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 to grow and that infrastructure was required became the central 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
