Canals, containers, and corridors: Bringing river geomorphology to North America's largest inland port

Abstract

While the corridor as a spatial arrangement is familiar to transportation geographers, I argue that it has not been thoroughly explored as a type of space comparable to networks, territories, or scales. Drawing on river geomorphology and its four-dimensional conceptualization of the corridor, I use the Will County Inland Port—the largest inland port in North America—to demonstrate how a deeper theorization of the space of the corridor can inform our understanding of the relationship between transportation infrastructure and its surroundings. By considering a corridor as not only one-dimensional, along which goods and people flow back and forth, but incorporating the vertical, anisotropic, and temporal dimensions as well, we can better understand the impacts of infrastructure on its surroundings and the broader relationship between mobility and space.