Logistical geographies

Neil M. Coe

2020

Although logistics are fundamentally geographical and of critical importance to contemporary society, it is only relatively recently that human geographers and cognate social scientists have started to meaningfully engage with the topic. This paper explores this recent growth of interest, which encompasses the work of transport geographers, economic geographers, labour geographers, mobilities scholars and critical logistics scholars. It synthesises, reviews and evaluates this research around four themes: logistics, cities and regional development; logistics and global production networks; logistics labour; and infrastructure, power and violence. These themes are presented in the loose order in which they have emerged in the literature; while these topics have originated in particular sub‐disciplines, important conversations are now starting to emerge between different kinds of scholars both within and across these themes. These conversations have also increasingly connected geographers into vibrant interdisciplinary debates involving researchers from political science, sociology, anthropology, labour studies, and architecture and planning, among others.

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National University of Singapore