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operating logic for logistics boosters. Official projections estimated that port capacity was at 144,500,000 tons in 1989 and was expected to reach 221,800,000 tons by 2020.¹⁴ Port leaders pointed to the anticipated growth in Asian manufacturing, arguing that Southern California could and should establish itself as the nation’s main gateway for transpacific commodity shipments.

      Keller’s statement reflects part of the political strategy that port boosters used to turn the region into a major logistics hub; they used speculative data to problematize the need for public spending on transportation infrastructure and proposed a strategic plan to solve this perceived problem. The logic of this argument—that growth is coming and we must therefore prepare to absorb it—became the governing ethos for a new regional development regime that rerouted public transportation funds into logistics-supporting infrastructure. Official projections performed two key functions.

      First, they naturalized growth and provided a road map for port boosters to create a spatial economy that privileged logistics development. Although it is easy to dismiss boosterish claims as political rhetoric and wishful thinking, spatial ideologies can serve as powerful narratives, especially when they motivate people to act. Spatial ideologies, such as those espoused by prologistics boosters, involve what John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch described as “[p]eople dreaming, planning, and organizing themselves to make money” and represent “the agents through which accumulation does its work at the level of the urban place.”¹⁵

      Second, these speculative logistics ideologies necessitated new institutions to manage the expanding territorial scope and scale of development that was required to meet future projections. For example, SCAG’s $26 billion Multi-County Goods Movement Action Plan (MCGMAP) called for the creation of the Southern California Institution to Execute Infrastructure Construction (SCIEIC). This new oversight body would be responsible for developing, collecting, and implementing plans to further expand the region’s transportation infrastructure. According to SCAG, “No existing institution, under its current authorities, can manage the building of the wide range of infrastructure projects needed to implement the logistics-based economic strategy region wide.”¹⁶ One of the SCIEIC’s key tasks was to reduce intraregional competition by facilitating collaborative funding initiatives.

      Speculative data and the political discourse of eminent growth also played a key role in producing logistics as an economic category. Logistics, like all economic constructs, “is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things”; Susan Buck-Morss notes that for these constructs, “to be ‘seen’ by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping.”¹⁷ The invention of logistics as an economic and spatial category by regional leaders gave that “thing” agency because the very act of labeling it turned it into a political object that could be tracked and measured. Chapter 6 gives a more detailed account of how logistics was stitched together as a container for various economic indicators. For now it is important to note that markets are produced and not naturally occurring phenomena; they are assembled and embedded in particular geographies by political actors and market forces.

      SPECULATIVE GROWTH REGIME

      Of course imagining development and actually building something are very different things. It is not enough to simply examine the discursive techniques that local political and business elites used to craft a discourse of development with the hope of luring potential investors. After all, many municipal leaders have crafted elaborate development plans only to see them languish. Just because local boosters want to turn their city into the next Silicon Valley or world-class gateway doesn’t mean that it will happen. What made Southern California different was its ability to capture some of the post-1980s global capital flows while other regions suffered from economic restructuring. Before attributing too much power to the state, it is important to point out that the implementation of a logistics development path was a messy process. It is much too simple to argue that logistics development was neatly implemented and that the built environment was merely a reflection of a centralized state strategy. While the San Pedro Bay ports pursued an orchestrated strategy of port and rail expansion, other parts of the region succumbed to rampant speculative development, which was not always actively managed by port leaders. To fully understand how this happened, we need to trace how specific circuits of capital intersected with local interests to build the material spaces that enabled globalization to flourish. This requires examining how local actors aligned their development prospects with the interests of the global goods movement industry.¹⁸

      Local actors first had to create new governance systems before they could build a territorially coherent regional distribution network.¹⁹ The two semiautonomous commissions that govern the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports took the lead on many of the progrowth policy initiatives.²⁰ Harbor commissioners had considerable power to set the development agenda by both approving individual projects and crafting longer term master plans that affected the entire region.²¹ Southern California’s production as a global logistics hub was orchestrated through a series of planning studies and joint funding projects that were coordinated by SCAG. These studies brought together planners and policy makers from different jurisdictions and provided a training ground for regional governance at a time when coordinated state action was unusual. The volume of policy papers, planning studies, and joint funding proposals that SCAG sponsored became a blueprint for regional cooperation and propelled logistics-based economic development.²²

      Planning for port expansion began during the 1980s with the creation of The San Pedro Bay Ports 2020 Master Plan and the Alameda Corridor project.²³ The 2020 Master Plan was adopted by authorities from the POLA and the Port of Long Beach. It highlighted three key project areas that would serve as focal points for future growth. First, port officials laid out plans to dredge the harbor to provide deeper channels for larger capacity ships. Second, some of the dredged material would be used to infill six hundred acres of harbor property, with the idea that this new area would provide enough space for thirty-eight additional terminals. Finally, the plan called for construction of an extensive inland distribution system that linked the ports with rail, highways, and intermodal facilities. Essentially, the 2020 Master Plan and later documents such as the MCGMAP used speculative port data to produce a commonsense or hegemonic rationale in which the region’s economic future depended on optimizing future port capacity.²⁴

      While port officials planned for growth, they were concerned that worsening traffic congestion would negatively affect the region’s capacity to absorb future trade. SCAG formed the Ports Advisory Committee (PAC) in 1981 to address some of these potential roadblocks. The PAC developed a series of proposals meant to improve traffic flows on roadways surrounding port terminals. Next, the PAC turned its attention to inland distribution, especially to the region’s rail system. Inland distribution was particularly worrisome for port authorities because future imports would have to compete with commuters as delivery trucks and trains connected incoming container goods with transcontinental road and rail systems. By 1983 the PAC had produced the basic plan for what would become the $2.4 billion Alameda Corridor rail project. The proposed project included twenty miles of rail lines and grade separations meant to improve connections between the ports and the transcontinental rail lines located near downtown Los Angeles. The crown jewel of the project included a ten-mile-long open trench that provided traffic-free passage for freight trains traveling between the city of Carson and 25th Street along the LA/Vernon/Maywood border.

      Both the 2020 Master Plan and the Alameda Corridor marked a new period of regional planning cooperation among federal, state, county, and municipal agencies, an unusual occurrence in a governance landscape normally dominated by municipal fragmentation. The corridor was a public-private partnership that, according to the California State Office of Research, was meant to “produce a sustainable economic development strategy that will effectively meet the challenges of a 21st century global economy.”²⁵ The Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority (ACTA), which oversaw the project, created institutional opportunities to access public funds. This was especially important because regional trade corridors required multi-jurisdictional alliances to secure funding, gain regulatory approval, and earn stakeholder consent. ACTA had broad support from SCAG, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA), and the San Pedro Bay Ports Harbor

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