When you travel on the outskirts of many cities, a sea of featureless warehouses can stretch to the horizon. Behind those bland walls beats the heart of the logistical city. From Kolkata to Singapore, Hong Kong to Melbourne, the business of the modern world depends on these structures which house data centres, freight forwarders and other supply chain businesses. How this complex system works and how it is changing the face of many post-colonial cities is a special area of interest for Professor Brett Neilson from Western Sydney University. Neilson’s research and writing aim to provide alternative ways of conceiving globalisation, with particular emphasis upon its social and cultural dimensions. He sat down with 360info for a discussion about logistical cities. 360info: Can you explain what a logistical city is? The logistical city is that part of the urban environment which is given to creating connections both in terms of transport and communication to other parts of the world. So it can be understood as a series of infrastructures that implant themselves in urban environments in order to facilitate different kinds of flows and connections, usually with other cities, but also with rural environments. What would be examples in Asia? The first example that comes to mind is the new town of Calcutta, Rajarhat, where I was involved in conducting a large project with the Calcutta Research Group. This is an area that has been developed over the last 10-15 years and there are a number of IT companies that operate as well as other kinds of urban development, particularly housing and consumer infrastructure such as malls. However, one of the first things that was done by the development company was to lay down fibre optic cable all through the area. More generally, I think we can say that the logistical city is often located on the urban fringes. It’s not the city centre. It’s not given to spectacular architectural or monumental kinds of structures. Its form is quite mundane and often anonymous. The kind of bland warehouse structure created in the 20th century is the sort of ubiquitous kind of theme of the logistical city. Some of the infrastructures it houses are critical to modern life. But because they are critical, they are also made obscure. You can walk past them without even noticing them, or even thinking about what might be going on inside. So it’s a city that lives in front of you, but is unseen. As a researcher interested in the logistical city you have to learn to see it. I know Melbourne a little bit. I know if I hop off the plane at Tullamarine and take the bus into the centre of Melbourne that I’m passing through spaces like this. But without those spaces the centre is not going to function. The shelves won’t be full. The digital messages won’t be bouncing around and so forth. So these aspects are crucial to the life of any city? They are critical. A good way to understand how is to see what happens when they stop working. This was certainly something that was experienced during the pandemic, so logistics and supply chain disruptions became front of mind during that period. That’s when that criticality becomes really obvious and visible to people. Clearly these infrastructures are critical for trade, critical for economic life in a way different to say the financial world, which is also a critical part of the global economy, but tends to occupy an urban centre in places like Hong Kong and Singapore. Certainly finance has its logistical aspects. Particularly because it’s such a global and digitalised process these days. So even the financial world has its shadow in the logistical city in the form of infrastructures such as data centres. In Hong Kong and Singapore these are really important aspects of the logistical city. They are not downtown. In Singapore lots of them are pushed out to the west of the city, in the Jurong district. In Hong Kong, many of them are pushed up into the New Territories, 90 minutes from the financial centre on Hong Kong Island. These kinds of facilities, which are basically hangars full of computer servers, are critical to the way those cities position themselves in the global economy. These cities have also instituted programmes and incentives to deliberately attract this kind of logistical business and infrastructure. Things like tax breaks, available water and electricity, and training people who are able to operate these kinds of structures have been key to their positioning. Interestingly, Singapore has recently introduced a moratorium on new data centre construction for environmental reasons. These facilities chew up vast amounts of energy, which is another factor at stake in the logistical city.