Journal of Landscape Architecture

ISSN: 1862-6033 (Print) 2164-604X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjla20

Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city

Clare Lyster

To cite this article: Clare Lyster (2012) Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city, Journal of
Landscape Architecture, 7:1, 54-67, DOI: 10.1080/18626033.2012.693781

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Published online: 19 Jun 2012.

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Download by: [George Mason University] Date: 09 June 2016, At: 23:49
 Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city
Clare Lyster
UIC School of Architecture, Chicago, USA

Abstract
Since 1970 there has been a host of new distribution systems that facili- In any given day one might send or receive a priority package via FedEx, pur-
tate the unprecedented mobility of goods, people and information across chase a product online through Amazon.com, communicate with friends
the world, yet there is little research into the implications of flow on the on Facebook, locate a car-share courtesy of zipcar.com, stream a DVD cour-
design of the city, for example logistics systems. This essay mines an orig- tesy of Netflix, purchase an airline ticket through Expedia.com or receive
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016

inally American-based (now global) logistics network, focusing on the op- a grocery shipment via Peapod. All of these actions are indebted to logisti-
erations and attendant spaces of the FedEx Corporation to produce a series cal infrastructures—info-organisational regimens—that dominate post-Ford-
of lessons, and applies them as a set of planning aids for the city. These ist production processes by marrying digital information with global and
lessons present an idea of territory based on time rather than distance, local transportation systems, for example overnight shipping, inter-modal
offer an organisational model that merges centralised control with dis- transportation, on-demand supply networks, e-retailing as well as online
tributed responsiveness, and demonstrate a dissolving of the distinctions social and entertainment systems that have evolved courtesy of globalisa-
between architecture, landscape and infrastructure. The essay speaks to tion, technological innovation and new forms of communication that in-
all the design disciplines with a stake in the city, but in reading terri- creasingly organise how we eat, work, recreate and travel on a daily basis.
tory from the perspective of systems rather than form it addresses a top- As citizens we participate more and more in a larger range of flows, and
ic more closely associated with landscape. Documenting a logistical net- most of us adjust to, if not depend on, the mobility that globalisation and
work advances scholarship into how artificial flows shape space to claim technological innovation have facilitated. As architects and landscape ar-
new territory for the discipline that so far has largely focused on the study chitects, we are just beginning to understand how these mobility systems
of natural flows. transform the built environment and what implications they have for the
design of the city.
architecture / FedEx/ infrastructure / logistics landscape / shipping network As the world’s largest overnight shipping network that receives, sorts
and delivers upwards of 5 million packages to over 220 global destinations
each day, FedEx is more than a convenient delivery service, rather, the
embodiment of the organisational philosophy of the re-structured glo-
bal economy. Made possible by advances in technological innovation and
communication infrastructure combined by the need to serve new modes
of production, in forty years it has emerged as a leading model for logisti-
cal infrastructure in the US, making it not only an indispensable service
but an important cultural as well as utility space. In promising delivery to
95 per cent of the world within 48 hours and expediting exchange between
two remote entities FedEx, and other rapid delivery networks like it, min-
imises the gap between the production and distribution of goods to defy
traditional time – space relationships. Moreover, in allowing us to sit at a
computer screen or PDA device and curate the delivery of our clothes, en-
tertainment and business services, it facilitates almost simultaneous ex-
change between production and consumption to produce a sort of accel-
erated urbanism. For example, a priority package dropped in a designated
late drop box in New Jersey at 11:30 p.m. can arrive in downtown Chicago
or Dallas by 8 a.m. the next morning.
This essay utilises a close analysis of the material exigencies and the at-
tendant spaces of FedEx to identify how the overnight shipping network
organises flow and produces space. More importantly, it extrapolates a se-
ries of lessons from the research to highlight some of the implications of
logistical networks for design practice and applies them as planning strat-

54 Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012

 475,000
450,000
425,000
Figure 1 FedEx global network
400,000
375,000
350,000
# DOCUMENTS + PACKAGES PER HOUR

325,000
300,000
275,000
250,000
225,000

MEMPHIS, TN
200,000
175,000
150,000
125,000

CHICAGO, IL
100,000
75,000
INDIANAPOLIS, IN
50,000
LOS ANGELES, CA

25,000
FORT WORTH, TX

NEWARK, NJ

550
500

PARIS, FRANCE

SUBIC BAY, PHILLIPINES

OAKLAND, CA
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016

450
A N C HO R A G E , A K

400
350
300
HUB ACREAGE

250
200
150
100
50

165 150 135 120 105 90 75 60 45 30 15 0 15 30 45 60 75 90 105 120 135 150 165 190
11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 0 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12--12

4
Departures 75
3

9 1111
1122
7 9
5
1100 60
3

4
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 8 3 1/2
1/ 6 110
FedEx Flights @ 45
Memphis International Airport (MEM)
7 5 8
6
441/2
1 /2
5 9
3 1/2
1 /2 Arrivals 30

5 1/2
1 /2 6
AIRCRAFT MOVEMENTS 0 3 11/2
/2 10
2 15

11 12
0
12
5 4 6

15
C lare L yster & C arlyn S o

3 1100
8 9 1/2
1 /2
3 30

45

Sun Sun
2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:000 7:000 0 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 13:00 14:00 15:00 16:00 17:00 18:00 19:00 20:00 21:00 22:00 23:00 Sun Sun
1:00 24:00
11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12--121:00
MEMPHIS GMT
0

egies for the city. Approaching the city through flow rather than form ne- ery of a FedEx package serves to explain the shipping network as well as
cessitates new ways to represent the city beyond conventional methods. In reveal the hidden manoeuvres and interwoven events that drive current
this research, business data and aircraft movements pertaining to FedEx modes of exchange. In spatalising this data, the maps take an exploration
found online are synthesised into a series of maps that visualise the dis- of logistics out of urban technology and into the realm of design to ampli-
tribution of goods. For example, graphically communicating the geospa- fy the disciplinary implications of the research. While directed to all the
tial, informational and temporal procedures required for the timely deliv- disciplines—architecture, landscape architecture and planning—that par-

Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012 55

 Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city Clare Lyster

Figure 2 FedEx site map

Site Memphis (MEM)

Regional Context FedEx: Superhub, Memphis, TN 4 mile radius
Local Land Use

Commercial / Industrial
Residential
Green Space
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Airport Boundary

