‘Gray space’: distribution centers and remaking California’s Inland Empire

This article contributes to the special issues topic on distribution by focusing on the environmental history of Southern California's Inland Empire region. The Inland Empire, stretching Riverside and San Bernardino Counties east of Los Angeles, encompasses the largest inland port region in the United States. Since the 1980s, as the region experienced economic transition, hundreds of leading retailers and manufacturers built distribution centers due to strategic logistical location, open space, and incentives from local governments. This development completely transformed the region, creating a dire environmental impact on air quality, which disproportionately affects poor residents of color. By looking at the longer history of the region's transformation, this article helps to both serve as an example for how scholars of retail can use an environmental lens to study the subject while also contributing to recent scholarship by showing how the history of the logistics industry in the region connects to larger local, regional, and national developments. As the article argues, the rise of distribution centers in the Inland Empire is not black and white; it is 'gray.'