Otherwise the nature of Capital presumes that it tread the different phases of circulation,

but not ideally, with the mental speed with which a concept is reversed into another in a zero time, but as distinct stages in time. Before you can fly like a butterfly, it must be chrysalis for some time.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse

In this contribution I focus on two intertwined points: the first refers to a critique of the common assumption that tend to interpret the relationship between logistics and urban spaces as a field/question/matter of exception; the second point I want to briefly discuss is a reflection about the link between logistics, infrastructures, the concept of frontier and the transformations of the urban spaces.

Within most of the current literature about logistics, many authors put their emphasis on very specific urban spaces to discuss the role of logistics in shaping our cities. The typical example is the so called “logistics city”: in the last decades all around the world this peculiar form of urban space has grown like mushrooms. The logistics city indicates a sort of bounded space, generally conceived as an ex novo urban park, an area where logistics activities are concentrated (Easterling 2005, Rossiter 2012, Cowen 2014).

Almost every major city has its own logistics city, a place where most of the logistical activities about the transportation and distribution of goods are developed. Other approaches concentrate on places like the ports; or on the role of big infrastructures in the redefinition of the urban texture; or on the production of special economical or juridical zones to improve the economic performances. Another conception refers to the “city logistics”, meaning the administrative and technological tools to improve a “smart” organization of the urban traffic and the transportation of goods within the city.

Even if all these researches have a lot to teach us, I think – as I said before – that their limit is that they tend to conceptualize the nexus between cities and logistics as something totally new, as the fresh production of a series of “exceptions” in the urban tissue [just to give a reference, when I use the concept of “urban” here I, more or less and with some personal critics, mostly refer to the theorization of Neil Brenner’s Urban Theory Lab about the so called planetary urbanization theory]. However, my argument is that we need to historicize these urban places like logistics cities. In fact, I think it is possible to sustain that logistics has been an immanent logic, or a rationality, for the production of modern urban space. This implies that we need to expand the meaning of logistics, and I propose to concentrate on a more general process. To put it briefly: the whole city is nowadays becoming a hub – in other words: logistics is an organising principle of contemporary cities, making them locations or terminals of logistics activities (see Easterling 2004; Gandy 2013; Hesse 2008; O’Connor 2010). This seems to be a “technical” innovation. But it has profound political implications.

Let me try to explain this assumption in historical and theoretical terms with some genealogical insights. Michel Foucault and others demonstrate how crucial has been, for the building up of the modern State, the application, to the whole territory, of the “ordinances of police” – specific norms elaborated into the medieval city. The point was to organize the whole territory of the rising States as if it is a big city. It is not an haphazard that since the XVI century the walls are not any more the distinctive character of the city. As Leonardo Benevolo puts it: in that period «the architecture of the city grows from the streets rather than from the edifices». In the same period the German geographer Georg Braun edited the Civitates orbis terrarum, which contains more than 5 hundred maps of cities from all around the world.

This global perspective on the city has an hidden implication: this new form of representation of the city contains a radical de-politicization of the city itself. Now, the city is only a specific scale (i.e.: the local) subordinated to the emerging Leviathan, as we can see from the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes famous book.

The civitas, the city conceived as the citizens, is evacuated from the urbs (the moltitude of the individuals is here bordered into the body of the sovereign, but it would be a long story to tell..), anyway the city remains only as a concentration of houses, streets and squares. The attempt is to reduce the city to a pacified market.

However, something changed during the XIX century. A plexus of different processes, usually labelled as “industrial revolution”, leads also to what many have named as an “urban revolution”.

Enormous masses of people moved from the countryside to the city, and the city became (again) a conflictual arena. In fact, most of the major European cities were the scenario of the 1848 insurrections. The State needed to bring back its sovereign order on the city. Two centuries before, as I said, the question was to urbanize the territory. Now the point is to “territorialize” the city, to make the city an orderer territory.

The conventional example about this is the work that Baron Von Haussmann did in Paris between 1853 and 1869 (see Walter Benjamin, David Harvey). He destroyed all the traces of the traditional city, considered as a disturbance for the possibility of a smooth circulation. The city itself became the locus where to apply a series of transformations driven by infrastructural reasons (like big routes for commodities’ circulation), for social reasons (like the expulsion of the poor from the city centre), for military reasons (against the possibility to erect the barricades) and for economic reasons (the city have to be a place of commodities valorisation). This tangle of different processes and rationalities is what we call, in fact, nowadays, logistics.

