Core-periphery relations: spatial patterns of e-commerce in the San Francisco Bay Area

In the San Francisco Bay Area, e-commerce is facilitating a new wave of employment-driven exurbanization, resulting in the conversion of agricultural land to industrial for warehouse development. This paper illustrates the spatial patterns of e-commerce, highlighting the role of the urban core as a place of consumption, where wealthy e-commerce consumers are concentrated, and the exurban periphery, as a place of the production and reproduction of warehouse labor, where large distribution centers are located, and warehouse workers live and work. Through the concentration of low wage warehouse jobs on the exurban periphery, e-commerce is reinforcing existing dynamics of uneven development and the asymmetrical relationship between the urban core and exurban periphery.