ABSTRACT
An interrogation of logistics is a productive lens to reveal the spatial patterns of emerging essences and contexts in the contemporary urban environment. A range of new time–space networks and their attendant procedures and spaces have increasingly entered the built environment as well as our lifestyles since the 1970’s. This includes the expedited flow of materials and goods courtesy of priority shipping; online commerce and the technologies that make it possible (algorithms, data storage systems, smart industrial equipment, tracking, etc.); social media and its corresponding information systems (apps, Wi-Fi, high-speed cables, network subscriptions); and the increasingly wide range of alternative lifestyle networks, from shared transportation to food kits and their delivery systems (robotic couriers, drones). Every day we become more entangled by these convenient yet increasingly abstract actions of post-Fordist production and the corporate actors that make them possible (Amazon.com, FedEx, Netflix, Instagram and Blue Apron, to name but a few). Yet there are few, if any, intellectual models in place for architecture to contemplate urbanism from this perspective—that is, the Logistical City.
This chapter investigates the design of the city from the perspective of the logistical regimes that drive western lifestyles. Rather than dwell on the neoliberal/late capitalist ideologies of abstraction, profit, and efficiency that many argue are responsible for the expansion of logistics in society, it seeks to deploy logistical intelligence more critically to identify more robust (and ethical) spatial formations for the city in an era when the network has emerged as a fundamental element in its own right. This ranges from describing new patterns of domesticity to infrastructure so that a complete vision of the logistical city is legible.
