This paper outlines how logistics enacts geographies of rationalisation and optimisation. It begins with the messiness and tensions embodied in the encounter between the ideal, logistical city and the lived spaces of a particular no longer industrial city. The logistical city is not understood as a material space; it is an assemblage of practices and interventions that have as their aim the efficient and productive flow of commodities into, out of, and through urban space. As an assemblage, the logistical city embeds particular localities in material, discursive, and symbolic relations that link them to more or less distant sites and jurisdictions. In moving between the material and imagined geographies of logistics, the paper considers how these imaginaries legitimise particular interventions and practices in those sites, rendering others invisible or illegitimate. These interventions into lived space are considered relative to a single city—Sydney—with a focus on the Port Botany container terminals.
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