In this episode, Subina Shrestha, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Network for Equity in Sustainable Transition (CERC NEST) at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada, shares her insights about how the field of logistics is changing spaces, human relations, and more - and especially through the increasing dominance of more-than-human, or perhaps rather: less-than-human, digital technologies.
This episode sheds important light on digital more-than-human dynamics that a Planetary Future must take into account. In many societies, especially among the financially wealthiest countries around the world, it has become taken for granted that any object should be available to us within days or even hours, even when it is not something that is normally available in our immediate surroundings. At the same time, many other places, the people in those places, are working hard for an economy that is nowhere near them and that they see little to no benefit from. And then there are the people working in transporting those objects, be it over long distances or for the least mile.
As Subina shares with us, much of these logistics are dominated by a corporate objective of speed, efficiency and productivity. She argues that planning can and must play an important role in challenging those objectives in favour of more wellbeing-oriented values. This means that seeking a more-than-humanness in terms of technology and automation, as major corporations tend to do, should not be allowed to be achieved when these go to the detriment of human wellbeing - and perhaps also other more-than-human wellbeing, though we explore this less in this episode. Subina does also see the digital more-than-human world to offer many positive contributions, if one is careful to use them to that end, such as by enabling “platform cooperativism”.
In this episode we touch on “cyborg jobs”, workers’ rights and solidarity networks, agency of consumers and local municipalities, the dominance of large corporations in the current planning and execution of logistics, the increasing dominance of less-than-human digital technologies in this, and what planners can do.
Take-aways for planners, by Subina Shrestha:
Think about logistics in terms of human wellbeing perspectives - including consumers as well as workers
Focus on urban vitalism as the key objective in urban planning, meaning to aim to elevate wellbeing for everyone in the city
Think well about how digital tools can be used well, and avoid using them to the detriment of the local population. When thinking of people-centered planning, this should also include workers in logistics. And be sure to ask: whose interests are technological innovations serving, in both research and practice?
References:
Haarstad, H., Rosales, R., & Shrestha, S. (2024). Freight logistics and the city. Urban Studies, 61(1), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231177265
Mimes, C. (2021) Arriving Today. From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy. Harper Business.
And Antidote’s work, mentioned by Kim, for instance to find a way to support alternatives to Amazon, and to help consumers avoid Amazon.
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