Download PDF [English] [French]
Mahmoudi, Dillon, and Alan Wiig. 2024. “L’entrepôt Amazon [The Amazon Warehouse].” In Nos lieux communs: Une géographie du monde contemporain, edited by Fabrice Argounès, Michel Bussi, and Martine Drozdz, Illustrated édition. Paris: Fayard. EAN 9782213725147
Summary
Amazon’s warehouses are vast, windowless spaces, each the size of multiple football fields, where thousands of employees and over half a million robots work in tandem to process immense volumes of packages daily. Coordinated by Amazon’s AI-powered AWS platform, robots such as Pegasus and Proteus move products efficiently through these facilities, while delivery drivers are monitored closely by AI systems that regulate their behavior on the road. This tightly controlled logistical network extends beyond warehouses, with Amazon’s Prime Air fleet surpassing even some established carriers in cargo volume at U.S. airports. Despite the advanced technology, Amazon’s workers face intense surveillance, lower wages, and grueling conditions, highlighting a stark contrast to the stable, unionized manufacturing jobs of past decades. This operational framework relies on the infrastructure of deindustrialized cities, reinforcing a model of convenience that depends on relentless cost-cutting and worker control to maintain the seamless flow of products, down to the delivery of the most mundane commodities like charging cables.
Book Summary
Author and editor Michel Bussi, who here swaps his novelist hat to become a geographer again, Martine Drozdz and Fabrice Argounès have invited a hundred authors to embark on a surprising and playful Grand Tour, an inventive geography, at the heart of what makes our relationship to the world. From the Airbnb apartment to the village square, from the schoolyard to the nightclub, from the submarine to the universal exhibition, they invite us to explore these common, intimate or exceptional, banal or inaccessible places.
Did you know that the 10,000 data centres that store our data alone consume as much energy as the UK? That 600 million of us will have visited a zoo by 2023? That a political party headquarters can be a setting for a fashion show? That in some Asian countries, gallodromes and their cockfights are as popular as our stadiums? Could you spend eighteen years in an airport if you became stateless? Or plan your next tourist destination without checking Instagram? Have you ever looked at your house and imagined it could be a refuge from the climate crisis?