sense to ask what the deeper connections between political economy and space were if we wanted to move beyond the notion that spaces and places were more than just containers for larger (read as more determinative) social processes. If, as geographers and urban planners argued, space still mattered, then it was important to demonstrate how and why.35 As scholars tried to decipher the multiplicity of actors and forces involved in producing something called globalization, a tension emerged between those who focused on the power of global capital to transform local space and those who argued that the local still mattered and that place-based difference was key to the production of a globalized society.36
Difference is in fact essential to the creation and capitalization of new markets; it allows investors to determine where they should and should not invest.37 This is where universal and abstract models of capitalism fall short. While an abstract model may provide important insights into the relationship between social structures and space, it cannot substitute for a more concrete analysis of how various forces and actors, including gender and race, combine to produce locally specific spatial orders.38 What’s needed is a type of critical inquiry into space that recognizes macroeconomic forces while not glossing over the specificities of places and people. The key is to understand how these specificities are interconnected into a sometimes diffused web of social relations, which means that to understand the logic of global capital, we have to engage with the local specificities of space. This is an important methodological point about the importance of understanding specificity as the embodiment or experience of social processes.39
Indeed, only by looking at what Katherine Mitchell termed “the specific configurations of differing economic systems within their own geographical and historical contexts” will we grasp the intricate and contingent nature of global capitalism.40 The idea that capital has a critical “logic which works in and through specificity” rather than a universal abstract mode provides a theoretical bridge that enables us to traverse the sometimes wide gap between political economy and locally embedded cultural notions of difference and articulation.41 Social movements provide one way to examine how locally embedded actors confront the alienating tendencies of universal abstract space; they are, as Tilly describes, “historically specific clusters of political performances.”42 Movements are defined by how networks of individuals create and perform collective identities while giving meaning to their actions. These performances and meanings establish a relational position from which to make claims against entrenched forms of power. Parts 2 and 3 of this book show how social movements in Southern California challenged the moral text of development by providing alternative spatial imaginaries that were rooted in the dialectical exchange between abstract space and local specificity.
My discussion of social movement spatial strategies highlights why a multiscalar, local-global framework is critical to groups who try to challenge universalist development ideologies. Ignoring the local-global dialectic can obscure relationships of power, because as Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson note, “the presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power.”43 To expose the sometimes hidden relationships of power that produce specific spaces, this project begins “with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected.”44 Lefebvre was right in arguing that “the survival of capitalism has depended on this distinctive production and occupation of a fragmented, homogenized, and hierarchically structured space.”45 Local difference, racial and class difference in particular, has been critical to the survival and evolution of capitalist space. This continues to be the case as modern network infrastructures are “being organized to exploit differences between places within ever-more sophisticated spatial divisions of labor.”46 It is therefore important to examine how these sometimes obscure connections can help decipher how difference is produced and sustained. Logistics, I argue, is one example of how the spatial divisions of labor that are vital to the survival of capitalism are fixed in place through a complex interaction among race, capital, and power.
LOGISTICS AS THE REGIONAL SPATIAL FIX
Two cases in particular—the industrial inner-ring suburbs of Southeast Los Angeles and the exurban outer-ring region of the Inland Empire—provide distinct but overlapping glimpses into how different actors responded to the spatial ruptures that transformed Southern California after the 1980s. Both cases show how racial and spatial difference were central to post-Fordist redevelopment strategies.
Regional policy makers used Southeast Los Angeles as a warning to the rest of Southern California because it embodied the social and economic dislocation that wreaked havoc on blue-collar industrial suburbs between the late 1970s and 2000s.47 Blue-collar suburbs that were abandoned by capital and by a shrinking social safety net became what Mike Davis called the discarded “junkyards of the American Dream.”48 According to local political leaders the solution was to rally behind the region’s ports as a potential cure for Southern California’s manufacturing malaise. The logic was simple: if the shuttered manufacturing plants of Southeast Los Angeles represented the region’s Fordist past, then the ports and inland warehouses in places like Fontana provided a glimpse of its future.
Such disruptions are a normal part of capitalism, because it operates under a constant tension between needing to be fixed in particular places and having to fend off falling rates of profit that stem from decaying machinery and outmoded business models. “To solve this contradiction,” as Richard Walker notes, “capital must be liberated from its shackles to move elsewhere or destroyed (devalued) to raise the rate of profit and make room for new investments.”49 Creative destruction is thus woven into the fabric of capitalist development and provides a solution to the devaluation of fixed capital by reconfiguring spatial-temporal relationships to create new investment options.50 Kaiser’s mill and the Chinese workers who dismantled it embody this spatial fix.51
One result is that new spaces are constantly entangled and swept up into the capitalist system of accumulation as investors seek outlets for growth. The Chinese company Shougang’s purchase of the Kaiser steel mill in Fontana in 1992 was a spatial fix because it was part of a more comprehensive effort to make China into a major industrial manufacturing power. Redundant Western industrial facilities offered a solution to Shougang’s leaders, who desperately wanted to expand Chinese steel manufacturing but lacked enough capital and time to build their own equipment. Chinese government officials prodded manufacturers to increase capacity when they set a national goal to produce one hundred million tons of steel by the year 2000.52 Company executives responded by purchasing sixteen secondhand facilities from the United States and other industrialized countries throughout the 1980s and 1990s.53 By the end of this period Shougang’s traveling band of workers had become experts at dismantling the old industrial spaces of Western economies and reassembling their remains into giant, Frankensteinian steel plants.
Kaiser’s rusting carcass was prime fodder for industrial scavenging because part of it was relatively new. Corporate officials had invested $278 million to build a state-of-the-art No. 2 Basic Oxygen Process and Caster plant in 1978.54 Yet even such massive investment in new facilities did not prevent the mill’s collapse; executives blamed tougher environmental regulations and increased international competition as major reasons for ceasing operations. Kaiser provides many lessons; one of them is that abandoned spaces are not completely left behind. Abandoned spaces and people sometimes learn to renegotiate their relationships with different circuits of capital.55 For inland Southern California this renegotiation began when workers loaded the mill’s disassembled parts onto the Atlantic Queen (see figure 3). The ship, which left the port of Los Angeles in July 1994, transported the old blast furnace and cauldrons that Kaiser workers once used to pour molten steel (see figure 4) in Fontana to an area just outside of Beijing. Shougang officials planned to reassemble, modify, and attach the old mill to an existing steel plant. In its new incarnation
