The Role of Urban Logistics in the City Economy

This chapter explains the foundational principles in the study of logistics. Urban logistics often receives particular research focus, since the impacts of freight in urban areas are typically the most concentrated and visible. Logistics activity almost always benefits from some form of subsidy, even if it may take the form of government provision of public infrastructure, or tolerance of negative externalities. While developing schemes to address logistics problems can be challenging, there remains immense scope to improve urban logistics, and the increasingly broad streams of research into freight and logistics offer insights into how to do so. In terms of the transportation component of urban logistics, there is a generally agreed hierarchy of types of measures to improve sustainability. A number of freight and logistics research networks also continue to facilitate research cooperation and dissemination, often serving as a bridge for researchers to relate their local research to the global corpus of knowledge.