What is the social economy and how can it reorient market-making to forge equitable local economies and reverse patterns of socio-spatial inequality?1 This chapter takes up these questions within a fundamentally Polanyian framework attentive to contemporary initiatives within urban planning and community development to build social economies that counter the commodification of land and labour with alternative institutions of accumulation and democratic community control. Empirically, the chapter investigates the recent flourishing of community economic development initiatives in the City of Toronto, as the potential site for a counter-movement to neoliberal market forms.

Theoretically, the chapter probes the concept of social economy to address the vexing paradox that community economic development seeks to mobilize local capacities and assets from within the very communities that have been most severely compromised by neoliberal governmentality. We argue that in order to reject a functional role for the social economy as a kind of neoliberal communitarianism – local communities and non-profit agencies fulfilling welfare functions more properly situated at the scale of state governance – some clear criteria are needed for articulating a more radical mode of market-making for social justice. To this end, we advocate an interpretation of social economy as comprised of three pillars of market-making, namely redistributive justice, economic democracy and relational autonomy (Rankin 2013). We suggest that the three pillars, which should be understood as normative principles, could serve as a conceptual framework for exploring actually existing market diversity.

Community economic development (CED) refers to a sector of practice and an associated literature that aims to analyse and mitigate the consequences of historic patterns of uneven investment, racial discrimination and gender oppression, and to catalyse economic development within marginalized and disinvested communities. CED encompasses critical debates about the appropriate scale and place for making markets as well as competing normative theories of action. We read the dynamic CED sector in Toronto against the notion of social economy in order to probe the conditions of possibility for CED to play a role in making socially just markets.