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Logistics: the Backend of the Big Box

 

(Fred Scharmen, November 2005, revised April 2006)

 

"There is no there there."

-Gertrude Stein on the San Francisco suburb and port city of Oakland, CA, 1937 1

 

Nowheresville

 

The recognizable characteristics of the suburban lifestyle - driving, brandnames, television, sameness - are caught in a kind of feedback loop with the built environment of suburbia: a neighborhood cut by highways requires residents to drive even if they are only traveling a few blocks, and the addition of more cars to the traffic stream requires the construction of even more highways 2 . The convergence of highways and Big Box retail have affected the landscape of suburbia in ways that are well documented 3 , but many of these studies have focused only on the relationship between the consumer and the purchase point. This paper will attempt to trace the network of systems that extends out the other end of the Big Box store, opposite the parking lot, entry canopy and supergraphics. The backend of the Big Box is, in the sociological sense, unmarked 4 , but the network that has its consumer interface here reaches out and formats 5 the suburban landscape in important ways. This paper will examine the feedback loop introduced into suburbia by these supply chain networks, and the way in which this loop reinforces and changes urban form, buildings, and infrastructure outside the city center: sprawling across the United States and around the world.

 

Logistics

 

The Wikipedia defines Logistics as: "... the art and science of managing and controlling the flow of goods, energy, information and other resources." 6 The term has its origin in military jargon. In the classic The Art of War, first published in France in 1837, Baron Henri de Jomini 7 discusses Logistics as the third leg of a trinity along with the more famous Strategy and Tactics: "Strategy is the art of making war upon the map ... Grand Tactics is the art of posting troops upon the battle-field according to the accidents of the ground ... Logistics comprises the means and arrangements which work out the plans of Strategy and Tactics ... Strategy decides where to act; Logistics brings the troops to this point; Grand Tactics decides the manner of execution and the employment of the troops." To replace the word "troops" with the word "commodities" is to fully relocate these practices into the contemporary discourse of business school. For a retailer like IKEA, managing Logistics means maintaining a continuous supply chain from the manufacturer of raw material, to the producer of goods, through their distributors across the globe and up to the loading dock. This paper will start to map that supply chain with special attention to the ways in which it shapes, and is shaped by, the exurban built environment.

 

Flow

 

IKEA is a company that does much of its selling in the West and much of its purchasing in the East 8 . In 2003, IKEA signed an agreement to purchase over four and a half million carpets from India over the next several years, with suppliers located chiefly in the "carpet belt", India's state of Uttar Pradesh. The complexity of global supply chains often masks a link between first world consumption and third world exploitation. Retailers looking for the cheapest raw goods might not ask how that price is maintained. IKEA is one of very few corporations around the world that is using supply chain management as a tool to uphold basic labor standards, a carpet manufactured for a supplier in Varanasi, India (also known as Benares) is guaranteed not to have been woven by children. If IKEA, or its auditors, catches any of the manufacturers or suppliers in its network employing child labor, those children must be removed from the factory and placed in school at their former employer's expense, or else they forfeit their contract 9 .

 

Carpets manufactured in Varanasi will likely travel by barge and overland to Calcutta, where they will be packed in containers and enter the global shipping network at the port of Haldia. Shipping containers were first used in the 1950s. Ships owned by the Sea-Land Corporation were modified to accommodate the standardized, stackable containers that could then be loaded directly onto trucks and freight trains 10 . The high speed and high volume traffic enabled by containerization, as Martin Stopford writes in Maritime Economics , by the mid 1980s, was such a powerful economizing force that "... the rail freight for a ton of coal from Virginia to Jacksonville, Florida was almost three times the sea freight from Hampton Roads to Japan." 11 By 1999, container shipping had become so widespread that Wired Magazine called containers, in an article of the same name, "The 20 Ton Packet" 12 . Analogies between global communications networks and global shipping cannot be pushed too far. The internet uses a standard system of control and protocol (the Internet Protocol or IP) and a standardized unit of information, the packet, to move diverse content long distances across disparate media platforms. Keller Easterling 13 has pointed out that the genericness of the shipping container can be seen as a response to the "dumb" nature of the switches between sea, highway and rail networks: the interchange is always different, so the unit of transport must remain the same.