10.6 million SF Aalsmeer Flower Auction Aalsmeer, Netherlands

10.5 million SF Venetian Macao Resort Macau

5.7 million SF Magnuson Health Sciences Center Seattle, WA

Superhub Area: 1,650,000 SF (39 acres) / (footprint)
Airline Slots: 175 Airline Slots:
Flights Per Day: 140 Aircraft between 11pm & 5am
4.2 million SF Mall of America Bloomington, MN

4.0 million SF Merchandise Mart Chicago, IL

4.3 million SF Boeing Assembly Plant Everett, WA

1.65 million SF FedEx SUPERHUB Terminal Memphis, TN

C lare L yster , C arlyn S o & P atrick F inn

North Secondary Sort

Primary Sort
East Ramp Sorting
Domestic Sort
International Sort
International Freight Canopy
Large Freight Canopy
Input Canopy
Administration

56 Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012

 ticipate in the design of the city, by focusing on how large-scale territori- Deadline: Second, time at the Sort Center is interpreted as a deadline. The
al processes implicate space the essay addresses a field of scholarship more Sort Center houses a package handling system, a computer controlled set
closely associated with that of landscape. Reading territory from the per- of conveyors known as the Matrix that directs the trajectory of packages
spective of systems rather than form is germane to landscape architecture, from inbound to outbound planes for delivery. It typically takes a pack-
but so far this has been largely limited to the study of natural processes age 30 minutes to pass through this intestinal arrangement of conveyors,
of flow. Documenting a logistical network advances scholarship into how which if unravelled would measure 482 kilometres (300 miles). (Fig. 4) A
artificial flows implicate space and as such claims new territory for the steel skeleton supports the Matrix, while electronic cameras located on
discipline in this context (Waldheim & Berger 2006: 233). Moreover, given and over the conveyor belts read destinations of packages and direct each
that logistics is a study of territory and performance, the work broadens a to one of twelve secondary belts arranged by zip code. Workers in booths
definition of landscape while the diagrams highlight its representation as high above this mobile package highway mechanically control the met-
a set of processes that by itself is an emerging genre of research. al diverters and rollers on the conveyor belts to prevent build-up in any
given area. Packages for a particular geographic region later run through
Lesson 1: time as a vehicle for urbanism a finer sort system and are placed in containers ready for dispatch (Maye-
Unlike more traditional infrastructures that are topographically deter- rowitz 2007). An alarm signals ‘Zero Hour’ at 2:09 a.m. each night, the time
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016

mined, connecting spaces by distance, FedEx is a temporally based net- by which all packages must be offloaded from incoming planes and on the
work. This means that time, not geography, is the means by which space conveyor system so that outbound planes can be loaded in time to make
is indexed. That FedEx promises to deliver anywhere in the world within early morning deliveries. At peak times, from midnight through to 3 a.m.,
a 48-hour time frame, if not sooner, demands unprecedented precision. As the Sort Center receives cargo from 175 planes that can be simultaneous-
a result its attendant spaces, in particular its Superhub at Memphis Inter- ly hosted at the site. In a recent online documentary describing a single
national Airport, are conceived not by symbolism, form or materiality but night’s operation at the Superhub, Scott Mayerowitz of ABC reports that
instead are calibrated in milliseconds to meet delivery deadlines around no package at the Sort Center is stationary for longer than 30 minutes and
the world. In fact, a close reading of the Superhub reveals that time at the only spends 90 minutes in total at the facility (Mayerowitz 2007). It takes 33
space is significant in a number of ways. minutes to unload 50 containers from a full B-747 when it lands, and ball
Hourly time: First, time at the Superhub is measured by the time of bearings in the floor of the Sort Center guarantee quick container trans-
day, or in the case of FedEx, by time of night. Almost half of FedEx’s ship- feral so that in 15 minutes (Cosmos & Bastien 2007) a package reaches its
ments, 3.5 million packages per day, pass through its 210-hectare (518- destination pile. If possible, a package is kept moving at all times as min-
acre) Superhub at the northern edge of Memphis International Airport, imising stoppages is the main premise of the space. Westbound packag-
making it the world’s busiest cargo airport. While FedEx recently opened es are sorted alongside packages going east so that if delays ensue, work-
two additional Superhubs, one in Indianapolis and one in Guangzhou, ers on the western packages can stop and help their colleagues packing
China, its principal hub remains in Memphis. (Fig. 1) The main enclosure for eastern destinations. Memphis is on North American Central Time
at the site is the Sort Center. Constructed in 1981, the single-storey space and so has less leeway sending packages to the East Coast, which is an
covers 15.75 hectares (39 acres) and contains 12,000 employees. (Fig. 2) The hour ahead, rather than the two hours it gains in sorting West Coast de-
Sort, a theatrical event that takes place twice daily in the space, is the pro- liveries (Deutsch 2003). Photographs of the Superhub always depict pack-
cedure by which all packages are received, processed and re-routed to their ages moving in the vast interior, a true representation since space here is
destinations. A small day-sort between 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. processes defined not by volume or enclosure but by the time it takes a package to
packages, including the US mail, that arrive on planes returning to Mem- flow through the facility.
phis after completing early morning priority deliveries. Examining the Arrival time: Finally, time is not necessarily the length of time it takes
pattern of air traffic in and out of Memphis International Airport courtesy for a package to reach its destination but the local ‘arrival time’ at which
of online flight tracking software illustrates that the bulk of cargo flights it is delivered. It makes no difference whether a package has been trav-
arrive and depart between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., a fallow time elling 80 kilometres (50 miles) or 800 kilometres (500 miles), as long as it
period in most other airports. (Fig. 3) During these hours airline activity reaches its destination by the scheduled time. John McPhee highlights
in and out of the Superhub is intense. A plane lands or takes off every 30 that it was easier (and quicker) to send important documents between
seconds and on a busy night 86 incoming flights can be handled per hour. floors in the World Trade Center by UPS rather than have them delivered
The spectacular compression of activity in and out of the Sort Center over through the building’s in-house mail service (McPhee 2005: 166). A series
these five hours explains why 8,000 FedEx employees, many of them wom- of packages tracked courtesy of FedEx’s online software yields a detailed
en and students, check into the Superhub at 9 p.m. for the night shift. A timeline of activity between pick up and delivery and demonstrates that
series of images rendered from a YouTube video that track movement in at FedEx time is independent of distance. (Fig. 5) From a list of priority
and out of Memphis illustrate the frequency of flights across a 24-hour packages originating in Chicago, a package to Guatemala City arrives at
period and supports the theory that FedEx is busiest during the late night its destination faster than a package to Boston or Houston while a pack-
and early morning hours. Large densities of flights are legible in certain age to Zagreb comprises a longer delivery timeframe than a package to
frames, for example the frame at 3 a.m. shows most activity, which is Beijing. Moreover, as the map illustrates, in most cases a package incurs a
when the Sort finishes and outbound flights leave the Superhub. similar sort time at the Superhub irrespective of final destination.

Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012 57

 Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city Clare Lyster

Figure 3 FedEx geo-temporal map

80
70 66
DEPARTURES
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016

60
60
50
50
40
30 NIGHT SORT
19
20
8
10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 1 2 0 0 0 0 1 5 6
2 1 2 0
0
0 0 0 1 0 1 2 2 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
5 5 4
10 11 10 10 10
20 18
ARRIVALS

30 25 DAY SORT
28
37
40
50 49
60
70
80 7 8 9 1 11 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 11 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
p p p 0 p 2 a a a a a a a a a 0 a 2 p p p p p p p p p
p a a m p

AIR CR A F T M O V E M E N T S

7am 9 am 11 am 1 pm 3 pm 5 pm
C lare L yster , C arlyn S o & P atrick F inn

7 pm 9 pm 11 pm 1 pm 3 pm 5 pm

58 Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012

 NewNew
YorkYork
New York
Philadelphia
Philadelphia
Philadelphia
E q u i v alent D istance K n o tted C o n v ey o r
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016
Figure 4 Diagram of Matrix
As a result of its temporal precision, the FedEx Superhub at Memphis In-
ternational Airport attracts warehouse and distribution space for national­
retail corporations that exploit the proximity to FedEx’s infrastructure
for last-minute delivery. Hewlett Packard has a large depot near the Fed-
Ex Superhub in Memphis for this very reason, as well as Medtronic, which
can make use of last-minute departures from the Superhub to ensure a
pacemaker leaves their plant at 11 p.m. and arrives at an East Coast hospi-
tal by 9 the next morning. Ford’s Uptime Critical Parts Program is located
close by to exploit an extra long workday. Orders for emergency auto parts
made prior to 10 p.m. can be dispatched for overnight delivery; previous-
ly the cut off time for next-day delivery was 3 p.m. Nike leases 250,000
square metres (2.7 million square feet) of space in Memphis with 14,000
square metres (150,000 square feet) adjacent to Memphis International
Airport so merchandise can be quickly sorted and delivered to custom-
ers, while Williams and Sonoma hosts the largest distribution operation
in Memphis with 465,000 square metres (5 million square feet) of logistics
space. Given that all the major franchises have warehouse space close to
Memphis International Airport for easy shipping of mail order requests
around the country, it is not clear whether to characterise Memphis as
a distribution centre in a city or a city in a distribution landscape, since
it now boasts over 12 million square metres (130 million square feet) of
warehouse space within 9 kilometres of the airfield (Fishman 1998). ‘Mem-
phis contains yards for each of the nation’s top four railroads. It’s the end
point of a 7,000-mile product pipeline that starts in Asian factories, where
goods are packed into huge containers, and passes through the West Coast,
where the containers are transferred directly onto Memphis-bound trains.
After clearing customs in Memphis, the containers are dropped onto truck
trailers and hauled the last few miles to a Disney Store distribution cent-
er, a Nike distribution center, a Sears distribution center’ (Fishman 1998).
In catalysing development in and around Memphis International Airport
according to the flow patterns and time schedules of its shipping net-
work, FedEx succeeds in organising its immediate context according to
C lare L yster & P atrick F inn
I nteri o r K n o t
time. That the area in and around the airfield is temporally zoned rath-
er than zoned according to function offers an alternative to the organisa-
tional criteria perpetuated in modernist planning (Van Berkel & Bos, 1998).
Moreover, logistical networks can accelerate space by mixing with
and shaking up other spaces that would otherwise lag behind. For exam-
ple, the Superhub is busiest during the night-time hours when passenger
flights in and out of Memphis International Airport have finished for the
day. (Fig. 6) In occupying the airfield during lull periods, FedEx insures
occupation of Memphis International Airport round the clock. In speed-
ing up an otherwise slow space, FedEx renders the airport at Memphis the
most efficient transportation facility in the country. What design learns
from FedEx is that time is an effective vehicle for urbanism.
Lesson 2: top-down but flexible
‘You mean if I ship a package from Milwaukee to Chicago it has to go
through Memphis?’ (Sigafoos 1998:89) FedEx’s focus in the early days was
to serve emerging post-war urban areas that required computer parts,
medical equipment, and architectural blueprints. To solve the problem
of regional locations and volatile distribution patterns, the company im-
plemented a ‘hub and spoke’ distribution model that was the result of re-
search into the operations of United Parcel Service, major trucking com-
panies and even telephone switching systems (Sigafoos 1998). The hub and
spoke model describes how airlines direct trunk routes to one major air-
port before sending passengers out again on another plane to their final
destination. The model was pioneered by Delta Airlines in 1955 but be-
came widespread after deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 since
it offered airline carriers multiple destinations with fewer planes (Pas-
coe 2001: 222). By centralising control in one or a few strategic sites, the
hub and spoke model is supposedly more efficient to run, eliminates er-
ror and optimises plane occupancy. It was decided that all packages would
be flown to a single processing hub in Memphis before being shipped to
a final destination, a decision that would later make the city the global
Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012 59
 Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city Clare Lyster

Figure 5 FedEx system map of FedEx

iPod
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Shoes
Employees : 280,000

Worldwide, FedEx employs team members from

Packages : 11,400,000 six different continents. Trucks : 90,000
Dropbox
On December 17, Approximately 90,000
Books Employees : 30,000
2008, FedEx broke Typically located on street corners or FedEx trucks are in
the record (previously within office lobbies. 18”W x 24”L x 36”H service to date.
The largest employer in Memphis (followed by
9.8 million) for its a mere 16,000 Memphis City School employees),
company-wide the FedEx Memphis workforce represent
busiest night. approximately 10% of FedEx’s workforce.
Orchids
Package volume per
day has risen from
186 (1970s) to
9.8million today.

Lobster

Medication

Organs

Goose Island : 100,000sqft

Legal Documents
Storefront : 4,000sqft

Stand alone storefront. Typically 1,500 to 4,000 square feet.

Contracts Planes : 670

Only Delta Airlines (w/ Northwest Airlines)

utilize more aircraft (701), making FedEx the
second largest worldwide airline by fleet size.

