Logistical City: Software, Infrastructure, Labour
Ned Rossiter
June 14, 2012
Giorgio Grappi
Ned Rossiter
The logistical city is a city of peripheries. These peripheries are occupied by intermodal transport terminals, warehouses, IT infrastructure, container parks and shipping ports. Such logistical facilities do not stand isolated, of course, but are interspersed with suburbs, green belts, roads, railways, water systems and barren land. The interconnection of peripheries on a transnational scale comprises a special kind of globality, one in which the complex network of distribution systems – roads, rail, shipping, aviation – makes concrete the otherwise mysterious abstractions of capitalist operations. Yet for all this materiality, the logistical city goes largely unnoticed in the metropolitan imaginary precisely because the margins of cities tend to be overlooked and made invisible by more spectacular elements – magisterial feats of architecture, harbour views, cultural festivals and so forth. We long ago resigned ourselves to not needing to know how things work or where things come from. And we are in no rush for a reminder. The logistical city ticks along in the background as we get on with our busy daily lives.
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From IT Factory to Electronic Markets
Ned Rossiter
June 13, 2010
Ned Rossiter
From IT Factory to Electronic Markets: Speculations on Circuits, Regions, Labour
In programming field trip visits to two seemingly incongruous settings - an IT facility on the outskirts of Shanghai and Baoshan market for electronic waste, second hand products and fake gadgets - we see how both regions and social mobilization are configured as singularities within a larger constellation of relations. Following earlier waves of manufacturing across East Asia where 'Made in Japan' and, later, 'Made in Taiwan' became synonymous with a range of electronic commodities and attendant mythologies of techno-cultural dystopias, over the last two decades China has become renowned as the planet's epicentre for electronic manufacturing. When purchased, one of the primary attractions of an electronic commodity is how clean it seems. The lovely smooth surfaces coated in buffed plastics or complex metal composites provide a suitable black box of mystery for their interior circuits and generation of values that betray the toxic conditions of production and their effects on worker's health and the environment. Such is the fantastic power of the commodity-form to abstract itself from the experience of labour and life.
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