Martin Danyluk | Concordia University (Canada) (original) (raw)
Journal Articles by Martin Danyluk
Antipode, Aug 2, 2023
Recent studies of logistics have embraced the “choke point” thesis: the notion that a strategical... more Recent studies of logistics have embraced the “choke point” thesis: the notion that a strategically positioned group of workers or insurgents can exercise outsize power by disrupting the circulation of goods through the supply chain. This article examines this proposition through the case of Coco Solo, Panama, an informal community situated at the epicenter of Panama’s transit economy but persistently excluded from its benefits. Between 2001 and 2014, as part of a protracted struggle over housing, Coco Solo residents repeatedly blockaded key ports and logistics facilities. Despite their location at a critical node in global capitalist commodity circuits, the community’s actions met with limited success. I draw on the case to refine existing theorizations of logistical resistance, emphasizing the contingent factors that influence the effectiveness of such tactics, the diverse contexts in which they are mobilized, and the value of going beyond workerist and insurrectionist accounts of supply chain disruption.
Progress in Human Geography, 2022
The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as atten... more The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as attention to private finance has grown. Disrupting the tendency to fetishize private financial power, this article proposes an expanded conception of public finance that emphasizes its role in shaping geographies of inequality. We conceptualize the relationship between public and private finance as a dynamic interface characterized today by asymmetrical power relations, path-dependent policy solutions, the depoliticization of markets, and uneven distributional effects. A reimagined theory and praxis of public finance can contribute to building abolitionist futures, and geographers are well positioned to advance this project.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021
With the development of global logistical systems to coordinate the movement of goods, cities aro... more With the development of global logistical systems to coordinate the movement of goods, cities around the world are being reconceived as nodes in circuits of commodity capital. These efforts are reshaping urban environments and provoking novel forms of political resistance. They are also bringing distant places and subjects into new relations of interaction and interdependence. This article traces the web of urban change and contestation that has taken shape around the expansion of the Panama Canal, an infrastructure megaproject with reverberations that have been felt in port cities throughout the Americas. Drawing on research conducted in the Panama City, Los Angeles, and New York City areas, I examine efforts to remake urban space in the name of smooth, efficient circulation—what I call supply-chain urbanism—and the struggles that have ensued over land, labor, and environments. The concept of supply-chain urbanism calls attention to the life-damaging impacts of goods movement on communities and workers, impacts that are unevenly distributed across space, race, and class. Crucially, it also underscores the connections between seemingly disparate episodes of urban change and resistance. Beyond shedding light on emerging forms of logistics-based urbanization, the article illustrates the value of relational methodologies for the study of networked urban dynamics. In disclosing the wider forces, processes, and flows that connect far-flung experiences of urban transformation and struggle, such approaches can apprehend the interlinked character of contemporary urbanization processes in ways that purely local perspectives cannot.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2019
This article examines an emerging form of interspatial competition premised on attracting cargo t... more This article examines an emerging form of interspatial competition premised on attracting cargo traffic and value‐added logistics activities. Against the backdrop of economic globalization and the revolution in logistics, place‐based actors are increasingly vying to insert their localities into transnational supply chains. I explore the causes, conditions and consequences of this burgeoning growth strategy through a study of the dynamics surrounding the expansion of the Panama Canal, opened to shipping traffic in June 2016, and the consequent battle among North American ports to attract a new generation of oversized container vessels. The spatial practices of mobile actors in the logistics industry, I argue, represent the leading edge of capitalism's tendency to render places interchangeable—a condition I call fungible space. The abstract logic of spatial substitution, however, can never fully escape the concrete qualities of particular places, which form the very conditions of interchangeability itself. This dialectic of spatial fungibility and geographic specificity has intensified rivalries for volatile commodity flows and made logistics‐oriented development a particularly risky growth strategy for cities. What is at stake in these speculative ventures is the welfare of vulnerable communities and workers, who disproportionately bear the costs and risks of supply‐chain volatility.