This paper seeks to explain the persistence of inner-city deprivation in spite of sustained regeneration efforts, through demonstrating how urban regeneration policies are embedded in peculiar political-institutional power dynamics that actually contribute to the further disempowerment of the already disempowered groups in inner cities. The reconstruction of the post-war planning history of one specific urban neighbourhood, the South Bank in central London, will allow to demonstrate how the constantly reworked urban regeneration models comprise specific power relations that have important repercussions for the success and failure of regeneration programmes. The focus here will particularly be on how the fall of the South Bank's prominent era of community-based development in the 1970s is firmly embedded in changing political-institutional frameworks that, after a spell of `community power', were soon to restore the power of the local cultural, political and business elites over the local regeneration agenda.