We have to keep in mind that metropolis, that is to say the modern city constructed during the XIX century, is a logistical place. All the interventions of Hausmann, taken here as an example of a widespread logic/rationality, were driven by the vector of circulation. While Haussmann was the expression of a conservative politics, Idelfonso Cerdà, who formed the basis of the theory of urbanization in that period (see Teoria General de la Urbanizacion – Idelfonso Cerdà, 1867), was a liberal and a progressive. He elaborated the concept of vialidad (i.e. circulation) as the core vector of the new cities. Urbanization was seen as a project to unify humanity in a single global society interconnected within a global urbe.

«Cerdá’s frequent reference to the sea in describing the urbe (‘mare magnum’) is a crucial model for constructing a fluid space whose power lies in its transcending of limits – a political quality Cerdá saw as a historical duty for modern society to fulfill. The urban was to be a space of administered circulation whose connectivity would undermine all firm spatio-political boundaries. Instead, the infinite and mobile qualities of space experienced in the early modern Atlantic voyages would reemerge in the endlessly expansive process of ‘urbanización’»

(Ross Exo Adams, 2015).

I tried to elaborate on this idea through the concept of “terraqueous territory”, in a previous article (see Cuppini, Frapporti, Pirone, 2015).

So, whether from this perspective based on the idea of a rational planning or through the violent intervention of the French State, metropolis has to be a place of circulation and connection. The old city was seen as a block to that project. This is a point we need to deepen in the second session, as a starting point for the critique of the logistics seamless ideology.

This logistical logic, as I hope it has been comprehensible form this very concise depiction, is a tool that since the beginning of the modern city shapes the urban fabric. It is within this perspective that I think we should conceive the recent reflection about logistics cities, logistical infrastructures and so forth, not as an exception, or a total newness, but rather as the extreme output and manifestation of a long story.

I announced a second point of my contribution: the link between logistics, infrastructures, the concept of frontier and the transformations of the urban spaces. The question is that modern logistics evolves following the new necessities to move people and goods along the new modern spaces: the State-space, the colonies, the Atlantic routes and so forth. Modern logistics is linked to the global market and to the movement of the armies along continental spaces. It is in that contexts that a set of knowledges, practices and infrastructures was developed. The interesting point is that in the second half of the XIX century, these tools and logics, elaborated on the continental and oceanic spaces, are applied within the space of the city. There is, somehow, a specific resonance from “the colony” to the metropolis – using metropolis here in its double meaning: of “mater polis” and of “modern city”.

I try to explain this idea just through one example. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner, at the end of the XIX century, elaborated a famous theory about the relevance of the frontier for the American history, for its democracy and the vitality of its society. Turner was afraid that the frontier was ended. I think that one of the most symbolic event that sustains the idea of the closing of the frontier happened in 1869, the same year of the destitution of Haussmann. In that year, in Utah, the two lines of the railroad were finally connected. The East and the West coast were now weld by this train line, the first transcontinental railroad. This immense work, made possible thanks to a sort of public-private partnership (see Marx, Grundrisse, p. 554), is the infrastructure that connects the new nation and, paradoxically, “closes it”.

But what is suggestive is that in that same years this new technology (the railway) started to be applied to a totally different context: the city. The first line of a subway was introduced in London, but the most important cities started to construct their own inner railroad.

The logistics, the movement of people and commodities within the city (and also the perception of time and space), is completely revolutionized. But there is a second implication which I want to enlighten, going to the present time and to conclude my speech.

After the entrance of the railway within the city, the frontier follows.

Let me try to explain. After the Second World War (see also Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier, Harper and Row, New York, 1965)

«the imagery of wilderness and frontier has been applied less to the plains, mountains and forests of the West – now handsomely civilized – and more to US cities back East. As part of the experience of postwar suburbanization, the US city came to be seen as an “urban wilderness”; it was, and for many still is, the habitat of disease and disorder, crime and corruption, drugs and danger»

(Neil Smith, 1996, p. 5)

Neil Smith in this quote describes the ideological foundation of the gentrification phenomena. But

«in the context of so-called globalization, national and international capitals alike confront a global “frontier” of their own that subsumes the gentrification frontier. This link between different spatial scales, and the centrality of urban development to national and international expansion, was acutely clear in the enthusiastic language of supporters of “urban Enterprise Zones”, an idea pioneered by the Thatcher and Reagan governments in the 1980s, and a centerpiece of 1990s urban privatization strategies».