Auto Parts
C lare L yster & P atrick F inn

Electronics

USPS

60 Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012


Figure 6 Memphis International Airport occupancy diagram
hub for freight transportation. [1] (Fig. 7) In addition to the Superhub
there are four other attendant spaces (nodes) within the FedEx network. A
cargo terminal is located at most city airports and receives packages that
have already been sorted according to zip code at the Superhub in Mem-
phis. A Regional Sorting Facility performs a finer Sort and loads packag-
es onto trucks for final delivery. The FedEx Office is a storefront space
that evolved after the company merged with Kinkos (a franchised copy
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016
shop) in 2004, while the Drop Box, the smallest node in the system, is the
ubiquitous metal box found on street corners and in office lobbies. Spokes
of the system are comprised of the routes covered by the company’s 669
planes and 90,000 vehicles that deliver packages to 220 cities around the
world each day. FedEx’s top-down, centralised system permits more serv-
ice to larger destinations with fewer aircraft. The Superhub also minimis-
es mishandling and delay in transit, allowing total control from pick up
through to delivery.
In early 1973 Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, and his team moved
out of the airport at Little Rock, Arkansas where the company had started.
Research into a new location suggested a site far enough south to escape
winter weather and far enough north to be spared tornados and hurri-
canes in summer. Potential sites were narrowed down to an abandoned air
base in Smyrna, near Nashville, and Memphis, both located in the USA’s
Central Time Zone. While Memphis lies east of the geographical centre of
the country, it was close to the initial cluster of cities that FedEx planned
to service. It is also located at the convergence of seven U.S. highways, two
of which travel from coast to coast, making 75 per cent of the country
within reach with an overnight drive from the city. The weather in Mem-
phis was particularly suitable for a company that needed uninterrupted
air service throughout the year. The airport seldom shut down, while oth-
er cities in the region had significant problems during winter months. It
had parallel instrument runways in all four directions, and the airport
authority offered Smith three hangars, ramp access space and proposed to
subsidise a new hub if he signed a twenty-year contract (Lyndsay & Kasarda
2011: 61; Sigafoos 1998). In addition to its airfield, Memphis was suitable be-
cause it had a strong labour force in place, with housing and other infra-
structure for employees. [2] It boasted mature cultural institutions mak-
ing it an appealing setting for the location of a corporate HQ and a history
of relaxed labour laws (FedEx is a non-union company). Smith wanted to
locate all aspects of the operation in the one place. In his mind, Memphis
‘was reliable’ (Sigafoos 1998). Reliability is an unusual premise to measure a
city, yet not a surprising site characteristic to consider when situating the
motherboard of a global network. It is ironic that a company whose very
premise was to defy geography found itself converging in a place whose
reason for existence was precisely the result of its geographic positioning
(Capers 1939: 59). The hub could be located anywhere but at the same time
it is no surprise that it ended up in Memphis. [3]
W W W . F L ightracker . com
At first glance, such central control is reminiscent of corporate models
of the modern, not the informational, economy. Recent network theo-
rists have adopted the rhizome as a suitable model for contemporary net-
works because of the ease with which it accommodates change. Unlike
centralised structures, the rhizome rapidly develops new or kills off ex-
isting offshoots as a means to adapt to forces in its environment. For this
reason, the rhizome has emerged as a metaphorical diagram for either an
open ended, bottom-up or constantly mutating entity capable of synthe-
sising and representing the chaos around it. FedEx employs a top-down
planning model that is hierarchical and strategic, yet at the same time
the company recognised that some procedures needed to be customised
at short notice. For example, re-routing flights that are either over- or
under-subscribed or delayed as a result of inclement weather requires a
more tactical approach to the delivery operation. Resolving the hierarchy
inherent to a centrally controlled network with the flexibility to cater to
unforeseen circumstances underscored the logic of how FedEx was organ-
ised (Sigafoos 1998). As a result, FedEx is a unique model; in being high-
ly centralised it is treelike—every spoke leads to one hub—yet on the other
hand, embedded in its disciplined framework is an aptitude, like the rhi-
zome, to self regulate. This flexibility is facilitated by a series of organisa-
tional tricks that allow multiplicity and redundancy within the system,
which with the integration of smart technological software allows the
company to negotiate changes demanded by climate and package volume
when necessary.
Climate control: Even with Memphis’s reliable climate, weather takes
precedence at FedEx. In a nearby office park adjacent to the airfield sits the
FedEx Global Operation Control Center. Here, a world map is constantly
projected showing the status of every plane in the fleet as well as hyper-
analysis of the weather forecast for up to a week in advance (Sigafoos 1998).
FedEx employs advanced forecasting methods that can pinpoint weather
conditions within a five-mile radius of a particular place. Usually landing
airports are of most interest to the crew of fifteen meteorologists that are
employed full time at the centre, whose job is also to inform dispatch of
any necessary last minute changes to a flight route. Of particular impor-
tance is predicting exactly when rain will turn to snow or sleet, as this dis-
tinction has the greatest impact on a flight take-off or landing. As many
as twelve empty planes, or ‘overlift flights’ are aloft each night to provide
the necessary back-up to render the system resilient to weather anomalies
(Sigafoos 1998). FedEx’s Global Operation Control Center allows an Apollo-
nian view across its vast network surface (Cosgrove 2001) and multiplicity
in the number of vacant planes allows this image to be fulfilled.
Redundancy: FedEx has developed strategies that make it impervious
to costly and timely inefficiencies arising from volatility in load volume.
If load is heavier than anticipated, trucks transport packages to another
airport. Alternatively, use is made of the two emergency planes that fly
Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012 61
 Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city Clare Lyster
Lincoln Tunnel
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016
Newark, NJ
Figure 7 Diagram of Matrix
into Memphis every night from Denver and Salt Lake City to be diverted
to wherever there is demand. Other measures include calling in one of the
forty planes that are deliberately sent out half full in the event that they
also need to be diverted to other airports where package volume is heavy.
The mobilisation of reserve planes is the final emergency action. Redun-
dancy is therefore the key to mitigating the problematic effects of the cen-
tralised model, and provides the flexibility needed to make the system
adaptable to unforeseen forces. Minimising error not only produces great-
er efficiency but, more importantly from the perspective of FedEx, facili-
tates even more control within the system (Easterling 2003, 2004).
Soft serve: In 1977, FedEx installed a call centre in Memphis that aimed
to consolidate all communications concerning package coordination in
one location. An early data system called STAR was developed to provide a
real-time tracking system and facilitate the transmission of information
with pick-up vans and the assimilation of thousands of Drop Box loca-
tions and online pick-up calls that provide local access to the entire global
network. This enabled a courier to enter destination information at the
time of pick up, allowing the central hub to automatically record quantity
and destinations of packages. As the barcode became reliable it too was in-
corporated into the system. [4] The company spends over a billion dollars
a year on technological research, organised through its own research in-
stitute at the University of Memphis. Technology not only enables consol-
idation of the corporate operations in one place but amplifies control by
interpreting the bottom-up logic of the system’s own feedback loop, for
example, through soft technologies such as the bar code and other data
62 Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012
JFK, NY
*1 / mi 2
*50 / mi 2 : 150 drop boxes within a one-mile radius
*8 / mi 2 : 24 FedEx Office locations within a one-mile radius
Distribution Center
FedEx Dropbox
FedEx Office (FedEx Kinko’s, formerly)
FedEx Authorized Ship Center
FedEx World Shipping Center
gathering systems that track packages. Recently the company initiated
‘SenseAware’ which enables customers to monitor special or critical ship-
ments in real time, for example, tracking the temperature, location and
exposure to light of a human organ on route to a hospital for a transplant.
Technology also allows FedEx users to follow the route of a package on-
line—a service soon to be combined with MapQuest for satellite visualisa-
tion of package trajectory. For FedEx, soft systems mean greater efficiency,
speed and the further reduction of error in the shipment of goods. At the
same time as the company consolidates its operations at one major hub
it maintains the flexibility necessary to adapt to unforeseen events since
the feedback loop provided by soft technologies affords advance notice of
anomalies in the system. Soft systems not only allow centralisation to co-
exist with flexibility, modes traditionally considered in opposition to each
other, but also allow FedEx to present an image of seamlessness that dis-
guises the obstacles it negotiates at the local scale.
Field conditions: There are 43,000 Drop Boxes in the US. This ubiqui-
tous metal artefact is found on street corners or in office lobbies and is a
physical receptor point that facilitates local access to the abstract space of
global logistics. While the Drop Box is the smallest node in the FedEx net-
work, it is nonetheless the most identifiable product of the shipping sys-
tem and exists singularly or as a field of dense points. For example, plot-
ting the location of Drop Boxes in Midtown, Manhattan via MapQuest
and Google presents FedEx as a dense field of distributed points. (Fig. 8)
In fact the map shows over 150 FedEx locations within a 1.5-mile radius
of Grand Central Station.
 Duration by location
Relative trajectories (% time in superhub) FedEx: Route Details

