Logistics as Fix: Examining the Ecological Foundations of Urban Circulation

• In Event: Political Ecology (Co-sponsored by Environmental Sociology Section)

Abstract

From ports to warehouses to distribution centers, railway lines, and highways, logistical landscapes today are remaking an ever-growing set of diverse ecological systems and relationships today. Yet, these place-based ecological dynamics are typically made opaque by the fetishized form in which urban logistical networks appear to us today, mediated through apps and websites on digital screens. While a growing body of ecologically informed scholarship has increasingly turned to examine logistics' ecological footprint, in this paper, I investigate how ecology fundamentally shapes the field of logistics itself. In examining this question, we can turn to the long traditions in environmental history and political ecology situating the contingent role of nonhuman entities in circumscribing human agency and conditioning patterns of accumulation. My investigation is focused on Bangalore’s Northwestern Tumkur highway, a region where a wave of commercial storage and delivery warehouses emergent since the 2000s provide the built environment that nourishes new urban logistical flows. Drawing on extended interviews with landowners and village council members in the region, I center the ecological question of logistical capital by examining the co-constitutive role of hydrological patterns, topographical conditions, landed social relations, and socio-technical characteristics of agrarian crops in shaping the warehousing transition in the highway region. Drawing on the spatial fix literature, the paper concludes by suggesting that warehouses provided a crucial socio-ecological fix to a many-sided problem in the region including logistics capital seeking outsourced warehousing spaces, landowners seeking to profit off the growing value of urban-peripheral land; local proletarianized former farmers seeking urban employment; and a growing upwardly mobile urban IT class eager for rapid commodity delivery. The paper seeks to make visible how globally extended logistical capital and socially embedded local ecologies continuously and recursively remake one another.

Author

• Aman Banerji, Cornell University