Mapping Amazon's logistical footprint on the Ruhr – How a tech company is influencing cities,cluster politics and climates

Abstract

Today, the networks of digital platforms are deeply intertwined with our everyday topographies. One of the giants of the industry is Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company. Over the past decade, it has become our neighbour, employer and critical public infrastructure provider – a standard in modern city life. For the Ruhr metropolis in Germany, Amazon epitomizes a transformative force for shaping the historically industrial region into a warehouse for Europe. It brings with it the promise of turning the region into a service sector hub. With its extensive logistics and delivery operations, however, Amazon is building onto already existing (public) infrastructures, past and present: Drawing on the example of the logistical cluster at the Westfalenhütte in the north-east of Dortmund, a 612.000-resident city in Western Germany, this paper maps out how deeply rooted in (and dependent on) industrial histories ‘innovative’ contemporary developments by tech companies are. From the ground to the cloud, it reveals the various layers of public local infrastructure that Amazon is settling on to, profiting off of – or even taking over.

Today, the networks of digital platforms are deeply intertwined with our everyday topographies. One of the giants of the industry is Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company with a ‘mastery of logistics’ (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2020). Over the past decade, it has become our neighbour, employer and critical public infrastructure provider – a standard in modern city life (Voigt, 2024; West, 2022).

For the Ruhr metropolis in Germany, Amazon epitomizes a transformative force for shaping the historically industrial region into a warehouse for Europe (Hesse, 2002; Jarosch, 2019). As of 2024, it has 11 facilities in the Ruhr region alone, spanning from sorting centers to delivery stations (MWPVL International, 2024). Logistics companies like Amazon bring with them a promise of futures cleared of a heavily industrial past (Richter, 2004): In the last 25 years, they have been an important driver for turning the region into a service sector hub with adjacent infrastructure (Jarosch, 2019).

Take, for example, the logistical cluster at the Westfalenhütte in the north-east of Dortmund, a 612.000-resident city in Western Germany. Where once the ‘Kumpel’ (buddies) of the iron and steel works Hoesch, founded in 1871, cycled to work, Amazon's and other logistics workers (often noticeably dressed in bright high-visibility vests) are now cramping into public busses or rushing to their next shift on e-scooters. The mixed-use industrial estate has been a witness to significant local history and the perfect site for Amazon's later settlement there: The decrease of 10,000 jobs down to about 6400 at the Westfalenhütte by 2022 due to the deindustrialization meant the loss of a ‘huge “job motor” as well as long-term job security which provides social security for a number of neighborhood residents […]’ (Stadt Dortmund. Amt für Stadterneuerung, 2023, p. 10, trans. by author). Global and local logistics companies such as DB Schenker, Decathlon, Deutsche Post DHL and REWE have responded to the city's call to revitalize the area and attract companies that offer much-needed low-entry job opportunities. They ultimately built up enough technical, political and knowledge infrastructure on-site for Amazon to follow in 2017. While the Westfalenhütte still hosts a hot-dip galvanizing plant of ThyssenKrupp steel it is now mainly a logistics hub of big retailers.

Setting out to unbox Amazon's logistics and its urban impact in the Ruhr region from 2021 to 2023, our ‘Automating the Logistical City’ research project together with guests ethnographically traced the multiple layers of what this company consists of and is building on to – literally, from the ground up. We lingered in front of the company's ‘Inbound Crossdock’ DTM2 at the Westfalenhütte and explored the adjacent neighbourhood Nordstadt; we studied historical recounters and political strategy papers; we interviewed experts and city representatives on local industrial history. Following the traditions of counter-mappings by, for example, Kollektiv orangotango (2019) and deep mapping approaches (Mattern, 2015) I then assembled the gathered material (official maps, graphic recordings, pictures taken in the field, etc.) in the style of an architectural isometry ¹ which stresses the circular and multilayerness of spatial, material and social impact that tech companies like Amazon have. The visualization similarly aims to ‘illuminate the unavoidably subjective and political aspects of mapping and to provide alternatives to hegemonic, authoritative – and often naturalized and reified approaches to cartography’ (Mattern, 2015, p. 30). It centers especially on our interview partners’ accounts, albeit graphically translated by us researchers. What our qualitative mapping of Amazon's networks revealed is the various layers of public local infrastructure that Amazon is settling on to, profiting off of or even taking over.