hours 0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

London
TIME CHANGE

Barcelona
Dublin
Salvador

Beijing

Zagreb

Guatemala City

Boston

Houston
Denver
IN TRANSIT

Zagreb
Real-time Duration
1645
1700 1700
1600 1600
1500 1500
1400 1400
Beijing
1300 2045 -1230 1300
1200 1200
1100 1100
1000 1000
900 900
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016

800 800
700 700
600 600

4
500 500
400 400
DESTINATION

300 300
200 200
100 Frankfurt 100
2345
2400 2400
2300 2300
2200 2200
2100 2100
2000 2000
1900 1900
1800 1800
1700 1700
1600 1600
Salvador
1500 1430 1500
1400 1400
1300 Dublin 1300
1200 London 930a-noon
1200
11a
1100 Barcelona 1100
915 -1000
1000 1000
900 Houston 900
800 Boston 5a-8a 800
1030p-730a
SUPERHUB

700 700
600 600

3
500 500
400 400
300 300
200 200
100 100
2400 2400
2300 2300
2200 2200
2100 2100
Paris Stansted
2000 1930-1a 2000
1915-2100
1900 Stansted Guatemala
1900
1800-2400
1800 City 1800
1230-1700
1700 Campinas 1700
1600 -2300
1600 1600
Memphis Memphis
1500 430-530a 1415-1630
1500
1400 1400
1300 1300
1200 1200
1100 1100
1000 1000
900 Denver 900
HUB

800 5a-8a 800

Miami
700 Oakland 730a-815a Indianapolis 700
6a-1745p
6a-930a
600 600

2
500 500
400 400
300
Indianapolis Indianapolis Memphis 300
200 2a-545a
2a-545a
Memphis Memphis
2a-545a
Memphis 200
1a-6a
1a-4a 1a-3a
100 100
2400 Memphis 2400
2300-4a
2300 Ohare 2230-2315 Ohare 2300
2200 Ohare 2200-1330
2200
2215-2300
2100 Chicago Chicago Chicago Chicago 2100
Chicago 2000-2130 Chicago
2000 1930-2230
1945-2215 1945-2200 1945-2215 2000
1915-2230
1900 Chicago 1900
1800 Chicago 1745-2030 1800
1915-2230
1700 1700
1600 Chicago 1600

