Cities are a sprawling mass of things: buildings, pipes, wires, pavements, parking lots, machines, roads, tunnels, bridges. This landscape of things is often what we focus on when we think “city”. But alongside these bits and pieces of city life there is a dense web of living entities, both human and non-human, that make cities. It is the relations between these elements and how they come together that define city life. In our next step on our journey to save the city, I focus on what I call the players: the people who will put our strategies from the last chapter into practice, and make the emergency moves I outline in the next chapter. These players operate through dense and interconnected relations with others. How each player sees and shapes itself, how they relate to others, and how they use, mobilize and change our landscape of things, ultimately will determine our success. These players form our breakaway coalition, acting as first responders that will tackle our triple emergencies. It is a lot to ask. It means taking risks, feeling uncomfortable and standing up to powerful interests. There is a huge responsibility to change direction and take rapid, urgent and decisive action. But this is what is needed if we are to save the city.

I have intentionally developed a broad list of players. I want readers of this book to find their persona in this change game. But more importantly, it is crucial to understand that a broad range of actors make and remake cities. Given the complexity of urban life it is often quite difficult to identify who actually does what, who is in charge and who can actually make things happen. This is both a strength and a weakness. There is no single office or seat of power that can determine the future of cities. Cities are certainly powerful, in the sense that they are full of power, and we need to work hard to uncover who has this power, where it resides, how it is applied, and importantly how its focus can be disrupted and shared as we act in the emergency context in which we find ourselves.

We have to think about power in a relational way (Anderson 2017). Power does not just emanate from a single source.