In The Mystery of Capitalism , the darling of neoliberalism, Hernando de Soto posits that secure property titles explain “why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else.” While social scientists have taken him to task for an oversimplification of the causes and remedies of poverty, historians have contributed little to this important policy debate. Applying comparative methods across time and space, such a retrospective analysis exposes serious flaws in de Soto’s thesis. Case studies of Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City covering successive, fifty-year periods support his contention that property law was the single most important factor in determining the fate of rural migrants trying to find a place to live in these exploding cities. But in each case, residential property played a far more complex role in creating the social and physical geography of the city than its simple exchange value. This article illuminates some of these alternative economic uses and embedded cultural meanings of identities of place. It also shows how urban growth machines create capital value in property for some by creating environmental injustice of substandard conditions of everyday life for others.
United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Enhancing Urban Safety and Security: Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 (London, 2007). The world population is about 6.7 billion people. Also see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York, 2006). Cf. the scathing criticism of Thomas Angotti, who takes Davis to task for his use of the word slum. See Thomas Angotti, "Apocalyptic Anti-Urbanism: Mike and His Planet of Slums," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30 (2006): 961-67.
2.
Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850-1902 (Madison, WI, 1985), xiii, for the quotation; ibid., 132, for the population statistics. Also see David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, MD, 1985); and Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, La Ville (1852-1870), new ed. (Paris, 1997). For Chicago, see Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Duncan, The Negro Population of Chicago: A Study of Residential Succession (Chicago, 1957). For Mexico, see Fernando Romero and Mexico Laboratorio de la Ciudad, "Zmvm: Zona Metropolitana Del Valle De Mexico," in Zmvm: Zona Metropolitana Del Valle De Mexico (San Angel, Mexico, 2000); and Priscilla Connolly, "Mexico City: Our Common Future?" Environment and Urbanization 11 (April 1999): 53-78.
3.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York, 2000), 7, for the quotation. For a brief sketch of de Soto, see "Hernando de Soto’s Biography," www.cato.org/special/friedman/Desoto/index.hmtl (accessed May 24, 2010).
4.
A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., London 1500-1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London, 1986), 39, for demographic statistics; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City, 1st American ed. (New York, 2005), 305-18, for population statistics; Harvey, Consciousness, 68-80, for railroad mileage; and David H. Pinkney, "Migration to Paris during the Second Empire," Journal of Modern History 25 (March 1953): 1-12, for a detailed geographic analysis of the farm to factory migration.
5.
Jones, Paris, 317, for the quotation; and Pinkney, "Migration to Paris."
6.
Harvey, Consciousness, 82 for the quotation.
7.
Ibid., 94.
8.
Ibid., 96-166.
9.
David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1995), 10, for the quotation. Cf. ibid., 1-22; Allan Mitchell, "Obsessive Questions and Faint Answers: The French Response to Tuberculosis in the Belle Époque," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 62 (1988): 215-35; and David S. Barnes, "The Rise and Fall of Tuberculosis in Belle-Époque France: A Reply to Allan Mitchell," Social History of Medicine 5 (1992): 279-90.
10.
See Jones, Paris, chap. 9, on Haussmann; and L. G. Stevenson, "Putting Disease on the Map: The Early Use of Spot Maps in Yellow Fever," Journal of the History of Medicine 20 (1965): 226-61. Also see Sabine Barles and Laurence Lestel, "The Nitrogen Question: Urbanization, Industrialization, and River Quality in Paris, 1830-1939," Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 794-812; David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore, 2006); and Anthony Sutcliffe, The Autumn of Central Paris: The Defeat of Town Planning, 1850-1970, Studies in Urban History (London, 1970).
11.
Shapiro, Housing the Poor, 85, for the quotations.
12.
Ibid., chap. 5; Harvey, Consciousness, 145-67; and Roger-Henri Guerrand, Les Origines Du Logement Social En France (Paris, 1966). Also see Rosalind H. Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
13.
Shapiro, Housing the Poor, 128, for the quotation; ibid., passim, 111-33.
14.
