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

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4 Chapman Law Review [Vol. 14:1
saturated by legality, contemplate a slum like Dharavi. 16 Rather,
slums emerge as liminal spaces 17 where law, extra-legality, and
illegality are braided to produce the other side of universality—
―moral and legal no man‘s land, where universality finds its
spatial limits.‖ 18
This article examines the production and persistence of
urban slums in order to explore and evaluate remedial strategies
that could ensure adequate housing for the urban poor. This
inquiry is informed by the spatial turn in social inquiry that
deems spatial factors crucial to social phenomena, 19 and the
renewed interest in urban sociology and ―the city.‖ 20 It takes
cognizance of the mutually constitutive roles of law and space, 21
and of the fact that ―[w]e live in a time of porous legality or of
legal porosity, multiple networks of legal orders forcing us to
constant transitions and trespassings.‖ 22 First, the article
presents a picture of Dharavi to underscore the complexity and
gravity of the problem of urban slums. Second, it articulates a
theoretical framework to argue that urban slums are produced by
16 See JURGEN HABERMAS, THE STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC
SPHERE: AN INQUIRY INTO A CATEGORY OF BOURGEOIS SOCIETY 74–75 (1999). See
generally HABERMAS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE (Craig Calhoun ed., 1993); AFTER
HABERMAS: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE PUBLIC SPHERE (Nick Crossley & John Michael
Roberts eds., 2004).
17 According to Victor Turner:
The attributes of liminality or liminal personae (‗threshold people‘) are
necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip
through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions
in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt
and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention,
and ceremonial.
VICTOR TURNER, THE RITUAL PROCESS: STRUCTURE AND ANTI-STRUCTURE 95 (1969).
18 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Towards a Critique of the Socio-logos of Justice: The
Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality, 7 SOC. IDENTITIES 421, 422
(2001).
19 See generally DAVID HARVEY, THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY: AN ENQUIRY
INTO THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL CHANGE (1990); EDWARD W. SOJA, POSTMODERN
GEOGRAPHIES: THE REASSERTION OF SPACE IN CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY (1989); SPACE &
SOCIAL THEORY: INTERPRETING MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY (Georges Benko & Ulf
Strohmayer eds., 1997); PLACE AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY (Michael Keith & Steve
Pile eds., 1993).
20 See, e.g., EDWARD W. SOJA, POSTMETROPOLIS: CRITICAL STUDIES OF CITIES AND
REGIONS xi, xii (2000); ASH AMIN & NIGEL THRIFT, CITIES: REIMAGINING THE URBAN 2–4
(2002); POSTMODERN CITIES AND SPACES 1 (Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson eds.,
1995).
21 See generally Nicholas K. Blomley, Text and Context: Rethinking the Law-Space
Nexus, 13 PROGRESS IN HUM. GEOGRAPHY 512 (1989); NICHOLAS K. BLOMLEY, LAW,
SPACE, AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF POWER (1994); Desmond Manderson, Beyond the
Provincial: Space, Aesthetics, and Modernist Legal Theory, 20 MELB. U. L. REV. 1048
(1996); Chris Butler, Critical Legal Studies and the Politics of Space, 18 SOC. & LEGAL
STUD. 313 (2009).
22 BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS, TOWARD A NEW COMMON SENSE: LAW, SCIENCE
AND POLITICS IN THE PARADIGMATIC TRANSITION 473 (1995).