package up whatever China sends over and they break it down into smaller units and they sell them. You might say it’s 99 cent heaven. All the warehouses for the 99 Cent stores are located right here in this strip.”76
Before moving on to the next chapter, it’s important to connect all of the elements discussed so far—space, power, and method—into a coherent narrative. First, spatial ideologies are critical in the chapters that follow because they represent a central playing field in how the region was produced as a logistics landscape. Second, these spatial ideologies extend beyond the realm of discourse because they constitute a spatial method that does not separate the material from the ideological. For instance, the notion of the American Dream is a useful analytical framework because it involves both the cognitive and material forces central to the production of space. Something called the American Dream represents both the ideological construction of a normative spatial order and the material spaces that are required to make this idea an embodied and lived space. Instead of separating the ideological production of a logistics development discourse from the material construction of a regional transportation infrastructure, it is far more intriguing to examine how ideas—such as those espoused in dominant development discourses—are transformed into a material force that is exercised by and through power.77
TWO
Global Goods and the Infrastructure of Desire
CONSUMERS OFTEN ENTER INTO ECONOMIC exchanges without being fully aware of the social and ecological systems required to produce the bevy of things that we consume.1 In fact, modern commodity chains are often so complex and geographically dispersed that it is difficult for consumers to comprehend the vast spatial and social relationships that make everyday consumption possible. Consumers may also be blinded by ideological and disciplinary frameworks that prevent them from seeing the deeper human connections that bind complex systems together. For example, economic models that try to explain the proliferation of goods in contemporary society often use a consumer choice lens that takes for granted the extensive social relations needed to produce and distribute commodities.2 Such rational choice models place too much emphasis on microeconomic market decisions when trying to explain basic social phenomena.3 The result is a rather large gap between the microeconomics of individual choice and the social relations needed to produce robust market systems. A commodity chain approach can help fill some of this gap 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;