Barnes, Making of a Social Disease, 81, for the first quotation; Shapiro, Housing the Poor, 137, for the second quotation. On the impacts of germ theory on contemporary spatial perspectives, see Harold L. Platt, "From Hygeia to the Garden City: Bodies, Houses, and the Rediscovery of the Slum in Manchester ," Journal of Urban History33 (2007): 756-72; and Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way-Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 (Montreal, 1996).
15.
Barnes, Making of a Social Disease, 83-111.
16.
Ibid., 114, for the quotation; ibid., 112-37.
17.
Jones, Paris, 359, for the quotation; ibid., 385-425; Sutcliffe, Autumn of Central Paris.
18.
The basic texts on the formation of the ghetto are St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945); Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York, 1983). On the post-WWII era, also see John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North, Historical Studies of Urban America (Chicago, 1996); and Eileen McMahon, Which Parish Are You From? A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations (Lexington, 1995).
19.
For the great migration and race riot, see James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989); Spear, Black Chicago; William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970).
20.
Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, 2005), 167-71; and Margaret Garb, "Drawing the ‘Color Line’: Race and Real Estate in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago," Journal of Urban History32 (2006): 773-78.
21.
Philpott, Slum and Ghetto, 127, for the statistics; ibid., 111-200. Also see Duncan and Duncan, Negro Population.
22.
Duncan and Duncan, Negro Population, 145, for the quotation; ibid., 142-56, for statistics.
23.
Wendy Plotkin , "Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing and Restrictive Covenants in Chicago, 1900-1953" (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1999), 2, for the quotation; ibid., 1-42.
24.
See James Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison, WI, 1956); de Soto, Mystery of Capital; and Walter T. K. Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion ( New York, 2008).
25.
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Plotkin , "Deeds of Mistrust"
26.
Weston Arthur Goodspeed and Daniel David Healy, History of Cook County, Illinois, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1909), 1:290-91.
27.
See Everett Guy Ballard, Captain Streeter, Pioneer (Chicago, 1914), for an autobiographical memoir recorded by Ballard. For his final act, see Chicago Tribune, February 7-14, 1918.
28.
Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1930, July 4, 1931.
29.
Chicago Daily News, June 10, 1953, for the quotation; ibid., June 12, 1953, for the story of the apartment building at 4500 Vincennes; ibid., June 11-20, 1953. In addition, the records showed that 180 people had died in fires in slum buildings in the ghetto, caused most often by overloaded electrical circuits; and 57 people were on record for rat bites during the year. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York, 1940). Wright’s novel was based on a true story. See Richard Cahan, "Another Native Son," Chicago Magazine (June 2001): 89-91, 124-30. Ironically, on the day the infant died, March 27, 1953, the city announced a massive slum clearance project on the Near South Side, which would be funded in large part by private developers. See Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1953.
30.
"Chicago Shame," Time, June 29, 1953, 75, for the revelation of ten thousand complaints; Chicago Daily News, June 13-19, 1953.
31.
Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb, IL, 1984); Roger Biles, Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race and the Governing of Chicago (DeKalb, IL, 1995); and Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago, 2005).
32.
Peter M. Ward, Mexico City, Rev. 2nd ed. (New York, 1998), 159, for the quotation; ibid., 1-86, for an excellent overview of the national economy.
33.
Diane E. Davis, "The Social Construction of Mexico City: Political Conflict and Urban Development, 1950-1966," Journal of Urban History24 (1998): 364-415.
34.
Ibid. Also see Keith Pezzoli, Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Mexico City (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 3-35, 69-104. Pezzoli illustrates the plight of the average worker by calculating that one day’s minimum wage could buy 18 pounds of beans in 1981 but only 5.5 pounds ten years later. In a similar way, Susan Eckstein found in 1987 that almost all of her long-term oral history respondents reported a significant decline in basic conditions of life. Many were reduced to one meal a day. See Susan Eckstein, "Formal versus Substantive Democracy: Poor People’s Politics in Mexico City," Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 6 (1990): 213-39. Also see Mercedes González de la Rocha, "From the Resources of Poverty to the Poverty of Resources? The Erosion of a Survival Model," Latin American Perspectives 28 (2001): 72-100.
35.