The layers

1. The Ground: In the overall Ruhr region, the retreat of the steel industry meant an increasing rate of unemployment: in 2004, only 4000 people compared to 80.000 in 1970 remained employed in the sector (Richter, 2004). With that, a whole regional identity, economic and social infrastructure collapsed. At the Westfalenhütte, what was left was nothing but ‘800 hectares of industrially exploited wasteland […], interspersed above and below ground with decaying large-scale facilities and heavily contaminated soil throughout’ (Richter, 2004, p. 165, trans. by author). In an effort to prepare and level the ground for future use, the industrial past has been buried under 3 m of soil in 2016 (Dortmund Logistik21, 2016) and is now a global site of speculation on logistics real estate with, for example, Amazon at its heart.

2. Local Infrastructure: In a huge rebranding campaign which aimed to turn its dirty past into an innovative service sector site for IT, Micro- and Nano Technologies, the so-called ‘dortmund-project’ of 2000 put a focus on attracting logistics (Richter, 2004). A 10-year program initiated by a private–public partnership of the city of Dortmund, then Westfalenhütte-owner ThyssenKrupp, and McKinsey consultants was supposed to provide 70.000 new jobs by 2010 and fight the high unemployment rate (Richter, 2004). Young talents were to attract global companies and ‘future industries’ (Küpper, 2005, p. 631), while logistics was seen as filling in the gaps in the blue-collar sector. The location of the Westfalenhütte helped the latter matter tremendously: being an old industrial site in the north-east of Dortmund's city center means access to main existing infrastructures, like a connection to two Autobahnen, a rail system, and the Dortmund ePort. Most important, however, is probably the Westfallenhütte's immediate neighbourhood: companies like Amazon embrace the many migrant workers living in the Nordstadt, who often depend on low-entry warehouse jobs.

3. Amazon Infrastructure: Agreeing to a 15-year rental contract with logistical developer GARBE, Amazon settled at Westfalenhütte in 2017 with its ‘Inbound Crossdock’ DTM2 and DTM3 (a redistribution facility for products) (Stadt Dortmund, 2017; Völkel, 2022). In return for around 2000 jobs, the city provides Amazon with a global logistics network, the extension of traffic infrastructure and no significant business tax. Despite its rather major communal interventions into the local urban fabric and its evergreen claim to be a ‘good neighbor’ (Amazon, 2024, p. 3), Amazon's presence at the Westfalenhütte is nevertheless elusive. Quietly and – apart from its smiling blue trucks and white delivery vans – invisibly, Amazon in Dortmund seemingly extracts the most out of what historical and contemporary logistics companies such as Decathlon or Zalando have built up in the previous years, profiting from local cluster politics as well.

4. The Cloud: From the ground to the cloud, Amazon is part of a post-industrial history leaving especially its ecological footprint for eternity. Draining cities, their public infrastructures and work forces, Amazon is already contributing to the ongoing pollution of already vulnerable urban neighborhoods, like the Nordstadt, in proximity of its warehouses (Waddell et al., 2023). Additionally, it not only powers its own logistical operations, but 30% of the world's internet with its globally leading cloud computing and server infrastructure Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Richter, 2024) whose data centers’ climatic impact remains unclear. However, playing a crucial role in powering the Ruhr region's digital critical infrastructures, future proximity to data centers is going to be key for the metropolis. As the state's minister stresses, building local data centers is essential to get to the ‘top of technological innovation’ (Wüst cited after Microsoft, 2024, trans. by authors). In 2024, Amazon's biggest cloud computing competitor Microsoft announced a 3,2 billion Euros investment into a hyperscaler data center in the Rheinischen Revier just 100 kilometers away from Dortmund – a deal that went through Germany's chancellor Olaf Scholz himself. A few months later, in May 2024, Amazon itself announced plans for implementing an ‘AWS Region’ with endorsements of the German Federal Office for Information Security for a ‘European Sovereign Cloud’, albeit in the state of Brandenburg in Eastern Germany (Göldner, 2024). These data centers and server farms will only further extract the two regions’ resources with their need of immense amounts of local energy and drinking water (Marx, 2024).

Here is where Amazon's logistics come full circle: its cloud services will inevitably have an impact on our planet, and thus will be part of the post-industrial heritage. Its logistical footprint will be inscribed in future land relations, the ground, and the soil our observations started with. As is its elusive character, Amazon will probably be long gone by then.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-pns-10.1177_29768624251315164 - Supplemental material

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-pns-10.1177_29768624251315164