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation invo... more Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a calculative logic and spatial practice of circulation that is at the fore of the reorganization of capitalism and war. Viewed from this perspective, the rise of logistics has transformed not only the physical movement of materials but also the very rationality by which space is organized. It has remade economic and military space according to a universalizing logic of abstract flow, exacerbating existing patterns of uneven geographical development. Drawing on the articles that make up this themed issue, we propose that a critical approach to logistics is characterized by three core commitments: (1) a rejection of the field’s self-depiction as an apolitical science of management, along with a commitment to highlighting the relations of power and acts of violence that underpin it; (2) an interest in exposing the flaws, irrationalities, and vulnerabilities of logistical regimes; and (3) an orientation toward contestation and struggle within logistical networks.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
The growth and transformation of logistics have been attributed to a specific confluence of force... more The growth and transformation of logistics have been attributed to a specific confluence of forces that compelled firms to turn their attention to the circulation of commodities in the second half of the 20th century. This article seeks to develop a more theoretically informed account of the logistics revolution by delineating the industry’s role in promoting the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of capitalism. Drawing on Marxian geographical thought, I contend that the logistical turn of the past five decades has facilitated a multifaceted ‘‘spatial fix’’ to capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation—one that has reconfigured the geographies of circulation as well as production, consumption, and appropriation. This argument has important implications for our understanding of globalization. By enhancing the mobility of both commodity capital and the production process itself, advances in logistics have been an essential, albeit neglected, condition of global economic integration since the 1970s.
Rethinking Marxism, 2015
This essay provides a critical reading of the 2010 science fiction film Inception, advancing two ... more This essay provides a critical reading of the 2010 science fiction film Inception, advancing two theses about contemporary mass culture. First, mainstream cultural products contain certain utopian moments. Yet while they may offer glimpses of a world radically transformed in certain respects, this transcendent impulse rarely extends to the depiction of social relations. In fact, such products can be effective in consolidating dominant ideologies and naturalizing the existing political-economic order, because their sharp break from scientific or metaphysical realities may serve to conceal a symptomatic silence on matters of social organization. Second, this tension internal to commercial culture poses an opportunity for political intervention. The mass-cultural product, insofar as it must appeal to broadly felt desires, frequently makes a utopian or transformative promise that cannot be realized by the commodity itself. A culturally attuned Left could highlight this inadequacy by reappropriating mainstream cultural symbols in order to draw broader attention to struggles for social transformation.
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2012
Urban agriculture in Toronto largely focuses on self-provisioning, but it could be scaled up sign... more Urban agriculture in Toronto largely focuses on self-provisioning, but it could be scaled up significantly. Our findings in an earlier paper indicate that the supply of land is not an insurmountable barrier. Rather, other more subtle impediments exist, including taxation systems and structures that assume agriculture is a strictly rural activity; inadequate sharing of knowledge among urban producers; limited access to soil, water, and seeds; and the lack of incentives to attract landowners and foundations to provide financial or in-kind support.
The potential exists to develop urban agriculture so that it supplies 10% of the city's commercial demand for fresh vegetables. Scaling up to this level requires significant policy and program initiatives in five key areas: Increasing urban growers' access to spaces for production; putting in place the physical infrastructure and resources for agriculture; integrating local food production into the food supply chain; creating systems for sharing knowledge; and creating new models for governance, coordination, and financing. Our recommendations, while focusing on Toronto, offer lessons for those currently attempting to strengthen urban agriculture in other cities.
Urban Studies, 2007
This study examines the relationship between gentrification and the transport mode selected for t... more This study examines the relationship between gentrification and the transport mode selected for the journey to work. A review of surveys, ethnographies and electoral records shows a liberal and anti-suburban ideology associated with gentrification, including endorsement of sustainability and the public household. Consequently, one would expect to find non-automobile transport prevailing in gentrified districts. Data secured from the Census of Canada permit this proposition to be examined for the central cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The results show some complexity, due in part to divisions internal to gentrified neighbourhoods. The most robust results reveal an overrepresentation of cycling to work in gentrified districts and, surprisingly in light of a putative left-liberal ideology, an underutilisation of public transport compared with other districts.