 

Formatting New Sites

 

The links between information technologies and logistics are even denser. Each container has a unique ID number linked to information about its contents and history, this allows an algorithm to determine the best possible way in which to load a ship without breaking it in half, or requiring containers to be reshuffled on a multileg voyage 14 . The spatial requirements for sorting and loading containers have reformatted urban ports. The basic requirements are: a long, flat quay at the container terminal lined with movable gantries, an area for storing and sorting containers, wide and smooth like a giant tabletop, and an adjacent connection to rail or truck traffic. The parameters determined by these requirements are so well known that there is an entire class of software for simulating and optimizing the flow of containers through a terminal 15 , with more complex variants even able to take local and global weather data into account. As ships get larger, ports migrate to deeper water and expand, away from city centers and out to the edges, where there is more room to lay out large fields of containers 16 . From  Hong Kong to Hamburg to Houston, the same patterns emerge, all determined by these diagrammatic underlays.

 

At the Danish port of Aarhus, Maersk - the largest shipping company in the world - is building a new container terminal in open water with material dredged from the harbor floor. The new terminal will not only add to the capacity of the port, it will free space in the older terminals for the construction of new waterfront housing. The convergence of housing demand, port obsolescence, and harbor dredging produces new exurban forms all over the world. The Danish architects PLOT collaborated with Bruce Mau Design in 2003 to propose the SuperHarbour 17 . An extreme extrapolation of those same trends at work in Aarhus, the SuperHarbour would consolidate all Danish shipping into one new deepwater port on an artificial island, freeing the urban waterfronts for residential development. In Amsterdam, the two newest suburban housing developments are the Eastern Docklands, located on older quays made obsolete by the deepwater terminal at Rotterdam, and the Ijburg, a new town for 45,000 under construction on an artificial archipelago. Developments like these represent the creation of new suburbs from scratch, in what was once open sea. These examples might be compared to the even more radical and bizarre waterfront housing proposals under construction in Dubai, where developers are building luxury housing in figurative island complexes offshore with fill dredged from the nearby petroleum terminal. All of these projects are part of a continuum in space, time, and complexity that includes recent and historical (if more mundane) work in the United States as well.

 

Baltimore

 

Founded in 1706, the Port of Baltimore 18 is the 5th largest in the United States 19 . In the 1890s, the area around Curtis Bay and Locust Point was active, and dredging efforts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were concentrated here. Starting in the 1960s, dredging and maintenance was largely limited to the area around what are now the Seagirt and Dundalk container terminals south and east of the city, creating the familiar rectangular coastline necessary for deepwater container ships. Residential and commercial development has followed the same sequence. Historically, the oldest part of the port is adjacent to the old downtown, the defunct Inner Harbor was transformed in 1980 into a commercial and tourism center by the Rouse Company. The next oldest residential areas were built as Borderlands 20 ; suburbs from which the middle class commuted downtown via ferry in the 1850s 21 . The once declining Borderland of Locust Point is now becoming a succesful residential and office district. The warehouses are being adaptively reused as waterfront offices and condos, and activity is picking up throughout the neighborhood. The area of the port that is currently active is next to the depressed Streetcar Suburb 22 of Dundalk, first laid out in 1895 23 , the container terminals form a huge barrier between the upland of Locust Point and the waterfront.

