The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly

Chuck Tilly's late work on coercion, capital, and trust is provocative when applied to changes in urban form. Extending those categories for use in tracing the history of conflicts in cities about how development should be handled highlights the changing roles of economic and physical and cultural power, and the growing importance of trust in these processes. This is a speculative article with a political hope. The speculation is around the potential of using an expanded version of key categories of Charles Tilly's to create a framework for understanding the nature of change in the form of cities over time. The political hope is to use that framework to illuminate the possibilities of social change in cities today in the direction of social justice.