Book Chapters by Martin Danyluk
Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, 2019
Book Reviews by Martin Danyluk
Society and Space, Nov 25, 2019
Agriculture and Human Values, 2011
Theses by Martin Danyluk
This dissertation examines the landscapes of logistics, the fast-growing industry responsible for... more This dissertation examines the landscapes of logistics, the fast-growing industry responsible for managing the movement of goods, materials, and related information in the global economy. As commodity flows increase in volume, velocity, and distance, they depend on increasingly large-scale transformations of the physical and social environment. How is space being refashioned to accommodate new methods and patterns of circulation? And how do popular forces intervene in these processes?
This research employs a multi-sited, relational methodology to investigate how the circulation of commodities is influencing the production of space at multiple scales. Its empirical focus is the recent expansion of the Panama Canal, a logistics megaproject with global reverberations, and the consequent rivalry among North American ports seeking to attract a new generation of oversized container ships. Drawing on a year of mixed-methods fieldwork in Panama City, Los Angeles, and New York, the dissertation analyzes competitive efforts to remake space in the image of smooth, efficient circulation and the struggles that have ensued over land, labour, and the environment.
I argue that the landscapes of logistics are contradictory and conflictual spaces: even as global supply chains deliver the material provisions that make possible the reproduction of contemporary life, their development and functioning are undergirded by violent processes of community dispossession, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. These impacts are disproportionately borne by poor and racialized residents and workers, whose struggles play a fundamental role in shaping corporate production and distribution networks. The research offers a critical reappraisal of the prevailing view that logistics provides a progressive and sustainable path to economic development. It shows that, as logistics has become increasingly vital to the operations of capitalism, the circulation of commodities exacts a heavy toll on those who live and labour in the arteries of global trade.
Reports and Working Papers by Martin Danyluk
Global Responses to COVID-19: A Law and Economics Comparative Analysis, 2021
Media Appearances by Martin Danyluk
Interview by Amir Khafagy, American Prospect, Feb 2, 2022
Interview by John Lewis, 360° City (podcast), Dec 21, 2021
Other Publications by Martin Danyluk
Antipode, Aug 2, 2023
Recent studies of logistics have embraced the “choke point” thesis: the notion that a strategical... more Recent studies of logistics have embraced the “choke point” thesis: the notion that a strategically positioned group of workers or insurgents can exercise outsize power by disrupting the circulation of goods through the supply chain. This article examines this proposition through the case of Coco Solo, Panama, an informal community situated at the epicenter of Panama’s transit economy but persistently excluded from its benefits. Between 2001 and 2014, as part of a protracted struggle over housing, Coco Solo residents repeatedly blockaded key ports and logistics facilities. Despite their location at a critical node in global capitalist commodity circuits, the community’s actions met with limited success. I draw on the case to refine existing theorizations of logistical resistance, emphasizing the contingent factors that influence the effectiveness of such tactics, the diverse contexts in which they are mobilized, and the value of going beyond workerist and insurrectionist accounts of supply chain disruption.
