Abstract
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.
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Notes
But not Putnam et al.’s, which Bourdieu takes as the systems of trust that the holders of capital take advantage of to strengthen their power. And indeed Tilly seems to permit its use in this way too.
Although at other times Tilly seems to correlate “commitment” to the actions of (presumably oppositional) “trust networks.” See the interesting discussion of the phrase “the upper element” and Tilly’s preference for “ruling classes” [note the plural] in Review Forum, Trust and Rule, Tilly 2006, p.4.
Tilly’s definition of relations of trust is a very specific one, relations built around “weighty, high-risk, long-term collective enterprises,” (Tilly 2006, p.7, and is narrower than the one used here. Further, Tilly differentiates between cultural and social relations, and here I take cultural to be a subset of social.
Tilly uses the phrase “political control” as contrasted to resource extraction (Tilly 1998, p. 33).
I have elsewhere described the two sources of opposition as deprivation and discontent. (Marcuse, Forthcoming).
I have dealt with some of the drawbacks of this simplification as applied to the phrase “divided cities” (Marcuse 1989), and it becomes apparent in the short historical discussion to follow here.
David Harvey has pioneered in developing analysis along these lines (Harvey 1973), and there is a large body of work, much of it neo-Marxist, now pushing the issues. The current interest in the work of Henri Lefebvre and organization around claims to the “Right to the City” go along these lines. See Brenner et al. 2009.
The United States Supreme Court struggled with this issue in its landmark decision legitimating zoning under the United States Constitution (Euclid vs. Ambler 1926), and some commentators today consider it to have been mistaken in accepting this particular division. Even a separation between high-rise and low-rise buildings is today often questioned, as in new developments that deliberately mix sizes and configurations for variety and aesthetic appeal.
An expanded but earlier version of much of what follows, with more detailed citation from sources, may be found in Marcuse 2002.
I have explored this formulation: linking the concerns of the deprived and the discontent, in the context of the lessons of 1968, in Marcuse, Forthcoming.
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Marcuse, P. The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly. Theor Soc 39, 471–485 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9117-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9117-1