system that allows West Coast ports to compete with all-ocean delivery routes to East Coast markets. These conduits enable us to consummate the circulation of capital.14 This more comprehensive system, which includes the spaces needed to make and deliver the goods that drive global economies and fulfill individual yearnings, is what I call the “infrastructure of desire.”
Urban scholars have mostly ignored logistics and global commodity circuits.15 While it is true that scholars have written extensively about the revolutionary impact that the shipping container had on commodity distribution, the relationship between logistics and urbanization has been understudied.16 Economic geographers and transportation scholars, for example, conducted important research on the extensive nature of global production networks.17 Yet transportation studies tend to leave out the social relations of extended commodity chains. Studies that have examined freight movement mostly focused on ports, gateways, and transportation efficiency, rather than on the broader social relations of metropolitan development.18 The focus was instead on network efficiencies and on the micro-geographies of place. Likewise, social science scholars have investigated globalization by studying reconfigured labor markets, industry change, and emerging development regions, but these investigations have also left out the role that commodity circulation has played in shaping urban space.19
Distribution has largely been ignored because scholars believed that new technologies and transportation systems had reduced the significance of space as a factor in the global flow of goods and capital.20 According to this logic, greater mobility had effectively annihilated the limits of space and distribution in modern global commodity chains.21 Therefore, scholars of American cities embraced the globalization turn by shifting their attention from modernist industrial manufacturing to the postmodern decline of U.S.-based production, new labor markets, and the rise of the symbolic economy as major factors in post-1970s urban development.22 Studies that examined the intersection of mobility, space, and time tended to focus on the circulation of information, money, and people rather than on the movement of goods.23 Capital flows, information technologies, and cultural innovations became the defining markers of global cities. London and New York, for example, were studied as financial control centers for an expanding global economic network.24
Logistics was also widely disregarded by scholars who study culture and consumption. Most of the literature that tries to explain the rise of American consumption assumes that consumer desire and individual choice drive the cultural products industry.25 The focus often centers on how consumers make choices about what to buy. One common argument in these accounts is that merchants can use cultural signifiers like taste and status to shape consumer purchasing decisions.26 The underlying assumption is that companies can manipulate desire through advertising and marketing techniques. “Desire” is the right word, because advertisers have often appealed to basic human drives—sex, food, the sense of belonging—to stimulate buying behavior.27 While consumer-centric accounts can provide useful insights into market transactions, they tend to exclude other parts of the commodity chain, such as production and distribution. Consumer models leave out the deep connections among commodity chains, social networks, and products. The following two examples illustrate this point.
First, greater access to finance capital expanded consumption in the post-1980s period. Increased consumption wasn’t simply a consequence of the relentless desire for more stuff. Much of this yearning was underwritten and made possible by ballooning credit card debt and mortgage-backed revolving lines of credit. Access to more credit enabled consumer debt to explode from $5.6 billion in 1980 to more than $1 trillion by the end of 2007 (see figure 5).28 A typical American consumer could use a credit card or a second mortgage to increase their consumption even if wages declined or remained stagnant. Advertising is the second example of how consumer-centered accounts can obfuscate other forces at play. Ad agencies became more important in the consumption process only after producers developed the logistical infrastructure that allowed them to brand and distribute mass-produced goods.29
FIGURE 5. Growth of consumer debt in the United States, 1980–2010. Author analysis of data from the United States Federal Reserve.
Finance capital and advertising both illustrate why it is necessary to break with models that explain consumption through a consumer choice lens. These rational choice models can naturalize major changes in capitalist modes of accumulation while ignoring the social contexts in which individuals operate. To understand how consumption is linked to regional space, we must embed it in a “larger web of social relations.”30 Such an approach helps to reveal the actors and nodes at each stage of the circulation process. A commodity chain framework can strip away any antisocial illusion that places too much emphasis on isolated individual choice. Commodity chains, as Ken Conca, Thomas Princen, and Michael Maniates argue, show how “consumption decisions are heavily influenced, shaped, and constrained by an entire string of linked choices being made, and power being exercised, as commodities are created, distributed, used, and disposed of.”31 It is time to move beyond the transactional spaces of consumption—stores and online shopping, for example—to explore how this infrastructure of desire—in particular the logistics of commodity distribution—has shaped metropolitan space. The goal here is to examine how ports and warehouses have expanded the geographical possibilities of contemporary capitalism.
To determine why and how logistics became a prominent part of Southern California’s landscape, we need to place its growth within the wider global economic context of post-Fordist restructuring, especially because regional leaders pushed logistics as an antidote to deindustrialization. North America lost approximately six million manufacturing jobs between 1970 and 2010.32 Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, and Los Angeles Counties lost more than five hundred thousand jobs between 1990 and 2010, a decline of 46 percent. Flexible production systems like JIT rendered older push-based manufacturing spaces obsolete. Once-mighty factories slowly withered away as capital sought newer facilities and cheaper labor in emerging industrial economies.
China in particular became a major investment target because it offered access to large pools of relatively cheap labor. In addition, heavy state investment in economic infrastructure meant that companies could set up shop and reach tremendous economies of scale in a relatively short period of time. Foreign direct investment into China increased from $57 million in 1980 to $114.7 billion in 2010.33 The infusion of investment and state-backed capital enabled Chinese producers to quickly overtake both Mexico and Canada as the biggest importer of goods into the United States. By 2008 Chinese goods represented 16.1 percent of all U.S. imports, up from 6.5 percent in 1996 (see figure 6).34
FIGURE 6. Value of commodities imported into the United States, by country, 1996–2010. Author analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission, tariff and trade data 1996–2010.
China’s incredible rise as a center of production, when combined with U.S. consumption capacity, created new opportunities for Southern California’s ports to establish themselves as vital transpacific gateways. Private investors and regional boosters championed the idea that Chinese imports provided a solution to the region’s sagging job base, especially among blue-collar workers. A report commissioned by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) argued that logistics was the “only route that the region has available to helping those workers achieve growing standards of living while simultaneously correcting the recent deep slide in Southern California’s relative prosperity vis-à-vis other major parts of the country.”35 The SCAG economists and planners believed that the region’s declining manufacturing sector could be replaced by global logistics. Their rationale seemed
