must consider the connection between individual desire and social status more deeply, especially because it is such an important part of understanding the rhythms of contemporary commodity flows. Even if capital structures what people can and cannot buy, high-velocity retailing has provided merchants with the ability to embed style and class status into mass consumption practices. H&M’s multinational brand of fast fashion, for example, which encouraged up-to-date style at low prices, required customers to buy more and to shop more often to maintain their social status. Cultural motifs—the latest fabric or scarf—created an alternative style economy that let individuals escape the limits of economic capital by converting less expensive items into status-rendering goods. Low-cost goods that mimicked upper-middle-class commodity economies created new ways for people to participate in, even if they could not achieve, similar economic status. This disjuncture brings us back to debt and finance capital, which when combined with a greater array of cheap goods, enabled more shopping. As producers adopted market-driven business models—in which goods were produced and shipped whenever and wherever people wanted them—they also developed more efficient distribution systems and flexible labor supplies. The same technologies that sped up the circulation of capital and commodities also introduced new time and space demands into the labor process. Globalization, in the words of Andrew Herod, meant “greater pressure from employers and governments for workers to become more ‘flexible’, both in terms of skills and, more importantly, in terms of work organization, so that corporations may respond quickly to the vagaries of the market.”52 Such acceleration in the circulation of capital was a clear example of how globalization transformed the temporal experience of the economy for retailers, consumers, and workers. As retailers made more goods available to the masses, they also increased the amount of space needed to produce, distribute, and sell their goods.
I return to this theme elsewhere, but before moving on to logistics in more detail, I want to review my argument so far. I began this chapter by discussing the role that desire has played in expanding consumption. I then illustrated how consumer desire became a powerful material force in the post-1980s period, when individuals were able to leverage credit to purchase larger quantities of goods. However, as much as consumer desire is an important actor in this story, it was producers and retailers who created the material spaces and physical infrastructure that allowed commodity consumption to play such a prominent role in contemporary economies. Finally, while retailers developed new sales strategies and business relationships to assume greater control in the commodities game, it was their distribution systems that had a profound effect on metropolitan regions. The next chapter examines how high-velocity retailing and global commodity chains reconfigured logistics space.
THREE
The Spatial Politics of Southern California’s Logistics Regime
THIS CHAPTER EXPLAINS HOW CIVIC leaders capitalized on two key political and economic phenomena to make Southern California into the largest distribution gateway in the United States. I first examine how the global economic restructuring 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,
