The "Great Supply Chain Disruption"
Host Abby Kinney, an urban planner in Kansas City, and regular cohost Chuck Marohn, Strong Towns founder and president.
Right now in the Port of Savannah, there is a traffic jam amounting to nearly 80,000 shipping containers. Savannah is one of the U.S.’s largest ports, and like many other domestic and international ports, it’s been contending with massive cargo pileups, with ships sometimes waiting at sea for a week or more before they’re able to unload.
The problem doesn’t stop at ports, either: this is also a story about warehousing, trucking, and rail systems. The supply chain is clogged across the board, which has caused all kinds of ripple effects on a global scale. It’s just one of the many consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, recently dubbed the “great supply chain disruption” by Peter S. Goodman in The New York Times. What was expected to be a temporary phenomenon—an unintended consequence of the pandemic lockdowns—is increasingly being viewed as a new reality that could require a substantial refashioning of the world shipping infrastructure.
This week on Upzoned, host Abby Kinney and regular co-host Chuck Marohn “upzone” Goodman’s article, discussing why you can’t just turn off the world supply chain, then turn it back on again and expect it to work properly.
Abby Newsham is the cohost of the Upzoned podcast. Abby is an urban design and planning consultant at Multistudio in Kansas City, Missouri. In her own community, she works to advance bottom-up strategies that enhance both private development and the public realm, and facilitates the ad-hoc Kansas City chapter of the Incremental Development Alliance. When she’s not geeking out over cities, Abby is an avid urban mountain biker (because: potholes), audiobook and podcast junkie, amateur rock climber, and guitarist. You can connect with Abby on Twitter at @abbykatkc.