At the WCTR conference in Toulouse, we discussed the role of city logistics in 15-minute cities. The discussion started, as it always does, with data: what do we need to know to provide the right solutions? Counting transport movements is nice. It is not sufficient.
The 15-minute city promises daily needs within a short walk or bike ride. Yet planners keep forgetting that shops, cafés, pharmacies and homes still need supply. Proximity for people means complexity for deliveries: smaller, more frequent deliveries in streets redesigned for pedestrians and cyclists, not for trucks. Without a serious freight strategy, the 15-minute city becomes a 15-minute traffic jam.
What do families and workers in the neighborhood need?
But the real blind spot sits one level deeper. We ask the wrong question. Not: how many vans enter the neighborhood? But: what do families and workers in that neighborhood need? Activities drive transport. Nursing and caring for a growing population of seniors. Construction, renovation and repair of an aging housing stock. Moving houses, maintaining installations, re-using products, eating and drinking. Every one of these activities generates logistics, and every one of these processes is about to change fundamentally with new AI technology. Those data are relevant.
Take maintenance and repair. Remote diagnostics and AI mean that a technician no longer drives to a boiler to discover which part is broken; the boiler reports it, the right part arrives at a neighborhood hub, and an experienced engineer living in the neighborhood fixes it. Take care logistics: predictive planning can bundle deliveries of medication, meals, and medical supplies instead of sending five vans to the same street.
Take the neighborhood itself as a resource: senior residents with decades of professional experience can run repair circles. Furniture swapping keeps goods in the neighborhood instead of moving them across the city twice. Social delivery: neighbors carrying parcels and groceries for neighbors. And shared parcel pick-up points turn the last meter into a community asset rather than a commercial burden, fostering more social cohesion.
Smarter cities
Smart city technology is the layer that makes this possible. If we use it for the right questions. Sensors, IoT and digital twins can show how neighborhoods actually function: which curbs are used when, where delivery peaks collide with school runs, which buildings will need maintenance next. Real-time data platforms can match supply and demand, dynamically allocate loading zones, and enable parcel pick-up, repair circles, and social delivery networks to talk to each other. But technology should serve the neighborhood, not the other way around: the goal is not a dashboard full of transport movements; it is to understand and support the daily activities of residents and workers.
Stop optimizing yesterday’s processes
This is the point too many city logistics debates miss. We keep optimizing vehicles: electric vans, cargo bikes, micro-hubs. Necessary, but it is optimizing yesterday’s processes. The bigger prize is redesigning the processes themselves: making neighborhoods partly self-sustaining and resilient, so that fewer movements are needed in the first place. What remains can then be organized cleanly and quietly: hubs at the neighborhood edge, zero-emission vehicles for the last meter, smart curb management and off-peak windows.
The agenda for researchers and policymakers is clear. Stop counting only trips. Start mapping the activities of residents and workers, with smart city technology as the measuring instrument, and ask which processes technology and social innovation will transform in the next decade. Design the 15-minute city around those future processes; and design the logistics in from day one, not bolted on afterward.
Walther Ploos van Amstel