Deborah Cowen: Global Logistics, Power and Urban Transformation

Global logistics is the system that moves goods, data and people through ports, motorways, airports, warehouses and undersea cables with just-in-time precision, and the Canadian geographer Deborah Cowen, a professor at the University of Toronto, has shown in The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (2014) that this system, presented as a neutral technique of efficiency, is a form of power with military roots that is reorganising the cities and territories it crosses. Her thesis is that logistics was born in war, became the science of global trade and now governs whole spaces through the logic of supply chain security.

From war to trade: the military genealogy of logistics

Cowen first reconstructs the genealogy. For centuries logistics was the military art of supplying armies, and only after the Second World War did it pass to business, where the logistics revolution of the 1960s, with the container, computing and inventory management, made distribution the centre of production. The factory dispersed across the world and the supply chain became the object to be protected. Cowen shows that this shift did not erase the warlike origin but extended it: the interruption of flow, a port strike, a blockade, an attack, came to be treated as a security threat, and the bodies that interrupt, workers, pirates, migrants, as enemies.

Supply chain security: the border inside the flow

The concept of supply chain security is the centre of the book. After 2001, the United States and its partners created regimes that move the border inside the chains: ports with security zones, containers scanned at origin, dockworkers with biometric cards, guarded corridors crossing countries. Cowen documents how those regimes limit the right to strike and protest in logistics spaces, and how the protection of the flow of goods is imposed over the rights of those who make it possible. Logistics thus produces a geography of exception within states governed by law.

Logistics cities: spaces for flow, not for life

Logistics cities are its urban consequence. Dubai Logistics City, the corridors of Basra, the warehouse districts around the airports of Toronto or Memphis, the free zones of Panama or Tangier are spaces designed for flow and not for life: without public space, with their own labour and customs rules, governed by port authorities and companies more than by city councils. Cowen shows how those pieces reorganise metropolitan regions, displace communities, in her later work on Canada Indigenous ones, and turn infrastructure into the new terrain of urban politics.

Vulnerability, strikes and the politics of infrastructure

The book converses with Stephen Graham on urban militarisation and with Keller Easterling on infrastructure as a form of government, and anticipates debates that the pandemic and the supply crises of 2021 made visible: when containers piled up in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the world discovered that cities depend on chains nobody governs democratically. Cowen also warns that the vulnerability of those chains is the source of power of those who work in them: blockades of ports and warehouses are the strike of the twenty-first century.

For urban studies, Cowen's contribution is to have put logistics on the map as a political object. Ports, warehouses and corridors are not the city's backyard but its engine and its border, and deciding where they are built, with what labour rights and under whose authority is an urban question of the first order. Her book invites us to look at the container as we look at a tower: as a decision about who gains, who works and who is left outside the flow.