Infrastructure Alliances: Supply-Chain Expansion and Multi-city Growth Coalitions

abstract

Recent scholarship has suggested that infrastructure development is fragmenting local urban politics, but I argue that it has had the opposite impact at the multi-city regional scale. New multi-city growth coalitions are currently emerging across the United States, united by a shared interest in supply-chain expansion—the extension of effective supply chains and the intensification of circulatory possibilities in regional transportation networks. In this article I develop a theoretical account of these novel infrastructure alliances, and explore empirical examples across the domains of (1) logistics and trade, and (2) manufacturing and resource extraction supply chains. I conclude by considering possible future trajectories for infrastructure alliances and entrepreneurial urban governance.

Key words:

• growth coalitions
• infrastructure
• urban politics
• competitive multi-city regionalism
• logistics
• supply chains
• regionalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Neil Brenner, Craig Calhoun, Eric Klinenberg, Kyle Loewen, and the anonymous reviewers at Economic Geography for comments on previous drafts of this article.

Notes

¹ CMCR is in some regards a political counterpart to the recent academic and policy discourse about megaregions in the United States (e.g., Ross 2009; see also Harrison and Hoyler 2014, for a more critical take), although only a very small number of CMCR partnerships have anything like the expansive geographies contemplated most prominently by the Regional Plan Association (2008). The relationship between the two concepts is beyond the scope of this article, but I have argued elsewhere (Wachsmuth 2014) that US megaregions are best understood not as emerging competitive urban governance actors, as much of the literature assumes, but as strategic terrains facilitating a variety of differently scaled competitiveness strategies—only some of which have the territorial reach of CMCR, let alone megaregionalism proper.

² My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for noting that tonnage does not tell the complete story of shipping concentration, since the state of Washington has comparably dispersed tonnage figures to Florida but in fact features specialized ports that monopolize specific goods. In Florida, though, tonnage tells the correct story: shipping is dispersed in individual sectors as well.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Horowitz Institute for Social Policy.