ABSTRACT
The arrangement of urban and regional freight places and patterns of movement we observe today have evolved over time and are anchored in geography. The case study cities and regions explored in previous chapters make intuitive sense to us as freight places, often because of their physical endowments – navigable waters, ocean port or national/continental centrality. Their natural advantages have been leveraged by the accumulation of policy and economic decisions, culminating in their current prominence on the global logistics stage (O’Connor 2010). Yet, as we have discovered in these chapters, they are not immune from the challenges presented by the tensions between the forces of integration and disintegration, and the muddied allocation of global gain and local pain (Hesse 2006; Hall 2007). Security, environment, land use, employment, economics, demographics, equity are all realms where global and local imperatives intersect in challenging ways. Today’s prominence and success may be tomorrow’s decline, depending of course on how these challenges are addressed.
