Manufacturing regions are being remade into warehouse and logistics centers

Evidence

Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, a region long known for manufacturing, has over the past several years been remade into a center for the shipping and storing of commodities. Increasingly crowded with warehouses and fulfillment centers operated by Amazon and other online retailers, Lehigh Valley is notable simultaneously for its proximity to and distance from New York City, roughly eighty miles away. Its famed industrial decline was once charted in popular songs like Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” which rhymes the name of the Valley’s largest city with “they’re closing all the factories down.” Today, a local economy once representative of deindustrialization’s destructive impact on the livelihoods of countless workers is now an exemplar of American capitalism’s reinvention through shipping and logistics. With the rise of warehouses on the peripheries of urban centers, manufacturing has been remade into the circulation and storage of consumer goods. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 284

Categorization

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