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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]

In the era of economic globalization and the e-commerce boom, the demand for urban logistics has been rapidly growing in terms of both scale and intensity. The spatial clustering of logistics facilities and their associated environmental consequences has caused growing concern. This study analyzes the spatial evolution of logistics facilities and establishes a series of regression models to explore the driving factors of logistics facility location choice using a high-resolution grid-based data set. The results show that as the urban highway network gets improved, transportation costs are more balanced across space. Therefore, the distribution of logistics facilities is less regionally constrained and more widely located in space. The spatial evolution of logistics facilities was driven not only by demand of land uses and industries but also by transport supply and urban structure. Land use planning including the planning of industrial parks is among the important driving forces affecting the spatial location of logistics facilities, although the effects vary across types of logistics facilities. This study aims to provide a sustainable development-oriented policy path for regional development by proposing an analytical framework that reconsiders spatial location choice factors as a means of controlling logistics environmental negative externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]