On Ajusco, I draw heavily on Pezzoli, Human Settlements; and Miguel Diaz-Barriga, "Urban Politics in the Valley of Mexico: A Case Study of Urban Movements in the Ajusco Region of Mexico City, 1970-1987" (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1991).
36.
Diaz-Barriga, "Urban Politics ," 43-89.
37.
Ibid., 97, for the quotation; ibid., 91-169. "Ursula" is the name given this leader in the oral history taped by Diaz-Barriga.
38.
Ibid., 91-169. On the student massacre, see Vivienne Bennett, "The Evolution of Urban Popular Movements in Mexico between 1968 and 1988," in The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy, ed. Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez (Boulder, CO, 1992), 253-57; Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (New York, 1975). On the political shock waves following the massacre, see Susan Eckstein, "Poor People versus the State and Capital: Anatomy of a Successful Community Mobilization for Housing in Mexico City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 14, no. 2 (1990): 274-96; and Juan Manuel Ramirez Saiz, "Urban Struggles and Their Political Consequences," in Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico, ed. Joe Foweraker and Ann L. Craig (Boulder, CO, 1990), 234-46.
39.
Diaz-Barriga, "Urban Politics," 110-69. Peter Ward called the 1968 law "probably the most important single piece of legislation in the field of urban planning in Mexico." See Ward, Mexico City, 163, for the quotation. On Oscar Lewis and his critics, see Janice E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio De Janeiro (Berkeley, 1976); Eckstein, "Poor People versus the State and Capital"; and Lucio Kowarick, "Social, Economic and Civil Vulnerability in the United States, France and Brazil," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005): 268-82. On economic and environmental reform in the 1970s and 1980s, see Stephen P. Mumme, Richard Bath, and Valerie Assetto, "Political Development and Environmental Policy in Mexico," Latin American Research Review 23, no. 1 (1988): 7-34.
40.
Diaz-Barriga, "Urban Politics," 133, for the quotation; ibid., 101-69. Also see Eckstein , "Formal versus Substantive Democracy"
41.
Ibid. In 1977, FEDEURBE was replaced by the Comision de Desarrollo Urbano (CODEUR), which conducted the final negotiations. The original lot sizes were five hundred square meters. The sale price was forty pesos per square meter as opposed to the CODEUR offer of one hundred pesos per square meter.
42.
Diaz-Barriga, "Urban Politics," 172, for the quotation; ibid., chap 4. Also see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998).
43.
Pezzoli, Human Settlements , chap. 9.
44.
Ibid.
45.
Ibid., 271-340. Cf. Basil van Horen, "Developing Community-Based Watershed Management in Greater Sao Paulo: The Case of Santo Andre," Environment and Urbanization13 (2001): 209-22; and Pedro R. Jacobi, "The Challenges of Multi-Stakeholder Management in the Watersheds of Sao Paulo," Environment and Urbanization16 (2004): 199-211.
46.
González de la Rocha, "From the Resources of Poverty"; and note 33, above. On de Soto’s champions and critics, see "Hernando de Soto," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_(economist) (accessed September 8, 2008).
47.
New York Times, November 7-11, 2005, for the Paris uprising. For the impacts of global restructuring on U.S. cities, see William Sites, "Global City, American City: Theories of Globalization and Approaches to Urban History," Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 222-46; Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapolis, 1999); Edward W. Soja, "From Crisis Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis," in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen John Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley, 1996), 426-62; and Jennifer Wolch, "From the Global to the Local: The Rise of Homeless-ness in Los Angeles During the 1980s," in Scott and Soja, The City, 390-425.
48.
Chicago Tribune, February 27, 2005, for the quotation. At that time, 51,000 names were on the (closed) waiting list for public housing. See ibid., August 2, 2005, April 17-18, 2008. For the new patterns of segregation on a regional scale, see Harvard Civil Rights Project, "Race, Place, and Opportunity: Racial Change and Segregation in the Chicago Metropolitan Area: 1990-2000," http://www.civilright sproject.ucla.edu/research/metro/three_metros.php (accessed May 24, 2010).
49.
González de la Rocha, "From the Resources of Poverty"; and Connolly, " Mexico City"
