CO4HUB

A substantial share of car traffic in cities is caused by the transportation of goods. With the 15-minute city concept, this problem even worsens. Therefore, holistic approaches are necessary that safeguard the supply of urban citizens with important goods and services while reducing the negative consequences of urban logistics on their quality of living. One such approach is urban logistics hubs (ULHs). ULHs can reduce the negative impact of urban logistics by increasing transport capacity utilization, and enabling the usage of ecologically sustainable means of transportation. Despite their obvious potential, previous ULH projects failed to achieve an actual positive impact, because they stressed technical issues in setting up projects in single regions. However, the major problems that surfaced in these projects are not technical, but related to the overall systems in which ULHs operate: These projects failed to create conditions (i.e., organizational setups, business models and public policy regimes) that incentivize actors to participate. These problems necessitate systemic solutions that can only be developed in a transnational, transdisciplinary project such as CO4HUB. In this project, our goal is to develop systemic sustainable ULH solutions across three core topics [(1) Organizational Setups, (2) Business Models and (3) Public Policy] based on two types of concepts [(a) Physical Concepts and (b) Digital Concepts].