 

Meanwhile, the shipping centers in the Port of Baltimore are still looking to expand 24 . Dredged material from the harbor is used to create more new land. The newest land around the port is at Hart-Miller Island, two islands that were slowly eroding into the Chesapeake Bay now joined into one. The Maryland Port Authority actively promotes the island as a bird sanctuary and recreational destination for boaters. Positioned between Baltimore's Sitcom Suburbs 25 and the Rural Fringe 26 of the Eastern Shore, and just outside the area that the Maryland Port Administration has designated for possible harbor expansion, it remains to be seen whether this new land will fall under the sway of demand for new housing or if demand for new deepwater ports will make it into a SuperHarbour for the Chesapeake Bay. In the waterfront areas around industrial harbors, industry and shipping have the same relationship to development that farming has in inland areas. Trade organizations, mixed-use advocates, and historical preservationists ally against residential developers for special zoning and legal protection against the construction of the housing that is, usually, ultimately more profitable 27 .

 

Long Wharf

 

Our notional IKEA carpet is headed for New Haven, not Baltimore. The area around IKEA in New Haven, including the land underneath the Sargent Lock Factory and Interstate 95, is all built of fill dredged from New Haven's harbor. New Haven's founders intended it to be a port city that would rival New Amsterdam in the south 28 . The area between the city and the water grew as the length of Long Wharf shrunk 29 . But New Haven's dredgers couldn't make their harbor deeper or larger than New York's, and today most international shipping for Connecticut comes from the ports of New York and New Jersey.

 

Here we see the same forces at work as in Baltimore: the oldest downtown docks in Manhattan at the Battery are now gone or revitalized, the newer facilities in Brooklyn are in the process of being converted to recreation and housing, and the newest, largest, active terminals are in the inner ring suburbs of Newark and Bayonne in New Jersey.  The Port of New Jersey facilities are strategically located between the water, the rails, the highway, and the airport, taking advantage of container shipping's inherent intermodality with access to a diverse range of transshipment possibilities. These large facilities in New Jersey include warehouse buildings where container shipments are broken down into their component elements and rearranged into loads for trucks headed into the region.

 

String of Pearls

 

The New Jersey Transportation and Planning Authority is looking into the potential for the expansion of this transshipment process to organize regional development. Currently, the area directly around the container terminals and airport is full, no new facilities can be built there, while freight traffic continues to grow. As the "Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Project" Executive Summary 30 notes: "Based on current real estate trends, many of these businesses are choosing to locate on 'greenfield' sites on the fringes of the region where land and development costs are lowest." An alternative proposed by the NJTPA would reduce shipping's contribution to regional sprawl. It involves the construction of a "Portway"; a new transportation network for trains, trucks and Automatic Guided Vehicles. This dedicated network, running parallel to the New Jersey Turnpike, would reduce traffic on the highway, and allow the derelict factories and other disused Brownfield sites in the area to be transformed into new transshipment and Logistics facilities, linking them into what the report calls a "String of Pearls".

 

Infrastructure

 

This is the transformation of the highway system that Keller Easterling 31 has called a "dumb network" - a nondeterministic, generic means of moving anything from place to place - into a smarter system, dedicated and optimized for performing specific functions. This recalls some of the ideas for managing national commercial traffic discussed by planners at the dawn of the highway age in the 1920s  and 30s. Easterling cites the "trunk-line traffic tracks" of landscape architect Warren H. Manning 32 . These routes would have carried freight traffic and buses, forming a network independent of the recreational roads, and linking up outside of city centers to mitigate congestion.

 

The String of Pearls proposal would use the high tech Portway to move goods independently of the car traffic on the Turnpike. In their book Splintering Urbanism , Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin discuss a phase of infrastructure development  contemporary with early industrialization 33 , rail, highway, and electrical grids are assumed to be nuetral and open to all, helping cities to cohere and develop smoothly. Systems like the Portway can have the opposite effect. The Portway is one of several emerging "... specialised, privatised and customised networks ..." 34 these networks are parallel and invisible, but their effects of stratification are felt throughout suburban sprawl.