1
1500 1445-2215 1500
ORIGIN

1400 1400
1300 1300
1200 1200
Chicago
1100 1030-1900 1100
1000 1000

DAY INTERNATIONAL DOMESTIC

Figure 8 Memphis International Airport occupancy diagram

Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012 63

 Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city Clare Lyster
FedEx is clearly a highly centralised and top-down planning model [5]
that simultaneously tolerates bottom-up intelligence. For example, at the
local scale, thousands of Drop Box locations facilitate a distributed web
of access points with multiple pick-up times, some as late as 11:30 p.m.
In many Asian cities, as a means to combat traffic congestion on what
Stephen Graham calls the ‘last mile’ (Graham & Marvin 2001: 81), FedEx
uses bike couriers instead of trucks to make final deliveries. Local inflec-
tions thus influence the system, yet in channelling the packages to one
facility for sorting, FedEx also master plans the delivery process. In de-
ploying a single vision with rules and procedures, yet at the same time ac-
commodating local nuances, FedEx is both a hierarchy and a network.
What design learns from FedEx is the development of a planning
model that is strategic and precise enough to deliver large-scale trans-
formation (a hierarchy) but that is also open enough to anticipate un-
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016
foreseen events (a network). In marrying two diverse planning approach-
es in a single vision that simultaneously assimilates self-organisation,
contemporary design practice might combine the best of what modern
and postmodern planning regimes had to offer, the legibility of a big idea
combined with distributed responsiveness.
Lesson 3: disciplinary dissolve
In facilitating the uninterrupted flow of packages, the Matrix merges
building and shipping network into a seamless environment, position-
ing the Sort Center at the intersection of architecture and infrastructure.
Enclosure in a warehouse shell makes it architecture, conveyors that af-
ford an uninterrupted conduit of package flow along with ball bearings
embedded in the floor that allow the ground to move make it infrastruc-
ture. Reinforcing the disciplinary ambiguity is the necessity to measure
the Sort Center interior in hectares rather than square metres. At 13 hec-
tares (31 acres) the Sort Center is larger than Millennium Park in Chica-
go. Hubs of other logistical networks are equally large scale. For exam-
ple, Amazon.com’s largest warehouse in Coffeyville, Kansas can hold three
football fields, and a warehouse employee, a ‘picker’, walks up to 24 kilo-
metres during an 8-hour shift. At 37 hectares (91 acres), the interior area
of Worldport, the UPS hub in Louisville, Kentucky is even larger than its
counterpart at FedEx. Author John McPhee informs us that it would take
over an hour to walk the perimeter of the structure, which measures 8
linear kilometres. At 39 hectares (95 acres) the interior is too large to be
air-conditioned. ‘The building is about seventy-five feet high, and essen-
tially windowless. Its vast interior spaces are supported by forests of col-
umns. It could bring to mind, among other things, the seemingly endless
interior colonnades of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, but the UPS is fif-
teen times the size’ (McPhee 2005: 164). Deborah Richmond documents the
Tejon Ranch Industrial Center in Kern County, California, which hous-
es a series of single-storey super distribution centres for companies in-
cluding IKEA that measures approximately 160,000 square metres. Simi-
lar sized structures exist close by for Walmart, Target and Home Depot for
the storage of cargo transported from the ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach via the 37-kilometre Alameda Corridor (Richmond 2008). At almost
1 million square metres, the Aalsmeer flower market near Amsterdam is
one of the largest commercial structures in the world. As an interior envi-
ronment, the Sort Center falls within the category of architecture, yet by
64 Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012
calibrating its footprint in hectares it is more akin to a natural landscape.
In falling between disciplines, the Sort Center exhibits formal and materi-
al attributes that amalgamate architecture, infrastructure and landscape.
Precedents that help position spatial hybridity include Robert Smith-
son’s characterisation of the State of New Jersey as a superimposition of
constructed, natural and altered sites, which he summarises as ‘sediments
of the same geology’ (Angelil & Klingmann 1999: 17). Expressing the con-
temporary city as a fusion of built, natural and infrastructural properties
highlights Rem Koolhaas’s reading of Atlanta (Koolhaas 1995: 835). In both
cases, the term ‘landscape’ emerges as a complex state equally composed
of constructed (artificial) and natural characteristics. There is no natural
or altered landscape at the FedEx Sort Center, instead its properties com-
prise of an equal share of conveyor (industrial infrastructure), ball-bear-
ing (mechanical detail) and asphalt runway (material surface). As such it
may not offer a full-fledged re-reading of landscape except to broaden its
definition beyond green, ecological and infrastructural to a highly graph-
ic—the runway is coded so planes know exactly where to stop and unload—
mechanised surface, where landscape is rendered less as a pictorial and
aesthetic space than as a constructed performative one (Wall 1999).. In her
book Enduring Innocence: Architecture and its Global Masquerades, Kel-
ler Easterling highlights the extent of surface intelligence at international
port terminals in Rotterdam and Hong Kong as well as in warehouse inte-
riors. In fact Easterling’s chapter is titled ‘Park’, and in it she characterises
her port-park as an ‘information landschaft’, serving to amplify the anal-
ogy between information, landscape and the surfaces of large logistical
sites. Amplifying this analogy is her description of the floors in automat-
ed warehouses that are ‘more than merely the durable surface underfoot’
(Easterling 2005: 109) since they host detectors to curate the movement of
automated vehicles that navigate the space above.
In the case of Atlanta, Koolhaas also includes architecture in his defi-
nition of the city as landscape by presenting it less as figure and more as,
to use his words, a ‘thin carpet of habitation’ (Koolhaas 1998: 835). Other
than a benign enclosure, architecture at the Sort Center similarly ignores
its figural history, this time manifested in the tectonic details that sim-
plify the transferal of goods from the runway into the Matrix and back to
outbound planes. Deborah Richmond describes how large distribution
warehouses have successfully inverted architectural attention (and invest-
ment) away from the front to the back of buildings. Here gaskets, han-
dling equipment and specially designed docks and doors constitute the
spatial features that render architecture less as volume and more as a link
in a larger supply of material flow (Richmond 2008) thus rendering archi-
tecture and system as one and the same. Conceiving site, architectural in-
terior and network not as discrete parts but as a larger integrated ecology
is characterised here as ‘systemscape’. To put it another way, the space of
the Sort Center and the system that demands it (shipping) dissolve into
one machined construct. Systemscapes are characterised by indefinite
boundaries between inside and outside, are dominated by circulation, re-
spond to larger exchanges in their environment (InfraNet Lab / Lateral Of-
fice 2011: 6) and, since many are in fact enclosed, with an array of interior
mobility infrastructure from conveyors to automated vehicular systems,
can be characterised as interior landscapes.
 That a region (New Jersey) or a city (Atlanta) and now a building (the FedEx volumes’ (Van Berkel & Bos, 1998)—to aligning temporal flows (transporta-
Sort Center) cannot be described by any one property alone but as a com- tion, freight and pedestrian) as a vehicle for urbanism. In categorising the
binatory territory of multiple equally critical conditions has its own set of city according to the patterns of flow through a specific location rather
valuable lessons. In falling across or between landscape and architecture, than by function or use (in the way a zoning map would do), Deep Plan-
systemscapes ignore historical distinctions between the disciplines to offer ning emerged as a critical technique that explored the city as a series of
a new approach to the production of space and thus new formal models for ‘topologies of shared values’ (Van Berkel & Bos 1998). The firm’s unbuilt IFF-
the attendant spaces of other mobility systems beyond logistics. CA project for the West Side Rail Yards in Manhattan (1998), and its ongo-
ing project for Arnheim Station (1996-2010) demonstrate the suitability of
Applying the lessons a time-based organisational strategy over a volumetric massing strategy
Logistics is the efficient movement and distribution of materials and at a site of intense mobility. But overall, projects that combine time and
troops across time and space and comprises disciplined organisational flow as attributes for planning are the exception rather than the norm.
manoeuvres to out-do one’s opponent and ensure victory on the battle- UN Studio deploys a temporal model conceptually, but there are also prac-
field. But logistics is not solely an instrumental exercise. As an approach tical applications for this planning approach. Faced with huge deficits and
to war (Lecavalier 2009), logistics facilitates both the practical and artful a shrinking tax base, many cities in the West are considering a variety of
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016

