LITMIR.BIZ

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that began in the 1970s produced a crisis discourse among policy makers, who argued for strategic interventions to lessen the financial shocks tied to industrial job losses. I then review how the same global economic changes that triggered capital flight away from Los Angeles and other cities in the United States provided economic opportunities for local private and public leaders to invest in transpacific trade corridors. This mix between the discourse of crisis and the material geographies of a shifting global capitalism set the stage for a new spatial politics that culminated in a regional development regime centered on logistics. By recognizing these intersections—between the local and the global, the discursive and the material—we can glean a better understanding of how metropolitan space was produced through the contentious politics of logistics development.

      Regions are particularly important as a scale of analysis because they help us grasp how local actors have used statecraft to renegotiate their territorial relationship with global capitalism. Several scholars have made this point, including members of the new regionalism school, who argued that globalization increased the importance of city-regions and provided useful insight into the “new territorial structures and imaginaries” that were produced during the globalization shift.¹ While city-regions have been widely studied, Jonas and Ward argue that this body of work has downplayed “how new territorial forms are constructed politically and reproduced through everyday acts and struggles around consumption and social reproduction.”² My analysis of logistics addresses this gap in the literature because it brings the politics of regional development into conversation with the social and material infrastructures of modern consumption. More specifically, I use the geographic concept of landscape to analyze how regions are necessarily produced as both ideological constructs and material structures. Don Mitchell defines landscape as “the conscious construction of a perspective, a way of seeing the region that, in concert with policies, laws, and institutions, physically makes the land, produces the landscape materially, and sustains it ideologically.”³ Landscape is therefore a spatial ideology that bridges discursive and material space, similar to what Lefebvre calls “representations of space.”⁴ These representations rationalize the production of particular material spaces. Spatial ideologies are powerful tools because they set the parameters for the production of space by invoking everyday language to produce a commonsense or normative understanding of dominant spatial practices.

      Spatial ideologies were particularly important to logistics development because before the elaborate system of roads and rail lines that connect inland warehouses to the San Pedro Bay ports could be built, planners and investors had to first imagine and design the region as an intricate hub for global goods. These cognitive and discursive mappings supplied the ideological foundations for the region’s goods movement industry. The simple notion that Southern California could and should become a global logistics hub provided a powerful ideological and moral shield for regional leaders. Prologistics policies involved an ideological devotion that committed the region and its residents to a specific development path. I use a spatial politics framework to investigate how such ideological commitments were produced, performed, perceived, and contested through cultural and economic lenses/forces.

      REGIONS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

      One of the strategies that Southern California’s political leaders used in the aftermath of global economic restructuring and manufacturing job losses included trying to lure investment away from other cities. In fact, interurban competition redefined regional politics and was especially fierce after the 1970s, when industrial cities had to fill the buildings and empty lots abandoned by deindustrialization. Increased regional competition affected urban political economy in four key ways. First, regions competed to improve their position in the international division of labor. Second, they tried to convert themselves into major centers of consumption. Third, regions tried to gain an advantage over control and command functions (financial services and business management). Fourth, regions engaged in more tenacious competition for governmental redistribution of resources.⁵ Southern California’s political leadership used each of these strategies to position the region for economic growth during the globalization era.

      City and regional planners responded to increased competition by devising elaborate strategies to lure finance capital into decaying urban centers. They recruited various sectors, including modern convention centers, lavish lifestyle shopping experiences, refined cultural spaces, and mega sports stadiums.⁶ In Southern California local political leaders and regional planners used the changing economic landscape as an opportunity to mobilize the region for multiple development paths, including downtown revitalization, Hollywood entertainment, and port-based logistics. Although it is easy to see how money and power combined to produce the tall buildings and sports facilities of contemporary downtown Los Angeles and the financial complexes of Orange County, it is less obvious to discern the power and money embedded in the massive rail, port, and highway infrastructure projects that combine Southern California’s sprawling regional metropolis into a coherent, if somewhat unwieldy, whole.

      Nevertheless, the connections between global commodity flows and local development regimes are there if we peel back enough layers to reveal how the region expanded between 1980 and 2010. One factor that will become more evident is how policy makers orchestrated the transfer of private and public resources into the regional goods movement economy as they scrambled to make Southern California into a major shipping gateway for transpacific goods. This transfer of resources and political support for logistics development marked a new type of spatial politics in Southern California. A regional political framework was especially important because port boosters had to convince the 188 independent cities and six counties that make up the Southern California region, not all of which had an obvious relationship with logistics, that they should cooperate on transportation infrastructure projects. The act of convincing disparate entities and constituencies that logistics was the solution to the region’s manufacturing crisis of the 1990s and 2000s illustrates how the ideological and material politics of space were central to logistics development.⁷ Crisis and its antithesis—logistics—were deployed as a political tool by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special adviser for economic affairs, David Crane, who argued that the “country is dramatically under-infrastructured” as a rationalization for public support of infrastructure spending.⁸ When Crane said “infrastructure” he meant logistics and transportation. Key members of the logistics industry and regional economic boosters made similar arguments. Jack Kyser, former chief economist of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), regularly warned the public that the region was “running out of trade infrastructure capacity.”⁹ The Pacific Merchant Shipping Association added to the urgent call by arguing that shippers were “building their supply chains around California” because the lack of “freight supporting infrastructure” was making it inefficient and costly to do business with the West Coast.¹⁰

      Logistics infrastructure created a new political field; the stakes included access to public funds during the neoliberal era, when social services were being slashed or privatized. Port boosters justified their access to state funding streams by claiming that logistics and infrastructure generated public benefits. Planners with SCAG, for example, cited the region’s notorious traffic problems to rationalize further spending on grade separations that they claimed would relieve congestion while mitigating the negative impact of the goods movement industry on public citizens. Employees of SCAG claimed that regional leaders could improve logistics efficiencies and ease commuter traffic if they reduced “conflicts between trains and motor vehicles by separating at-grade crossings.”¹¹ Seemingly banal discussions about grade separations and infrastructure were in fact essential to a $2.5 billion plan to extend the logistics system through the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire.¹²

      Government support for infrastructure projects was critical because among other things it stimulated speculative growth in the logistics industry. Larry Keller, a former executive director for the Port of Los Angeles (POLA), explained how this happened when he spoke before a congressional hearing on the Alameda Corridor project: “In the early 1980’s, it was apparent an improved infrastructure would be required if the cargo transportation system serving the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach was to handle the predicted growth in cargo through the West Coast ports.”¹³ The notion that cargo was predicted

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