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Paper short abstract

We examine how aesthetic and spatial features of the warehouse are woven into the everyday meaning‑making of work‑based socialities and resistance. We draw on collaborative mapping exercises with unions and workers to develop theories about the political and spatial situatedness of the warehouse.

Paper long abstract

The warehouse is central to contemporary logistified capitalism. Unions worldwide have long focused on its labour conditions, its pervasive surveillance and the rise of automation specifically developed in fulfillment centers. A place where workers are shuffled in and out for shifts, a streamlined box architecture for in-between places or in vast parks that host many other similar structures, the warehouse is a mostly ignored yet ever-present element of economic transformation. How, though, are the warehouse’s aesthetic and spatial features woven into the everyday meaning‑making of work‑based socialities, solidarities and resistance?

This presentation draws on collective, comparative research into the making of European logistics towns in post‑industrial settings. Through fieldwork in Eskilstuna, Sweden, and Dos Hermanas, Spain, we have engaged with municipal authorities, logistics firms, workers and unions to trace how logistics hit the ground locally. We argue for an ethnography that approaches the warehouse from the outside: documenting how it is commercially imagined, politically emplaced and classed in embodied practice.

Concretely, we reflect on collaborative mapping exercises conducted with union representatives and Amazon workers in Spain. These creative cartographies make visible the spatial technologies of surveillance and algorithmic control, the choreography of labour, and the shadow geographies where organising and refusal take shape. By attending to mapping as a method and a practice, we show how strategies of resistance are spatially produced and embedded in the material arrangements of the warehouse.