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

•Neoliberalism has been the dominant narrative of urban economic development in recent decades.•The paper introduces four alternative narratives of urban economic development: degrowth; collaborative consumption; solidarity economy and social entrepreneurship.•Each of these narratives informs and is reproduced by urban experiments in transformative social innovation.•These alternative narratives open the possibility of a more diverse range of possible urban economic pathways.