Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/653001
I DA U N I V E R S A L M a rc h -A p r i l 2 0 1 6 35 the global fl ow and movement of shipped materials. The expansion will recon- fi gure trans-American shipping in three primary ways. First, a higher volume of goods will move faster between the two oceans, decreasing transport costs and altering the delicate fi nancial calculus that determines global shipping routes. Second, as canal traffi c increases, there will be a corresponding rise in trans- shipment, where goods are transferred to smaller ships that service cities with more shallow harbors. The canal's three ports – Balboa, Colón, and Manzanillo – will link distri- bution centers, like Shanghai, with smaller hubs like Barranquilla, Colombia, thus increasing Panama's impor- tance to regional shipping networks. Third, the expansion will provide an attractive alter- native for shipping agricultural products from the interior United States to East Asian markets, elevating the Missis- sippi River corridor relative to the currently dominant overland routes to Pacifi c ports. This massive recon- fi guration of landscapes and infrastructures is organized primarily through the invis- ible hand of logistics, which seeks economic gain and functions through paradigms of effi ciency and control. But these transformations should not be understood solely along economic and technical lines, for they are also cultural, social, political, material, and ecolog- ical. With its narrow focus on optimizing profi t margins, wait times, and warehousing sched- ules, logistics is largely indif- ferent to the effects of canal expansion on societies and landscapes, and to the roles of people, corporations, and governments in shaping those effects. When we widen the lens to consider these broader dimensions, we fi nd that logistics is not the neutral actor it may seem to be. Rather, it produces ineffi - ciencies and excess at multiple scales, from the material surplus of the excavations to the specula- tive bubble of overbuilt infra- structure across the hemisphere. The Panama Canal expansion reverberates throughout the Americas, in the form of deeper harbors, recon- structed islands, and redeveloped waterfronts. Landscape provides a more useful analytic frame- work. Geographers, planners, architects, environmental designers, and others who take a landscape approach are fundamentally concerned with value systems that include the cultural, social, and material. J.B. Jackson famously argued that "a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a [hu] man-made system of spaces functioning and evolving, not according to natural laws, but to serve a community." The key question is: Whose values are inscribed in the landscape? Which community's needs are served? Here we focus on one dimension of the Panama Canal expansion – the material – as it reverberates throughout the Americas, in the form of deeper harbors, reconstructed islands, restored wetlands, redeveloped waterfronts, and other new infrastructures. While our study is not compre- hensive, it offers lessons that may prove useful across a range of social and environ- mental issues where similar dynamics are at work. The Logistical Production of Space Logistics is the design and management of the fl ow and distribution of goods. Although it is now often deployed in the service of global capitalism, logistics originated in military science as a set of strategies for organizing the distribu- tion of materials and services within national territories and occupied lands. As such, it has always had a sociopolitical dimension: Who is positioned to distribute things to whom? By what methods? For whose benefi t? At what expense? As an expanding set of ideologies, practices, and protocols, logistics now exceeds its original meaning as a pragmatic "science of distribution." Seeking nothing less than the total "monetiza- tion of space and time," it has emerged as a dominant force in "the cold calculation of cost at the center of the production of space." This is particularly true of maritime landscapes like the Panama Canal, where the goals of logistics and commerce have essentially converged. Since World War II, logistics has advanced via technologies, such as contain- erized shipping, upgrades in data management, and complex trade agreements. And yet, its objectives remain deceptively simple: effi ciency and reliability. In commercial Panama Canal watershed. [Map by the authors] Story continued on page 36