 

Chaos and Standards

 

An understanding of the organizational principles behind the construction and placement of these facilities can help us to make sense of the apparent chaos that dominates the suburban territory along the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to Connecticut. The Brownfields Project report identifies an expanding market for facilities "... including assembly, packaging, labeling and other operations to add value to the goods  ..." that are shipped into the region 35 . These processing, packaging, and transshipment sites are recognizable in aerial photographs by their ring of loading docks, distinguishable from the Big Box purchase points by their lack of front door and parking lot. These buildings cluster into what the report calls "Distriparks", including all of the processing capability necessary to organize and repackage goods for an entire region. These are the mediators between the global system of ports and ships, and the regional system of trains and trucks.

 

If it is the standardization of the container that makes the high volumes and speed of global shipping possible, the equivalent unit for regional trucking is the pallet. The dimensions for these units are established by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization 36 . The interrelationship between palletization and containerization is so dense and crucial that ISO is currently moderating competing proposals from European ground and International maritime shippers. The Europeans are asking that container width be upgraded from 8 feet to 8.5 feet, this would allow two European pallets to fit side by side in the interior. The current container width allows two American pallets to fit. International shippers are fighting the change on the grounds that it would render billions of dollars in infrastructure investment obsolete 37 .

 

Software

 

The standardization of pallet size and protocol organizes the diagram of the Logistics building just as the container organizes the terminal. The intent is to minimize shuffling, and maximize throughput. The location, dimension and layout of the building itself therefore becomes a problem that lies more in the realm of information science than in the fields of architecture or urbanism, at least as those disciplines are traditionally defined 38 . The interior is determined by forklift access, the width of the aisles is at a minimum, and the maximum height for these warehouses is growing as forklifts are replaced by driverless automated storage and retrieval vehicles, able to reach much higher racks 39 . The exterior is a ring of loading docks, and the most sophisticated systems available can even load and unload the trucks automatically 40 . The location of regional intermodal facilities can be evaluated algorithmically 41 , and studies suggest that the ideal locations for these switches and terminals is, as predicted by Manning, outside and between the city centers, in the suburbs and rural fringe 42 .

 

The logistics building outside of York, Pennsylvania on RT. 83 is 30 miles north of Baltimore, and 10 miles south of York. It was constructed in sections from standard steel pieces bolted together, the completed sections were lifted by crane and added to the growing grid at a continuous rate. The crew on site could predict when the building would be finished to the day. I visited it in 2001 when I saw the blur of the steel superstructure against the sky from the highway and turned around to investigate. An engineer on site told me about the automated storage and retrieval vehicles that would operate it and gave me information about Westfalia Technologies, the company that designed the system. When I returned two years later, in 2003, the steel grid had been completely wrapped with a blank skin of white metal siding. The building that had looked so strange before now became insignificant and anonymous, invisible like the rest of the supply chain network that sprawls across the globe.

 

Westfalia packages software along with its automated warehouse hardware, the Warehouse Management System offers "effortless, precision control" for "users of all computer literacy levels". The illustration on the brochure is a masterpiece of stock photography and photoshop: a disembodied hand on a mouse, in a universe of circuits, ones and zeroes. It is easy to imagine the increasing automation and expanding scale of the logisitic networks as a dehumanizing process, overdetermined by optimization algorithms, huge ships unloaded automatically in suburban ports, goods transferred by Automatic Guided Vehicles along a Portway and into the gridded world of the high tech automated warehouse. The logistics process operates within Robert Lang's edgeless city 43 , the unmarked and unseen territory that surrounds us on the fringe.  But concepts like the NJTPA's String of Pearls are taking advantage of the diagram-based nature of the system, and rewriting the diagram in ways that mitigate sprawl instead of adding to it. IKEA's corrporate responsibility program uses the interconnections in the supply chain to begin to spread the Welfare State values of Scandinavia into the Third World, instead of hiding exploitation behind complexity. ISO, the standards organization that determines the parameters for everything from shipping containers to ATM cards, seems to be expanding the concept of "standards" to include social responsibility as well, declaring on its website 44 : "In the wake of increasing globalization, we have become increasingly conscious not only of what we buy, but also how the goods and services we buy have been produced."

