Governing circulation, disruption, and emergency on the London Underground: a theory of logistical power

Mutter, Samuel (2020) Governing circulation, disruption, and emergency on the London Underground: a theory of logistical power. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

The following thesis argues for and –using the case study of the London Underground –elaborates upon the idea of logistical power as a framework for understanding contemporary forms of urban governance (in particular in the post-industrial cities of the ‘global North’). This is a framework evolved from attention to the dual heritage of logistics: its military origins on the one hand, wherein it was key to the management and minimisation of the frictions of circulatory systems, and its work in the corporate sphere, on the other, through which it became practiced in discovering and extracting novel forms of value from circulation. Today, this set of ideas, calculations, spatial ,sensory and affective mechanisms is increasingly applied, I will argue, to urban infrastructures in the context of a claimed unprecedented level of uncertainty and risk, together with intense financial pressures. Theoretically, the thesis will claim that the prominence of logistics in the governance of circulation forces us to reconsider the binary of the tactical and the strategic; of systems and their disruption, upon which the political stakes of urban infrastructure have been wagered.

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