Transition Redux: Global Warehousing in Europe’s Westernmost East
Daniel Šitera has just published chapter ´Transition Redux: Global Warehousing in Europe’s Westernmost East´ in an interdisciplinary volume on The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe.
His chapter discusses the developmental effects of invasive warehouse landscapes which are expanding in Central and Eastern Europe. It argues that these warehouse infrastructures enable dynamic growth of e-commerce business model but simultaneously reproduce the age-old economic position of our region as a transition space between semi-Eastern costs and semi-Western conditions in Europe. The proverbial ´westernmost East´ – Czechia, Poland, and their western borderlands – fixes a strategic location which combines cheap but skilled labour and reliant physical infrastructures for the proliferating warehouses to primarily service Western Europe. In short, transforming our region into a logistical crossroads of Europe has detrimental effects on its future social and economic development.