The COVID-19 pandemic has been and still is the cause of major disruptions to urban mobility systems worldwide. This is of course also true for urban logistics, a sector that is often complex to navigate for city authorities. However, cities are not new to the challenges of dealing with uncertainties and unexpected developments, and the pandemic has also shown the capabilities of cities to re-think processes and structures and adapt to mutating circumstances at a fast pace.

With the pandemic, the concept of “resilience” becomes a MUST

During the last workshop of the Eurocities Mobility Forum, we deep-dived into the topic of resilient planning, looking at techniques and tools to improve the capacity of cities to become more adaptive and agile in their planning process, with a specific focus on Urban Logistics.

The workshop was opened by Fernando Liesa, Secretary-General of ALICE (Alliance for Logistics Innovation through Collaboration in Europe). Fernando walked us through some of the key ingredients that would help cities cope with uncertainties – what we like to call “planning for the unplannable”:

• increase “skills, capabilities and knowledge” in city administrations, in other words raising awareness about the issues, building a knowledge base on urban logistics among practitioners and building capacity in cities on a sector that still today is often neglected or overlooked.
• identify “silent versus visible problems”, some issues are evident and is obviously essential to tackle them, but some might slip under the radar if there are not proper monitoring processes in place.
• “collaboration, collaboration, collaboration”, especially in a sector like urban logistics, problems and uncertainties cannot be tackled without investing in building relationships among the different stakeholders involved. This also emerged clearly from our discussions during the workshop.

Check the full presentation here.

What can cities do then?

Our second speaker, Ward Rauws, Associate Professor in Spatial Planning at the University of Groningen, then moved to the core of the issue “Building adaptivity in urban logistic plans”.

Ward made it clear, if you had to bring home something from the workshop, these would be his three key messages:

1. Urban logistics is a highly dynamic sector that generates uncertainties for city planners
2. Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans (SULPs) that are able to deal with change need adaptive capacity
3. Use a variety of adaptive actions: prepared in advance + responsively deployed

Check the full presentation here.

Last but not least, we heard from Mechelen – one of the ULaaDS Lighthouse cities – and Madrid, which respectively presented in the case of Mechelen how they are reshaping last-mile deliveries thanks to cooperation with the national post operator (boost), and EMT Madrid which presented how Digital Twins can support cities in scenario planning with the specific examples coming from the EU funded project LEAD.

The full presentations are available here: Mechelen & EMT Madrid.

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This workshop was co-organised by ULaaDS partners Eurocities, Bax & Company and the University of Groningen as part of the 2021 Eurocities Mobility Forum, in collaboration with ALICE and the LEAD project. If you missed the session, click the button below to watch the recording!