Progress in Human Geography, 2022
The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as atten... more The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as attention to private finance has grown. Disrupting the tendency to fetishize private financial power, this article proposes an expanded conception of public finance that emphasizes its role in shaping geographies of inequality. We conceptualize the relationship between public and private finance as a dynamic interface characterized today by asymmetrical power relations, path-dependent policy solutions, the depoliticization of markets, and uneven distributional effects. A reimagined theory and praxis of public finance can contribute to building abolitionist futures, and geographers are well positioned to advance this project.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021
With the development of global logistical systems to coordinate the movement of goods, cities aro... more With the development of global logistical systems to coordinate the movement of goods, cities around the world are being reconceived as nodes in circuits of commodity capital. These efforts are reshaping urban environments and provoking novel forms of political resistance. They are also bringing distant places and subjects into new relations of interaction and interdependence. This article traces the web of urban change and contestation that has taken shape around the expansion of the Panama Canal, an infrastructure megaproject with reverberations that have been felt in port cities throughout the Americas. Drawing on research conducted in the Panama City, Los Angeles, and New York City areas, I examine efforts to remake urban space in the name of smooth, efficient circulation—what I call supply-chain urbanism—and the struggles that have ensued over land, labor, and environments. The concept of supply-chain urbanism calls attention to the life-damaging impacts of goods movement on communities and workers, impacts that are unevenly distributed across space, race, and class. Crucially, it also underscores the connections between seemingly disparate episodes of urban change and resistance. Beyond shedding light on emerging forms of logistics-based urbanization, the article illustrates the value of relational methodologies for the study of networked urban dynamics. In disclosing the wider forces, processes, and flows that connect far-flung experiences of urban transformation and struggle, such approaches can apprehend the interlinked character of contemporary urbanization processes in ways that purely local perspectives cannot.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2019
This article examines an emerging form of interspatial competition premised on attracting cargo t... more This article examines an emerging form of interspatial competition premised on attracting cargo traffic and value‐added logistics activities. Against the backdrop of economic globalization and the revolution in logistics, place‐based actors are increasingly vying to insert their localities into transnational supply chains. I explore the causes, conditions and consequences of this burgeoning growth strategy through a study of the dynamics surrounding the expansion of the Panama Canal, opened to shipping traffic in June 2016, and the consequent battle among North American ports to attract a new generation of oversized container vessels. The spatial practices of mobile actors in the logistics industry, I argue, represent the leading edge of capitalism's tendency to render places interchangeable—a condition I call fungible space. The abstract logic of spatial substitution, however, can never fully escape the concrete qualities of particular places, which form the very conditions of interchangeability itself. This dialectic of spatial fungibility and geographic specificity has intensified rivalries for volatile commodity flows and made logistics‐oriented development a particularly risky growth strategy for cities. What is at stake in these speculative ventures is the welfare of vulnerable communities and workers, who disproportionately bear the costs and risks of supply‐chain volatility.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation invo... more Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a calculative logic and spatial practice of circulation that is at the fore of the reorganization of capitalism and war. Viewed from this perspective, the rise of logistics has transformed not only the physical movement of materials but also the very rationality by which space is organized. It has remade economic and military space according to a universalizing logic of abstract flow, exacerbating existing patterns of uneven geographical development. Drawing on the articles that make up this themed issue, we propose that a critical approach to logistics is characterized by three core commitments: (1) a rejection of the field’s self-depiction as an apolitical science of management, along with a commitment to highlighting the relations of power and acts of violence that underpin it; (2) an interest in exposing the flaws, irrationalities, and vulnerabilities of logistical regimes; and (3) an orientation toward contestation and struggle within logistical networks.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
The growth and transformation of logistics have been attributed to a specific confluence of force... more The growth and transformation of logistics have been attributed to a specific confluence of forces that compelled firms to turn their attention to the circulation of commodities in the second half of the 20th century. This article seeks to develop a more theoretically informed account of the logistics revolution by delineating the industry’s role in promoting the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of capitalism. Drawing on Marxian geographical thought, I contend that the logistical turn of the past five decades has facilitated a multifaceted ‘‘spatial fix’’ to capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation—one that has reconfigured the geographies of circulation as well as production, consumption, and appropriation. This argument has important implications for our understanding of globalization. By enhancing the mobility of both commodity capital and the production process itself, advances in logistics have been an essential, albeit neglected, condition of global economic integration since the 1970s.
