ILPC 2027

Logistics is a matter of worldwide supply chains, connectivity, transnational corridors, multinational corporations, and thus it is often investigated within its global dimension. Indeed, the element that mostly characterizes logistics in contemporary production chains relies on its ability to connect different figures and labour regimes thanks to financial devices, as well as to new software and technologies of communication, production and transport (Tsing, 2009; Neilson, 2010; Rossiter, 2014). Our contribution, based on an ongoing empirical research, proposes to shift from this usual perspective, focusing on how logistics “hits the ground” in a local context. Starting from an historical overview about the evolution of the logistics sector in Northern Italy, we will outline some general hypothesis on the intersection between local dynamics and the logistical global process.

Northern Italy, that we conceptualize as the “megalopolis Padana” (Turri, 2000), is a useful case study because in the last few years a strong cycle of strikes and blockages has perturbed the seamless circulation of goods and commodities inside the region. In this paper we will describe how this “space of friction” has been made up from a peculiar combination of urban transformations and a specific assemblage of labour composition. Our aim is to highlight the tight and biunique relationship between two phenomena: the infrastructures of urbanization and the labour process. The co-evolution of the logistical mode of production and the redefinition of the urban tissue is, in other words, our analytical angle of enquiry of the contemporary geographies of labour.

It is a matter of fact that the instability of logistics workplace dynamics (Gutelius, 2015) also concerns their spatial location. Warehouses move relatively fast if compared to the traditional factories (Raimbault, Bahoken, 2014), and one of the main driving factors - together with the proximity to consumption areas and the strategic position inside the circulation flows - is the search for new “convenient” labour pools and for new assemblages of labour force. On the one hand, the multiplication of warehouses, logistics platforms, railways and other logistical infrastructures that cut and cross this region, is producing an increasingly heterogeneous, mobile, and diffused cartography of an uneven urban zone (i.e. the megalopolis Padana). On the other hand, labour conflicts in the logistics sector in the North of Italy since the last ten years, have been mainly played by migrant workers (Cuppini, Frapporti, Pirone, 2015). To respond to those growing workplace conflictual dynamics, companies are putting in place a range of strategies, not at least the search for new labour forces. Therefore, we argue that the search for new labour compositions is one of the main driving factors of logistics infrastructures mobility.

Our paper seeks to contribute to the investigation of the ways in which logistics actually works on the ground: adapting to and re-shaping a specific social context, not only from the point of view of patterns of control and discipline inside the workplace (Coe, 2014), but also from the point of view of the contested shaping of the urban territory.