Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city

Abstract

Since 1970 there has been a host of new distribution systems that facilitate the unprecedented mobility of goods, people and information across the world, yet there is little research into the implications of flow on the design of the city, for example logistics systems. This essay mines an originally American-based (now global) logistics network, focusing on the operations and attendant spaces of the FedEx Corporation to produce a series of lessons, and applies them as a set of planning aids for the city. These lessons present an idea of territory based on time rather than distance, offer an organisational model that merges centralised control with distributed responsiveness, and demonstrate a dissolving of the distinctions between architecture, landscape and infrastructure. The essay speaks to all the design disciplines with a stake in the city, but in reading territory from the perspective of systems rather than form it addresses a topic more closely associated with landscape. Documenting a logistical network advances scholarship into how artificial flows shape space to claim new territory for the discipline that so far has largely focused on the study of natural flows.