This book project is designed to advance a new way to think about city power. It criticizes the current literature's failure to understand city power as structured by state-imposed legal rules that grant cities certain powers and deny them others. The book will demonstrate the importance of these structures by examining the kind of state-created rules under which seven major American cities (Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco) now operate. Doing so will enable readers to see how different kinds of incentives for local action, and different kinds of futures for city development, are fostered by alternative legal systems. These differences will be illustrated through a discussion of specific city powers: home rule, the ability to control revenues and expenditures, land use and development, and education. The final section of the book will then build on the lessons learned from these earlier chapters by examining how city structures can promote or inhibit alternative futures for major American cities and, equally importantly, how revising city structures can change the ways in which central cities relate to the larger metropolitan area in which they are located.