The "mobilities turn" has demonstrated the importance of the social, cultural, and political implications of travel for a variety of modes. However, this work has largely focused on traveling people and vehicles, not freight, despite the rapid worldwide growth in freight traffic over the last few decades. The transport of goods by shipping container has become the predominant means of freight transport since the 1960s, shaping places from port cities to rural distribution centers.  As part of the logistics chain, the distribution center is a short-term dwelling place for goods that come in via one container, are re-packaged and re-containerized, and leave again within days or even hours. These massive, low-slung structures are generally located in either one of two places: a greenfield site with little existing development so as to minimize traffic congestion, or adjacent to existing port, road, and/or rail infrastructure so as to minimize drayage (the carrying of goods between modes of transportation rather than between origins and destinations).

However, a distribution center is not a single place, or at least not a place confined to a single building. It is a place-as-network, or a distributed place, existing over miles of rails and roads as much as it does inside four walls and a roof. If the DC is located on the edge of a metropolitan area, it soon acquires a much larger footprint as roads are resurfaced and widened to handle increased truck traffic, and new highway connections or even entire highways are constructed to keep goods moving in and out of that one building and its compatriots. If the DC is located within a city, close to rail and roads, congestion must be offset by new overpasses, rerouting truck traffic from residential areas, or other technologies meant to keep containers, goods, and people constantly moving. Using examples from across the US, I argue for thinking of the distribution center as a "distributed place" or a "place-as-network." Along the way, I also explore temporary immobilities or pauses in the flows of shipping containers, showing that the problems containers pose to the places they pass through are not a function of the objects themselves, but their state of mobility.