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

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28 Chapman Law Review [Vol. 14:1
states have been far more effective in the destruction of mass
housing than in its construction.‖ 179
Parallel with the neoliberal reordering of global production
and accumulation, cities are becoming a primary arena of the
convergence between the domains of economy and culture. 180
Accordingly, a confluence of reconfiguration of urban space and
commodification of symbolic forms is underway. 181 A remarkable
feature of post-Fordist production systems is the increasing
significance of production and consumption of cultural
products. 182 In the new economic geography of capital
accumulation, Fordist mass production is increasingly moved to
low wage areas, usually away from urban centers, both globally
and nationally. 183 As a result, the city becomes exclusively a zone
of the service and consumption economy, and urban space itself
turns into a cultural commodity to be consumed along market
principles. 184 Skills suitable for the service sector and/or the
capacity to consume what this space has to offer become the only
grounds for eligibility to be in the city. Deindustrialization and
flight of the ineligible often leave in their wake ―dead zones‖ that
become ―developers‘ utopias‖ or ―privatopias.‖ 185 The ineligible
who choose to stay back are eventually confined to the informal
economy and deprived of secure shelter. The commodification of
urban space, with culture and aesthetics at a premium,
disciplines the ineligible and the dispossessed through a range of
legal and architectural measures. These include ―secure
architecture,‖ ―zero tolerance policing,‖ and ―preemptive crime
control,‖ in the neoliberal ―post-justice‖ city. 186
179 Berner, Learning from Informal Markets, supra note 38, at 295.
180 For transformative impacts of neoliberal globalization on urban spaces around the
world, see Swapna Banerjee-Guha, Introduction, in ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION:
TRANSFORMATIVE CITIES IN THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER 1, 1–5 (Swapna Banerjee-Guha ed.,
2010) [hereinafter ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION]; William Sites, Primitive
Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement, 18 SOC. THEORY 121,
128 (2000).
181 For a thoughtful survey, see generally Allen J. Scott, Capitalism, Cities, and the
Production of Symbolic Forms, 26 TRANSACTIONS OF THE INST. BRIT. GEOGRAPHERS 11
(2001), available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-5661.00003/abstract.
182 Id. at 16.
183 Douglas S. Massey, Social Structure, Household Strategies, and the Cumulative
Causation of Migration, 56 POPULATION INDEX 3, 14–17 (1990), available at
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3644185.
184 See generally Timothy A. Gibson, Selling City Living: Urban Branding
Campaigns, Class Power and the Civic Good, 8 INT‘L J. CULTURAL STUD. 259 (2005).
185 Gordon MacLeod et al., Negotiating the Contemporary City: Introduction, 40 URB.
STUD. 1655, 1656 (2003) (citation omitted). See also Henry W. McGee, Jr., Seattle's
Central District, 1990–2006: Integration of Displacement?, 39 URB. LAW. 167, 169–71
(2007).
186 See Don Mitchell, Postmodern Geographical Praxis? The Postmodern Impulse and
the War Against Homeless People in the ‗Post-justice‘ City, in POSTMODERN GEOGRAPHY:
THEORY AND PRAXIS 57, 77, 82 (Claudio Minca ed., 2001); Don Mitchell, The Annihilation