Law, the city and the poor: a roadmap

Abstract

In this introduction to the themed Special Feature ‘Law at the margins of the city’, we present a roadmap of concepts and practices across the various fields that are explored in this collection of articles. We invite readers to visit a disciplinary and creative encounter by untangling different routes and layers connecting law, finance, raciality, urban poverty and radical insurgencies. The aim is to delineate and reinaugurate an existing but still not entirely explored area of knowledge, in which the contributing articles provoke insightful critiques about legal articulations on and from the margins of the city. Through a multi-sited perspective, reflected in the contexts from which the invited authors are writing, we suggest that the ‘problem of poverty’ is not only globalised, but also embedded in and facilitated by globally effective legal processes. By bringing together variegated urban experiences in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy, Mozambique, Colombia, Turkey and India, that could be read as isolated and localised, a clear global pattern reveals itself in the transformation of cities and their margins. Likewise, a global web of insurgent practices emerges through the local ways in which law is appropriated by resistance groups from the margins. As will be seen in the contributions to this Special Feature, by disputing law and by disputing space, these ongoing practices can work to destabilise an entire world-making system of property, raciality and urban organisation.