This dissertation examines the landscapes of logistics, the fast-growing industry responsible for managing the movement of goods, materials, and related information in the global economy. As commodity flows increase in volume, velocity, and distance, they depend on increasingly large-scale transformations of the physical and social environment. How is space being refashioned to accommodate new methods and patterns of circulation? And how do popular forces intervene in these processes?
This research employs a multi-sited, relational methodology to investigate how the circulation of commodities is influencing the production of space at multiple scales. Its empirical focus is the recent expansion of the Panama Canal, a logistics megaproject with global reverberations, and the consequent rivalry among North American ports seeking to attract a new generation of oversized container ships. Drawing on a year of mixed-methods fieldwork in Panama City, Los Angeles, and New York, the dissertation analyzes competitive efforts to remake space in the image of smooth, efficient circulation and the struggles that have ensued over land, labour, and the environment.
I argue that the landscapes of logistics are contradictory and conflictual spaces: even as global supply chains deliver the material provisions that make possible the reproduction of contemporary life, their development and functioning are undergirded by violent processes of community dispossession, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. These impacts are disproportionately borne by poor and racialized residents and workers, whose struggles play a fundamental role in shaping corporate production and distribution networks. The research offers a critical reappraisal of the prevailing view that logistics provides a progressive and sustainable path to economic development. It shows that, as logistics has become increasingly vital to the operations of capitalism, the circulation of commodities exacts a heavy toll on those who live and labour in the arteries of global trade.Ph.D.2020-07-10 00:00:0
