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The maturation of digital(ized) consumption, together with the amplification of cities' initiatives in response to local and global environmental challenges, has placed goods transport, an essential but impactful activity, at the forefront of urban stakeholders' scrutiny. High-performance and low-impact supply chains benefit from the presence of logistics facilities in proximity to goods' destinations. This development of logistics facilities in high-demand areas, which are essentially urban, dense and mixed-use, we term 'proximity logistics'. It is the focus of this article. Proximity logistics entails extending and refining networks of logistics facilities towards urban cores and allows them to counteract some of the undesirable effects that their historic tendency to outward migration (or logistics sprawl) potentially brings about. The phenomenon is established around the world, albeit to different extents. In this article, we discuss the trends supporting proximity logistics' development and present a typology of facilities it could entail, followed by case studies of five cities: New York (United States); Paris (France); Seoul (South Korea); Shanghai (China); and Tokyo (Japan). We characterize the state of practice of logistics facilities in each city's dense, mixed-use areas, compare the characteristics in light of their context and distill learnings in support of sustainable land use patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Crowd logistics is an alternative to traditional home deliveries by parcel companies and is believed to be more sustainable. The idea of crowd logistics is that parcels and passengers are co-transported along a passenger trip that was intended to be made for another purpose. Due to the novelty of this concept and the fact that existing crowd logistics platforms are continuously changing, knowledge on the actual impact of crowd logistics is limited. To gain insight in crowd logistics' environmental impact and the involved stakeholders, we apply two methods. First, an impact analysis based on data of an operational crowd logistics platform in Belgium. We compare the external costs imposed on society when delivering a parcel with crowd logistics and with more traditional ways of transport. Second, an analysis of stakeholder support for crowd logistics, by applying a multi-actor multi-criteria analysis or MAMCA. The findings indicate that current platform use results in higher external transport costs and thus a higher environmental impact, when compared to traditional parcel delivery. Although the concept receives support from the main stakeholders, societal objectives are not met. A critical role in improving crowd logistics' impact is reserved for the platform provider, who can adjust the platform operation and incentivisation to steer efficient vehicle use. Future research efforts can be allocated to other types of crowd logistics platforms and non-urban application of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]