LITMIR.BIZ

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by connecting individual consumer choice to a theory of political economy that uses logistics to explain how modern retail innovations have reshaped urban space.

      It is very easy to get stuck on the physical location of the San Pedro Bay and to see the ports as a collection of terminals, cranes, and intermodal railyards. Nonetheless, the San Pedro Bay ports are part of a larger network that connects Southern California to places like the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, Chicago, China, and beyond. They constitute an extended circuit of capital that requires thinking through the relationships of power necessary to produce them. This more robust reading of logistics reveals how the fulfillment of individual consumer desire is built on an elaborate system of urban infrastructure.

      Logistics performs several methodological tasks for this project.⁴ First, it helps unpack the black box of globalization to reveal what John Urry has called “islands of order within a sea of disorder.”⁵ These “islands of order” are important because their production as fixed spaces demonstrates how actors exercise power to manage the complexity of globalization by reordering space and time. In the case of global commodity chains, I argue that logisticians used scientific rationalism and new technologies to create an abstract and ordered vision of space that enabled them to expand the territorial possibilities for capital investment.⁶ In fact, the logistician’s gaze provided a global spatial imaginary for capital investment by producing an abstract vison of the universe that linked places in new ways.

      Second, logistics shows how the scientific management of bodies, space, and time produced new labor regimes, which facilitated a more complex and extended system of global production, distribution, and consumption. For example, the ability of logisticians to implement information technologies and efficient just-in-time (JIT) management systems enabled them to stitch together dispersed sets of local nodes into elaborate global production and distribution networks. One result was that logisticians could create efficient spatial systems that linked Chinese factory workers to Southern California warehouse workers and American consumers by ensnaring disparate places into new spatial relationships.

      Finally, logistics connects the politics of regional development that shaped Southern California to the much more expansive spatial networks needed by global capital to transform itself in the twenty-first century. The logistics revolution created new opportunities for local actors to contest how they connected to or disconnected from the transportation and information infrastructures that undergird contemporary global commodity chains.⁷ Accordingly, local politics and regional planning became the conduit through which private and public actors extended the infrastructure for global goods.

      Logistics is particularly useful as an analytical lens because it reveals how state actors mobilized space for capitalist development and provides a different view of the systems, processes, and spaces that make up globalization.⁸ This reading of logistics as spatial method uses science, capitalism, culture, and political economy to reveal “how spatial restructuring hides consequences from us.”⁹ The deployment of such a method illustrates how transformations in the capitalist mode of production were tied to changes in mass consumption, the welfare state, and organized labor. Logistics enables us to discern some of the powerful forces that were unleashed when major retailers like Walmart and Amazon propelled capitalism into a new age of global expansion after the 1980s. It provides a spatial representation, a type of geographical window that reveals how space, capital, and race were transformed during a key period of global restructuring. The lessons learned from this study apply to many regions across the United States that tried to capitalize on commodity distribution economies by investing heavily in port-related infrastructure. Other metropolitan regions, such as Seattle-Tacoma, Savannah, and Newark, all pursued regional logistics development plans during the same period.¹⁰

      SPACES OF CONSUMPTION

      Scholars have used commodities as a unit of analysis for a very long time, including such luminaries as Adam Smith.¹¹ Likewise, Karl Marx developed an entire methodological approach by demonstrating how British capitalists erected a social system based on wage labor and profit-yielding objects.¹² He meticulously revealed the complex ways that industrial products were embedded in distinct relationships of power. Focusing on the social relations of an economic process allowed him to explore how different actors could maintain or alter these relationships. Marx pointed out that even if empires and social systems were built on the sometimes obscure rules of accumulation, capitalism’s inner logics, when coupled with the human desire for profit, acted as a powerful material force.¹³ The nexus among individual desire, social competition, and the internal logics of capitalist expansion has proved to be one of the system’s most dynamic drivers. Together, these forces provide the impetus for individuals to introduce the new technological, labor, or managerial innovations that have propelled capitalism forward. Marx’s contributions were critical to the commodity chain approach because his work stressed the importance of power and society in the consumption process. Yet too many of his disciples became stuck in the nineteenth-century widget factory that Marx used as his unit of analysis. The goal here is to find links and to see production, consumption, and distribution as part of the same circuit that makes up contemporary capitalism.

      Logistics infrastructure, which includes the roads and railways that deliver goods from factories to the consumer, is the glue that holds global and regional distribution networks together; it is the circulatory system of global capitalism. Thousands of diesel trucks and locomotives use these logistics arteries to deliver goods from foreign production sites to regional and national markets; they are part of an extensive overland distribution system that allows West Coast ports to compete with all-ocean delivery routes to East Coast markets. These conduits enable us to consummate the circulation of capital.¹⁴ This more comprehensive system, which includes the spaces needed to make and deliver the goods that drive global economies and fulfill individual yearnings, is what I call the “infrastructure of desire.”

      Urban scholars have mostly ignored logistics and global commodity circuits.¹⁵ While it is true that scholars have written extensively about the revolutionary impact that the shipping container had on commodity distribution, the relationship between logistics and urbanization has been understudied.¹⁶ Economic geographers and transportation scholars, for example, conducted important research on the extensive nature of global production networks.¹⁷ Yet transportation studies tend to leave out the social relations of extended commodity chains. Studies that have examined freight movement mostly focused on ports, gateways, and transportation efficiency, rather than on the broader social relations of metropolitan development.¹⁸ The focus was instead on network efficiencies and on the micro-geographies of place. Likewise, social science scholars have investigated globalization by studying reconfigured labor markets, industry change, and emerging development regions, but these investigations have also left out the role that commodity circulation has played in shaping urban space.¹⁹

      Distribution has largely been ignored because scholars believed that new technologies and transportation systems had reduced the significance of space as a factor in the global flow of goods and capital.²⁰ According to this logic, greater mobility had effectively annihilated the limits of space and distribution in modern global commodity chains.²¹ Therefore, scholars of American cities embraced the globalization turn by shifting their attention from modernist industrial manufacturing to the postmodern decline of U.S.-based production, new labor markets, and the rise of the symbolic economy as major factors in post-1970s urban development.²² Studies that examined the intersection of mobility, space, and time tended to focus on the circulation of information, money, and people rather than on the movement of goods.²³ Capital flows, information technologies, and cultural innovations became the defining markers of global cities. London and New York, for example, were studied as financial control centers for an expanding global economic network.²⁴

      Logistics was also widely disregarded by scholars who study culture and consumption. Most of the literature that tries to explain the rise of American consumption assumes that consumer desire and individual choice drive the cultural products industry.²⁵ The focus often centers on how consumers make choices about what to buy. One common argument in these accounts is that merchants can use cultural signifiers like taste and status to shape consumer purchasing

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