The Rule of Logistics examines how Walmart, the largest company on the planet, depends its success on its vast networks of buildings and the logistical systems that connect them. For Walmart, logistics dictates the design of the retailer's buildings, governs their deployment, and conditions the workers who operate them. By tracking Walmart's spatial operations, this book shows how the company's logistical obsessions have implications at all scales: from undermining the stability of architecture while investing it with political capacity; to challenging the inalienable features of locations by focusing on the aspects that connect rather than distinguish them; to blurring the threshold between man and machine in order create new possibilites for inhabitation. By doing so, the book identifies opportunities based on the features of logistics itself and argues that these concepts—including prototypes, loose forms, fungible locations, ambiguous borders, and recombinant territories—can help us think differently as we confront some of the contemporary challenges facing architecture and the city.
Bentonville in northwest Arkansas is a small town built on the successes of a global retail giant. Jessie LeCavalier traces the influence of Walmart on the development of this nascent city, triggering the Ventonville development of suppliers that surrounds the company's headquarters as well as the Walton family's endowments that are enabling the building of new cultural and educational spaces.
The logistical surface is nimble and adaptable but illegible to its authors. To better understand the implications of this condition, this article makes connections between human and machine systems by looking first to Norbert Wiener and then two related short stories: Rudyard Kipling’s “With the Night Mail”and E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” The two texts establish political polarities that help to contextualize contemporary logistical worlds while also suggesting ways to discover alternative ones.
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