(N. Smith, 1996, p. 17)

Again: the logic of the zone, a typical colonial logic, is now applied within the city. But here there is a shift from the past: the emphasis on (capital) circulation is accompanied with the necessity of new bordering capabilities. Far away from the linear draws of Cerdà and from the grand boulevards of Haussmann, urban texture increasingly becomes complex, rhapsodic, heterogeneous.

Recently, Saskia Sassen (see Sassen 2015) has expanded the concept of the city as a frontier zone:

«The global city is a new frontier zone. Deregulation, privatization, and new fiscal and monetary policies create the formal instruments to construct their equivalent of the old military “fort”. The city is also a strategic frontier zone for those who lack power, and allows the making of informal politics. […] The […] transformation of the city in a frontier zone […] far from making this a borderless world, have actually multiplied the bordered spaces that allow firms and markets to move across conventional borders. Cities are therefore one of the key sites where new neoliberal norms are made and where new identities emerge».

(Sassen, 2015, p. 295)

«If Hollywood wanted to capture the emotional center of western history, its movies would be about real estate. John Wayne would have been neither a gunfighter nor a sheriff, but a surveyor, speculator or claims lawyer. The showdowns would appear in the land office or the courtroom; weapons would be deeds and lawsuits, not six-guns»

(Limerick, 1987, p. 55)

nt is that logistics is a productive gaze through which it is possible to grasp these ongoing transformations: at the same time logistics improves the traffic of flows and constantly traces new bordered spaces – that are, it is important to note, always contested. Logistics connects, shakes and turns upside down the different scales of the modern world. At the end, the question I want to ask for the second session is: can we use logistics as a lens to think differently the modern geographical imagination of the world in terms of scales? How can we think the city if it not represents anymore the scale of the local? That is to say: Again: Can we abandon the logic of the scale if we see through logistics?

Finally: To think logistics as an urban logic, as I hope it has been sufficiently clear from my analysis, is also a way to politicize logistics. The paradigm of logistics applied to the city created a new urban habitat, a contemporary battlefield, that circulates worldwide. I am convinced that seeing, the city, through logistics, is a very useful exercise to grasp the contemporary urban mutations. And maybe something more…

References

Brenner Neil (ed), Implosion/Explosion. Towards a study of planetary urbanization, Jovis, Berlin, 2013.

Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier, Harper and Row, New York, 1965.

Adams Ross Exo, Mare Magnum: Urbanization of the Sea, Draft Paper, AAG 2015.

Leonardo Benevolo, Le origini dell’urbanistica moderna, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1963.

Benjamin Walter, Arcades Project, 1927-1940.

Braun Georg (ed), Civitates orbis terrarum, 1572-1617.

Cerdà Idelfonso, Teoría General de la Urbanización, 1867.

Cowen Deborah, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2014.

Cuppini Niccolò, Frapporti Mattia, Pirone Maurilio, Logistics Struggles in the Po Valley Region: Territorial Transformations and Processes of Antagonistic Subjectivation, South Atlantic Quarterly, 114, 1/2015, pp. 119-134.

Easterling Keller, Extrastatecraft. The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso, London-Brooklyn, 2014.

Grappi Giorgio, Logistica, Ediesse, Roma, 2016.

Harvey David, Paris, Capital of Modernity, Routledge, New York and London, 2003.

Hobbes Thomas, Leviathan, 1651.

Limerick Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Norton, New York-London, 1987.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Neilson Brett and Rossiter Ned (eds), Logistical Worlds,

Sassen Saskia, Old Borders and New Bordering Capabilities: Cities as Frontier Zones, Scienza&Politica, XXVII, 53/2015, pp. 295-306.

Smith Neil, The new urban frontier. Gentrification and the revanchist city, Routledge, London-New York, 1996.

Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1921.

Working paper presented @ KOSMOS Summer School – Investigating logistics, Berlin, 19-30 September 2016