ABSTRACT

The apparent flattening of urban governance and a more open, participatory planning process conceal new hierarchies that control who has access to resources and decision-making and who needs to be contained. The uneven nature of capitalist development in shallow growth and severe, often savage, collapse alienates the dispossessed workers from politics and political arenas and also from wages, welfare and socially 'cleansed urban centres'. Reassembling the city is the very core of resistive politics, and alternative economics confronts a hard-wired system that is not that easy to dismantle, let alone rebuild. Social economics enable communities to move along the continuum from protest to reform because it offers either a partial or complete historical rejection of the established rules of international capitalism in order to access resources and services. The resource dependency argument is an important one for social enterprises through the pressures that funders can exert on the behaviours, structures and programmes they pursue.