Rethinking Marxism, 2015
This essay provides a critical reading of the 2010 science fiction film Inception, advancing two ... more This essay provides a critical reading of the 2010 science fiction film Inception, advancing two theses about contemporary mass culture. First, mainstream cultural products contain certain utopian moments. Yet while they may offer glimpses of a world radically transformed in certain respects, this transcendent impulse rarely extends to the depiction of social relations. In fact, such products can be effective in consolidating dominant ideologies and naturalizing the existing political-economic order, because their sharp break from scientific or metaphysical realities may serve to conceal a symptomatic silence on matters of social organization. Second, this tension internal to commercial culture poses an opportunity for political intervention. The mass-cultural product, insofar as it must appeal to broadly felt desires, frequently makes a utopian or transformative promise that cannot be realized by the commodity itself. A culturally attuned Left could highlight this inadequacy by reappropriating mainstream cultural symbols in order to draw broader attention to struggles for social transformation.
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2012
Urban agriculture in Toronto largely focuses on self-provisioning, but it could be scaled up sign... more Urban agriculture in Toronto largely focuses on self-provisioning, but it could be scaled up significantly. Our findings in an earlier paper indicate that the supply of land is not an insurmountable barrier. Rather, other more subtle impediments exist, including taxation systems and structures that assume agriculture is a strictly rural activity; inadequate sharing of knowledge among urban producers; limited access to soil, water, and seeds; and the lack of incentives to attract landowners and foundations to provide financial or in-kind support.
The potential exists to develop urban agriculture so that it supplies 10% of the city's commercial demand for fresh vegetables. Scaling up to this level requires significant policy and program initiatives in five key areas: Increasing urban growers' access to spaces for production; putting in place the physical infrastructure and resources for agriculture; integrating local food production into the food supply chain; creating systems for sharing knowledge; and creating new models for governance, coordination, and financing. Our recommendations, while focusing on Toronto, offer lessons for those currently attempting to strengthen urban agriculture in other cities.
Urban Studies, 2007
This study examines the relationship between gentrification and the transport mode selected for t... more This study examines the relationship between gentrification and the transport mode selected for the journey to work. A review of surveys, ethnographies and electoral records shows a liberal and anti-suburban ideology associated with gentrification, including endorsement of sustainability and the public household. Consequently, one would expect to find non-automobile transport prevailing in gentrified districts. Data secured from the Census of Canada permit this proposition to be examined for the central cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The results show some complexity, due in part to divisions internal to gentrified neighbourhoods. The most robust results reveal an overrepresentation of cycling to work in gentrified districts and, surprisingly in light of a putative left-liberal ideology, an underutilisation of public transport compared with other districts.
This dissertation examines the landscapes of logistics, the fast-growing industry responsible for... more This dissertation examines the landscapes of logistics, the fast-growing industry responsible for managing the movement of goods, materials, and related information in the global economy. As commodity flows increase in volume, velocity, and distance, they depend on increasingly large-scale transformations of the physical and social environment. How is space being refashioned to accommodate new methods and patterns of circulation? And how do popular forces intervene in these processes?
This research employs a multi-sited, relational methodology to investigate how the circulation of commodities is influencing the production of space at multiple scales. Its empirical focus is the recent expansion of the Panama Canal, a logistics megaproject with global reverberations, and the consequent rivalry among North American ports seeking to attract a new generation of oversized container ships. Drawing on a year of mixed-methods fieldwork in Panama City, Los Angeles, and New York, the dissertation analyzes competitive efforts to remake space in the image of smooth, efficient circulation and the struggles that have ensued over land, labour, and the environment.
I argue that the landscapes of logistics are contradictory and conflictual spaces: even as global supply chains deliver the material provisions that make possible the reproduction of contemporary life, their development and functioning are undergirded by violent processes of community dispossession, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. These impacts are disproportionately borne by poor and racialized residents and workers, whose struggles play a fundamental role in shaping corporate production and distribution networks. The research offers a critical reappraisal of the prevailing view that logistics provides a progressive and sustainable path to economic development. It shows that, as logistics has become increasingly vital to the operations of capitalism, the circulation of commodities exacts a heavy toll on those who live and labour in the arteries of global trade.