UC Berkeley

Inland Southern California's development is deeply embedded in the territorial restruc- turing of profit. Cyclical waves of capital investment into local land markets has produced a regional landscape of commodity transport, housing, and labor that links the region's growth to multiple economic scales. My research is an attempt to understand how global shifts in production and an increasing dominance of finance capital have produced new landscapes of accumulation in Riverside and San Bernardino counties - also known as the Inland Empire. Most studies on globalization focus on the shifting geographies of industrial production, financial networks, information technologies, and the emergence of world cities that function as control centers. Links between commodity distribution and urbanization is virtually ignored in the globalization literature. But innovations in distri- bution processes and the shifting scale of development have played important roles in the growth of American cities. Studies of Los Angeles and Southern California's metropolitan growth tend to treat the Inland Empire as a parochial second cousin. But the region's growing population and important economic role requires us to acknowledge and reconcile some of the ways that the Inland Empire is implicated in regional and global processes.