calculation of a military conquest to the point that, when deployed crea- measures to cut back on public infrastructure and services. Time-based
tively, logistics can yield a favourable outcome in battle. Logistics involves organisational strategies could be deployed to ensure greater optimisa-
discipline, rigour and efficiency but is also opportunistic, crafty, devious tion of infrastructure and services over a 24-hour period, for example, aug-
and shrewd. This is supported by a recent essay on Walmart by Marc An- menting large-scale infrastructure such as airports with additional pro-
gelil and Cary Siress, who associate the word with two other important gramme that render the site active during off hours and simultaneously
terms: ‘strategy and tactic’ (Angelil & Siress 2011: 33). In this dialectical po- provide amenities for travellers and citizens. Bundling spaces with oppos-
sitioning of logistics—simultaneously functional and conceptual or prac- ing temporal requirements could also offer more radical definitions for
tical as well as opportunistic—that one might contemplate applications for sustainability as large sites that demand large resources are used more of-
the lessons outlined above. In other words, what can design learn from a ten, thus minimising waste.
large corporation like FedEx? Lesson 2: top-down but flexible. In the industrial city, infrastruc-
Lesson 1: time as a vehicle for urbanism. That the city is still tied to ei- tural planning was a moral obligation and a strategy to unify, sanitise
ther modernist or new urbanist planning principals of zoning and walk- and modernise society. Infrastructure was also the means by which the
ability as mechanisms for space making in downtown areas, or unsustain- nation-state could present itself and, for good or bad reasons, became a
able horizontal development in the periphery, necessitates new models to conduit for powerful ideologies passed down from the state apparatus
address the extensive mobility that constitutes our contemporary condi- (Schivelbusch 2006). Top-down approaches continued into the mid-twen-
tion, for example, long distances between work and living space, unequal tieth-century city through the Robert Moses era until activists and so-
distribution of transportation infrastructure and the increasing presence cially conscious urbanists began to publicly criticise the dominance and
of freight on highways and in downtowns among others. Conceptualising viability of single-vision master plans with respect to the multiple con-
space temporally is a core theme in landscape that historically has been stituencies that occupied a particular territory. Other than the Big Dig
expressed literally and metaphorically by those working in the realm of in Boston, after the completion of the U.S. highway network and a series
land art. Here I recall the large-scale site works by Robert Smithson and of superblock post-war housing projects most U.S. cities either refrained
his cohorts in the late 1960s and early 1970s and more recently by Andy from or disguised top-down planning strategies. Instead, municipalities
Goldsworthy and by Maya Lin. These projects trace time though natu- chose to outsource decision making to local communities to develop their
ral processes of flow such as erosion, sedimentation, disintegration and own futures or deploy small ideas that preserved the status quo. Bottom-
the registration of this temporal transformation on the material environ- up planning is an intriguing spatial model in very specific contexts; the
ment. More recent incorporation of time in landscape architecture is ren- favelas in Rio and Bogota or, more recently the Tent Cities in California,
dered by recognising changes in a landscape across different seasons and Occupy Wall Street and Cairo’s Tahrir Square, but other than the prom-
climates and the range of experiences this brings about; the duration of ise of a few notable landscape projects that proposed frameworks in lieu
ecological cycles, design and development of large-scale sites in phases, of fixed master plans there are few built precedents of urban spaces that
and projecting the transformation of a landscape with the maturation have evolved from this way of thinking. In a 2008 lecture presented at the
of vegetation over time. In both cases, time is still explored as a mecha- University of Illinois’s School of Architecture in Chicago, Stan Allen pro-
nism for the production of space with respect to natural flows. Why not claimed that self-organisation as a planning model espoused by landscape
deploy time as a vehicle for urbanism in environments dictated by arti- urbanism was a myth—first, because creating and implementing a natural
ficial flows? ecology to take care of itself did in fact require a great deal of design, con-
In the late 1990s the Dutch firm UN Studio coined the term ‘Deep trol and maintenance of the variables involved, and second, because pro-
Planning’ to describe a practice that emerged from the challenges faced grammatic indeterminacy — the notion that a space would programme
by the firm in the design and execution of public projects that demand- itself — is problematic not only because it produces un-occupied public
ed a move away from traditional urban planning—‘the shifting-around of space but also because it signifies a lack of commitment on behalf of the

Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012 65

 Learning from FedEx: lessons for the city Clare Lyster
designer. Allen’s plea for specificity and the strategic use of programme
is a call for leadership and control in the design process—not necessarily a
return to top-downism but certainly a call for definitive decision making
on the production of public space. [6] Similarly, in a recent article in the
New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell argues that at a certain scale the lack of
leadership in self-organising social networks renders them ineffective de-
spite the large populations that contribute, and that successful networks
exhibit hierarchical characteristics like discipline, organisation, strategy,
authority etc. In other words, strong networks exercise some aspect of a
top-down organisation (Gladwell 2011).
Logistics transforms how infrastructure is communicated to society at
large. Corporations have replaced the state and power still remains in the
hands of a few, but from the perspective of the user the tyranny of that
power is disguised by the convenience and options that logistics awards
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016
to the individual. After all, you don’t have to walk far to find a FedEx
Drop Box, and if you are too lazy you can arrange online to have a pack-
age picked up at your office or home. Moreover, pick-up hours late into
the night and still the promise of early morning delivery permits flexibil-
ity in one’s schedule and offers greater choice in allocating time for work,
family and play. Choice, change, flexibility, all words associated with bot-
tom-up and self-organising power structures, are intrinsic to logistical
infrastructure. Redbox, the movie rental network, allows users to pick
up DVDs from vending machines and return them to different locations.
Vending machines each hosting up to 100 DVDs are conveniently located
at Walmart, McDonalds and Target among others, making them accessi-
ble to a wide audience. Zipcar, the car-sharing network, disperses its cars
in twos and threes throughout major cities in parking lots, on residen-
tial streets and at transportation centres. Moreover, like FedEx, both Red-
box and Zipcar are centrally organised but their physical infrastructure in
the city is manifested as a distributed field of points. The most conceptual
application of the lessons exists in conceiving infrastructural space as be-
ing top-down as well as dispersed. In other words, that infrastructure is
not only big, totalising and strategic but also small, responsive and tacti-
cal. Exhaustive attempts have been made to argue and defend bigness in
the design of infrastructure, but perhaps the most potent vision exists at
the scale of a Drop Box. Vending, as a pointed intervention (D’Hooghe 2011:
81), whether a drop off or a pick up, is an apparatus of exchange that per-
mits individual participation and freedom of choice without compromis-
ing the efficiency of some larger entity in time and space and thus the in-
terface between bottom-up and top-down power structures.
Lesson 3: disciplinary dissolve. Approaching the city horizontally im-
plies greater synthesis across the primary components of a city—infrastruc-
ture, landscape and architecture. In her essay ‘Landscapes of Infrastruc-
ture’, Elizabeth Mossop argues for a move away from specialisation that
constitutes the design of urban networks such as highways and parking
lots, which she argues are designed without awareness of other opportu-
nities within their context to strategies that integrate infrastructure with
other urban components such as ecological systems (Mossop 2006). Too of-
ten, however municipal agencies such as transportation, waterfronts and
parks departments have their own sets of codes and conducts that endorse
specialisation, thus prohibiting the integration necessary for new spatial
products at the intersection of architecture, landscape and civil engineer-
66 Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012
ing. A case in point is the USA’s national highway system, which was de-
signed in complete isolation. The term systemscapes offers formal mod-
els for the attendant spaces of other mobility systems beyond logistics in
the city, for example, bundling not just ecological programme as Mossop
suggests but formal strategies that fuse housing, commercial, educational
and recreational spaces into emerging mobility systems such as bike net-
works, high speed fibre-optic routes, data centres, freight exchanges and
distribution centres. That architectural form, landscape and infrastruc-
ture now have equal roles in shaping the built environment implies dis-
solving the specialisation that typically structures how cities approach
public works in isolation to other needs and opportunities.
End note
Since 1970 there has been a host of new distribution systems that facili-
tate the unprecedented mobility of goods, people and information across
the world—what Manuel Castells refers to as the ‘space of flows’ (Castells &
Ince 2003: 55), yet contemporary design research is only beginning to in-
vestigate their impact on the city. Apart from recent design scholarship
that utilises ecological systems as a premise for urbanism, there is little
research into the representation and/or implications of other types of flow
on the design of the city, for example logistical systems. Part journalistic
dispatch, part theoretical contemplation, this essay deploys archival and
interpretive research of FedEx formatted as diagrams and text to read the
implications of logistical systems for design delivered through three prod-
ucts. First, FedEx research is utilised to explore how new mobility systems,
what Richard Hanley refers to as ‘cutting edge infrastructures’ (Hanley
2004: xi), that organise the flow of goods, information and people across
nations, regions and the world with their distinct set of operations and at-
tendant spaces shape the built environment. Second, diagrams and maps
illustrate a topic not usually considered by designers — a fast-track ship-
ping network — to represent the larger forces at play in the space of flows.
By graphically describing the backstage systems that exist in the city, the
essay provides a new method to spatialise the a-formal and dynamic sys-
tems that organise contemporary culture. Third, and most important, les-
sons extrapolated from the research identify some of the implications of
logistics for design practice to strengthen the disciplinary significance of
the work. Taken together, the research (and maps), the lessons and their
applications take an exploration of logistical systems out of sociological
and technical discourse and into the realm of design practice. They pro-
vide a new reading of the city in an era of intense mobility across time and
space, expand a definition of infrastructure and advance design research
of the city from the perspective of systems rather than form.
Acknowledgements
I am sincerely grateful to the reviewers of this essay. Their outstanding
comments were exact, insightful and thorough and really developed the
overall argument in the text. I’d also like to thank The Graham Founda-
tion for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts who funded my research on FedEx
with a grant in 2008 through 2009.
 Notes
1 Incidentally, in 1978, FedEx spent a year developing a four-
hub network model that included Memphis, Colorado Springs,
Chicago and Newburgh, NY. It’s not clear why the compa-
ny dropped plans for the four-hub concept in favour of a sin-
gle Sort Centre at Memphis. Plans were also studied to opti-
mize the use of the company’s expanding fleet of planes that
were used mostly at night. Operation TORSO conceived how
the planes could operate as passenger aircraft during the day
and on weekends and identified Chicago Midway as the serv-
ice hub. For the East Coast hub, Smith selected land on the
west side of the Hudson River in New Jersey so that passen-
gers could be ferried from Manhattan across the river to the
airstrip.
2 Information on why FedEx moved to Memphis varies
between sources.
3 Known as the ‘Middle Sister’ of the Mississippi, Memphis
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 23:49 09 June 2016
tions, once to argue for an increase in weight restrictions for
freight aircraft and once against a fuel cap for airliners during
the 1973 oil embargo.
6 Lecture delivered by Stan Allen at the School of Architecture,
University of Illinois, Chicago on 10 November 2008.
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is situated approximately 300 miles south of St. Louis and 400
miles north of New Orleans. It was founded in 1819 on one of
the few developable sites on the eastern side of the lower Mis-
sissippi Valley: the Chickasaw Bluffs in the southwest cor-
ner of present-day Tennessee. Memphis was a highly strate-
gic outpost. South of the Ohio River, the Mississippi zigzags
through a 30- to 60-mile-wide delta of soft soil. This means
the river shifts frequently, hampering use of land that finds
itself at varying distances or even opposite sides in this sec-
tion of the river, a condition that is worsened with overflow
from the Mississippi’s tributaries that combine to magnify ef-
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lower valley that could withstand damage from the unpre-
dictable flow of the river. In addition, in the late 19th centu-
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4 The U. S. Post Office also relies on new technologies. As a
means to offset the loss of its employees during World War II,
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of the largest cities. Delivery zones identified with single and
double digit numbers made it easy for unskilled employees
unfamiliar with the network to sort mail. In 1963 this num-
bering system gave way to the zip code designation that we
know today. The first number in the code designates a geo-
graphical area of the county—ranging from zero in the North-
east to 9 in the far West. The next two digits designate popula-
tion concentrations and one of the 552 sectional centres. The
final two digits designate a small area, a post office or a postal
zone in a large city—one of 552 sectional centres each serving
up to 150 post offices. In 1983 the five-digit zip code was ex-
panded to reflect more mechanized sorting systems that it had
adopted from the 1960s onwards. These additional four digits
further specified a destination. Digits 6 + 7 specified a deliv-
ery sector of a few blocks, a group of post office boxes, a single
high rise. The last two digits went so far as to specify a floor of
a large building, specific departments in a large company, or a
specific bank of post office boxes.
5 Political clout is also a major factor in the dominance of Fe-
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the company’s 38-year history to lobby for favourable condi-
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(London, Architectural Association), 22–32. cago. She received her B.Arch from University College Dublin
(Ireland) and M.Arch from Yale School of Architecture.
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UIC School of Architecture
Graham, S. & Marvin, S. (2001), Splintering Urbanism: Network ­
860 N. Lake Shore Drive
Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition
Chicago, IL 60611
(London, Routledge).
001 312 731 4082
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cl@cluaa.com
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Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2012 67