Urban consolidation centre – a literature review, categorisation, and a future research agenda

Abstract

Purpose: Urban consolidation centre (UCC) is a popular initiative targeting the challenge of negative environmental and social impacts from freight transports in cities. Despite this, UCC often fails in practice, which indicates a knowledge gap. Furthermore, research within the field can be described as fragmented, transdisciplinary, and fast-growing. This paper aims to provide an overview of the field by describing dominant categories and themes within the area, identify gaps in order to propose a future research agenda, and provide insights into the needs of practitioners. Research approach: A systematic literature review targeting journal articles based on UCCs has been constructed with a supplementary snowball approach. A content analysis was performed to categorise themes in the research on UCCs and to identify research gaps, both within and outside the categories identified. Findings and originality: Despite substantial research on UCC, very little research ends up in academic journals. Fifty-six articles address UCC. The most common topics were the role of stakeholders, design of distribution structures and transport resources, environmental and social consideration, and economic considerations. Much focus is directed towards finding "optimal" solutions and designs for potential initiatives with very little, if any, consideration to financial viability or the management of the UCC initiative. Research impact: This research points out existing gaps in the literature and proposes a future research agenda with UCCs as the focus. For example, although environmental and social arguments are often applied to justify the implementation of UCCs, few studies measure or evaluate their impact. Another important research gap is the economical consideration, both how to generate revenue and how to consider economies of scale. Practical impact: The practical contribution of most studies is directed towards municipalities. Few findings are presented in a way to support companies. Additionally, by bridging the gaps related to how stakeholders can collaborate and describe what is happening in a UCC, practitioners can use such information as guidelines. Originality: The results provides a research agenda for the fragmented research targeting urban consolidation centres, supporting the viability of future initiatives.

Roles and Perspectives When Estimating Energy and Environmental Potentials of Urban Consolidation

“…The evaluation of this initiative also added a clear strive to combine environmental, social, and economic measures, not only by addressing these dimensions in separation, but by calculating the external costs of the environmental and social impact integrating these. In previous performance measurement of the benefits of UCCs, the use of external costs to capture these potentials are very seldomly applied [11]. Furthermore, the results gained from this evaluation did also provide the municipality the justification needed to further support develop the initiative, in line with the many reasons for measuring the sustainability of transport (see e.g., [29,30]).…”

“…A holistic approach involving the three central aspects of financial analyses, traffic analyses, and environmental assessment is put forward by several researchers (e.g., [7,17,35]). Lately, more attentions have been drawn towards combining environmental, social and economic measurements when quantifying the potentials of implementing UCCs [11].…”

“…Behrends, et al [10] recognized early the need to select a set of indicators to monitor and measure whether the intended results of urban freight initiatives are being achieved. Despite this, the measurements and metrics applied when estimating the benefits from implementing UCCs still vary largely [11]. Besides the variation regarding performance measurements (see e.g., Allen and Browne [12]), there is a widespread usage of different methods to capture raw data and to estimate the impact of transport, and these different methods lead to different results [12,13].…”

“…Large improvement potentials regarding environmental impact as well as energy usage of UCCs are most likely to be found targeting aspects such as packing and loading of vehicles, inventory management, and modal split/change. Despite that mathematical modelling (e.g., optimization and simulation) is the most common method applied in journal articles focusing UCCs [11], these issues are likely of large interest for further research applying both qualitative and quantitative methodologies (see e.g., [65,66]).…”

Kent Lojistiği Alanındaki Yayınların Bibliyometrik Analizi

“…Tablo 2.1'de şehir lojistiği ile ilgili yapılmış olan önceki araştırmalar yer almaktadır. Tablo incelendiğinde; Wolpert ve Reuter'ın (2012) ilk çıktığı günden 2012 yılına kadar olan periyottaki yayınları, Lagorio ve arkadaşlarının (2016) 2000-2015 yılları arasındaki yayınları, Hajduk'un (2017Hajduk'un ( ) 1975Hajduk'un ( -2015 (Björklund ve Johansson, 2018;Ormond ve Telhada, 2017), kentsel yük taşımacılığı (Visser ve diğ., 2014; Oliveira ve diğ., 2017), kentsel yolcu taşımacılığı sistemleri (Perez ve diğ., 2015), şehir lojistiği için karar destek sistemleri (Bozzo ve diğ., 2014), havaalanı merkezli planlamada şehir lojistiğinin rolü (Boloukian ve Siegmann, 2016), şehir lojistiği modelleme çalışmaları (Anand ve diğ., 2012;Anand ve diğ., 2015), yük taşımacılığı modelleme (Nuzzolo ve diğ., 2013), kentsel yük taşımacılığını planlamadaki zorluklar (Lindholm ve Behrends, 2012) örnek olarak verilebilir.…”