative logic behind regeneration processes associated with the new urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 1989). It also argues that regeneration has to be conceived of as a fi eld of relationships that are always open to new inputs-energy, knowledge and resources-and that social movements are potential bearers of such inputs. Whilst these might be considered as challenging to corporate led or entrepreneurial models of regeneration, the argument here is that the confi dence to embrace these inputs allows for the emergence of potentially novel solutions and innovations, which might otherwise be overlooked or perceived solely as sources of confl ict and struggle.
