For Laurent Livolsi and Christelle Camman (2017), « identifying and understanding the flows of goods, their organization and steering, constitute a unique prism of the world« . Indeed, the irruption of the logistics paradigm in international governance is a major revolution, one that projects the productive system into a framework of increasingly globalized interdependence. The intensification of trade, the lowering of customs barriers and the reduction of transport costs have imposed the emergence of complex value chains whose functioning depends on the reliability of each of the links: transport, storage, insurance, banking transactions, exchanges of information and data (Manners-Bell, 2014).
The reorganization of flows is transforming geographical spaces by redefining the layouts and hierarchies of places (Savy, 2006) (Mérenne-Schoumaker, 2007). Logistics combines economic processes and their political framework and now appears as a central issue in planning. Whereas research has been able to focus on technical devices or economic choices, the conference invites the participants to highlight logistics as an instrument of geographical governance and a political issue.
In this light, three levels of analysis are favoured which form a system whose geographical interdependencies have to be questioned:
- Firstly, the global approach, which involves the major political and economic stakeholders in a geopolitical understanding of circulations and the decisions made by the most significant political powers involved;
- Secondly, in a macro-regional approach, the political responses of the competing states and their organization have to be considered;
- Thirdly, with regard to metropolitan areas where the major world hubs are linked to the final delivery (Hesse, 2008).
These three geographic components also correspond to three facets of the logistics approach seen by geographers, as a means of competition and domination, as an instrument of planning and as a negotiating issue.
Thematic areas:
- Corridors and intercontinental hubs: the place of infrastructures and the control over them with regard to global strategies to achieve power
- The affirmation of logistics as a planning tool and its spatial issues
- The challenges of logistics in metropolitan governance
