“Surplus Humanity” and the Margins of Legality - Chapman University

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26 Chapman Law Review [Vol. 14:1
early examples of this model of urban growth and the emergence
of slums.
Planned urbanization proves particularly attractive to
finance capital because this unavoidably state-sponsored and
debt-financed activity gives speculative capital security of
accumulation without getting directly involved with the
politically volatile terrain of industrial production. The first
prototype of planned urban development under capitalism was
furnished by the rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s
under Georges-Eugene Haussmann. 165 As a consequence of
state-sponsored urban reconstruction, Paris emerged as a center
of commerce and bourgeois life, and its emerging slums were
removed from the heart of the city to its outer rim. 166 While
Haussmann‘s designs ―transform[ed] the capital city into the city
of capital,‖ 167 they also demonstrated that ―the root cause of
urban slumming seems to lie not in urban poverty but in urban
wealth.‖ 168
The Haussmann model was replicated in the United States
after World War II; first in New York under Robert Moses, and
then in most metropolitan areas. 169 While predominantly white
middle classes, ensconced in debt-financed suburbia, turned to
the pursuit of individual accumulation, protection of property,
and so-called family values, the darker under-classes and the
marginalized had to contend with removals, blighted inner-city
ghettos, and inhuman public housing projects. This phase of
finance capital‘s deployment in urban reordering ended with the
property-market crash of 1973, and bankruptcy of New York City
in 1975, with global repercussions. 170 The recipe of neoliberalism
163 GARETH STEDMAN JONES, OUTCAST LONDON: A STUDY IN THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN CLASSES IN VICTORIAN SOCIETY 209–10 (1971).
164 FRANK M. SNOWDEN, NAPLES IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, 1884–1911 38–40 (1995).
165 For a detailed account, see MICHEL CARMONA, HAUSSMANN: HIS LIFE AND TIMES,
AND THE MAKING OF MODERN PARIS 149, 151–52, 155–56 (2002).
166 See id. at 9, 432–39; DAVID HARVEY, PARIS, CAPITAL OF MODERNITY 95–99 (2003).
167 Derek Gregory, Introduction: Troubling Geographies, in DAVID HARVEY: A
CRITICAL READER, supra note 101, at 13.
168 VERMA, supra note 55, at xix.
169 See Kenneth T. Jackson, Robert Moses and the Rise of New York: The Power
Broker in Perspective, in ROBERT MOSES AND THE MODERN CITY: THE TRANSFORMATION
OF NEW YORK 67, 70–71 (Hilary Ballon & Kenneth T. Jackson eds., 2007). In the process,
the scale and scope of urbanization was transformed by re-engineering not just existing
cities but whole metropolitan regions through suburbanization, highway systems, and
infrastructural transformations. Finance capital found a new outlet in public and private
debt, while urban geography and demography reconfigured class and race divides.
170 See ROBERT A. CARO, THE POWER BROKER: ROBERT MOSES AND THE FALL OF NEW
YORK 615–16, 618–19, 795, 899–900, 902–04 (1974); Roger E. Alcaly & Helen Bodian,
New York‘s Fiscal Crisis & the Economy, in THE FISCAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CITIES 30,
30–33 (Roger E. Alcaly & David Mermelstein eds., 1977).