 

The last stop for a carpet on its way to IKEA is a redistribution center in Milford, where goods headed to New Haven are broken down into shipments bound for specific stores. The placeless software of Logistics has direct spatial implications at every stage of the carpet’s trip. From PLOT's SuperHarbour project to current proposals for housing refugees and retirees in discarded ISO standard shipping containers, the byproducts of the global supply chains that carry carpet from Varanasi to New Haven can shape social and physical space in ways that are direct and profound. Working with and understanding the logistics supply chain in an operational way can enable architects and planners to reimagine the software that produces sprawl, and redesign the resultant suburban landscape.

 

Illustration collage (jpg)

slides (13meg. pdf)

related: dettifoss  

 

Works Cited

 

Brown, Elizabeth Mills New Haven, a Guide , (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976)

Easterling, Keller, Interchange and Container: the New Orgman in Perspecta 30, Louise Harpman and Evan M. Supcoff, Eds. (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999)

Easterling, Keller, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999)

Garvin, Alexander, The American City: What Works What Doesn’t (New York, Mcgraw Hill)

Gonzalez, David On the New Waterfront, a Place for the Old , New York Times, June 28, 2005, Tuesday

Graham, Stephen and Marvin, Simon Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructure, Technological Mobilities and the Urabn Condition , (London, Routledge, 2001)

Hayden, Dolores, Building Suburbia (New York, Vintage, 2004)

IKEA, http://www.ikea-group.ikea.com/responsible/brochure.html Access Date: Nov. 12, 2005

Indian Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, www.ficci.com/ficci/media-room/speeches-presentations/ 2004/sep/wisc/ficcipres_backup2.pdf Access Date: Nov. 12, 2005

ISO, http://www.iso.org Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

ISO, Social Responsibility , http://www.iso.org/sr Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

de Jomini, Baron Henri, The Art of War , Capt. G.H. Mendell and Lieut. W.P. Craighill, translators (Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13549/13549-h/13549-h.htm Access Date: Nov. 12, 2005)

Lang, Robert, edgeless cities (Washinton, DC, The Brookings Institution Press, 2003)

Macharis, Cathy and Verbeke, Alain, Location Analysis for Belgian Intermodal Terminals , in Current Issues in Port Logistics and Intermodality, Theo Notteboom, Ed.

Maryland Port Administration, http://www.marylandports.com/ Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

Maryland Port Administration, Port Land Use Study, http://www.marylandports.com/portuse/index.htm Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

Merkuryeva, Galina, Merkuryev, Yuri and Tolujev, Juri, National Institute for R&D in Informatics, Computer Simulation and Metamodelling Of Logistics Processes At A Container Terminal , http://www.ici.ro/ici/revista/sic2000_1/art06.html Access Date: Nov. 12, 2005

New Jersey Transportation Authority, Preparing Modern Intermodal Freight Infrastructure to Support Brownfield Economic Development, http://njtpa.org/planning/brownfields/ph1_exec_sum_.html Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

PLOT, SuperHarbour, http://www.plot.dk/ Access Date, Nov. 13, 2005

Robl, Ernest H. The Intermodal Container FAQ , http://www.robl.w1.com/Transport/intermod.htm Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

Stein, Gertrude, Everybody’s Autobiography ( New York, Exact Change, 1993)

Stopford, Martin Maritime Economics (New York, Routledge, 1997)

Szwankowski, Stanislaw, Logistics Centers in Seaport Regions , in Current Issues in Port Logistics and Intermodality, Theo Notteboom, Ed.

Taggart, Stewart, Wired Magazine, The 20 Ton Packet, 1999, http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/7.10/ports.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set= Access Date: Nov. 12, 2005

Westfalia Technologies, Automated Storage and Retrieval System for Pallets, http://www.westfaliausa.com/asrs/pallet_storage-01.htm Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

Wikipedia

http://pages.baltimorecountymd.com/history.htm Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

http://www.southbaltimore.com/miscellany/history1.html Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005

http://www.nathanielturner.com/robertmooreand1199union3.htm Access Date: Nov. 13, 2005