Unpacking the Logistics Town: how local communities are reshaped in the wake of Amazon’s European warehouse expansion

This project aims to understand how new logistical infrastructures are locally implemented, and how different actors in towns that are being reshaped as a ‘logistics towns’ navigate the promise and the risk of logistics with respect to decent work and sustainable cities.

In the wake of Amazon’s recent warehouse establishment in Dos Hermanas (Spain), Eskilstuna (Sweden) and Mansfield (U.K), this project will document and analyse the transformation of three post-industrial communities into ‘logistics towns’.

Logistics hubs are geographic concentrations of commercial activities centred on transportation, coordination and distribution of goods.

The promise of logistics as the business of the future is strong and encourages local governance to commit to digitalisation and platform models.

Amazon’s warehouse expansion in Europe has however led to objections to public investments in private infrastructures with unclear returns.

The researchers will make use of critical logistics perspectives to unpack the tensions between local sustainability and global connectivity at a moment where the vulnerabilities attached to the arrival of large digital corporations are increasingly debated.

The project relies on ethnographic studies of the three towns’ logistics parks and their connections to local industrial infrastructures.

The project maps the implementation of logistical business models and provides knowledge on local negotiations of decent work and sustainable cities.