The fourth chapter takes a wider view of the logistical environment in order to survey the range technologies that affect the human body itself. Inhabitants of distribution centers are subject to intense pressure to meet performance standards, all while increasingly inhabiting a world designed by and built for information management machines.
The first chapter traces the emergence of contemporary business logistics out of its roots in both military and managerial contexts. More than simply managing supply chains, contemporary logistics operates between abstract and concrete realms to manage objects in space and time with architectural, infrastructural, and territorial consequences.
The conclusion of The Rule of Logistics considers some of the implications of logistics for architectural form, the roots of logistics in desire, and infrastructure as a site of collective investment and imagination.
The third chapter inspects both the automation of city making and the geo-political possibilities of architecture itself by first tracing Walmart’s increasingly technologically sophisticated location strategies. Afterwards, it examines what happens to those strategies in practice.
The second chapter examines Walmart’s collection of building types to show how new technologies related to information production and management enrolled architecture into logistical systems with formal, spatial, and organizational implications.
The introduction of The Rule of Logistics establishes logistics as the way to understand Walmart’s architecture. It outlines some of the key concerns of the book before providing a portrait of the company as much more than just a retailer.
The fifth chapter returns to Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, to investigate the urban consequences of the region’s transformation because of the concentration of wealth and management expertise generated by the retailer.
