Space is the most contested resource in the modern city. Residential buildings, shops, cycling infrastructure, public green space. They all compete for the same finite stock of urban land. Logistics, which keeps it all functioning, has historically lost that competition and been pushed to the periphery. But a growing body of practice across European cities suggests a different approach: instead of asking where logistics can go, ask when existing spaces are available and use them then.
That is the core idea behind mixed-use urban space for city logistics, and a chapter by Marion Cottet in Urban Logistics Transformation (Springer, 2026) brings together some of the most instructive experiments from across Europe to show what this looks like in practice.
Why the pressure is building
The timing matters. As cities expand low-emission zones, pedestrian areas, and cycling networks, the environmental logic is clear — but the operational consequences for logistics are significant. Fewer vehicles can enter, delivery windows shrink, and the physical infrastructure needed to transfer goods to cargo bikes or electric vehicles must be in place. Meanwhile, e-commerce continues its relentless growth, driving up delivery volumes precisely in the areas where access is being restricted. The result is a squeeze that won’t resolve itself without deliberate spatial planning.
Cottet frames this as much an opportunity as a constraint. Cities are not running out of space — they are running out of synchronisation. Loading zones sit empty at night. Parking garages are half-full during the day. Bus depots lie dormant from morning until evening. Exhibition centres host events for a fraction of the year. Each of these represents untapped logistics capacity if the right governance, partnerships, and digital tools are in place.
What actually works
The chapter walks through a well-chosen set of case studies, spanning curbside interventions, open urban space, parking lots, and underused operating facilities. A few examples stand out.
In Lyon, a simple reallocation of one traffic lane on Rue Grenette for deliveries between 9:30 and 16:30 on working days shifted 85% of loading activity onto designated space, almost eliminating double-parking; achieved with nothing more than signage and road markings. The experiment, launched in 2015, became permanent. In Paris, RATP turned empty bus depots into daytime logistics hubs: once the buses leave in the morning, vans arrive with pre-sorted parcels, which are then transferred to cargo bikes for last-mile delivery within a 3–4 kilometer radius. By nightfall, there is no trace of logistics activity. The arrangement has since been replicated across multiple depots.
In Bologna, automated shared microhubs at the edge of the city’s Limited Traffic Zone allowed competing logistics operators to drop parcels for consolidated delivery by a single last-mile provider — resulting in a reported 52% reduction in CO2 emissions for one of the participating operators. And in Lyon’s Presqu’île, the underground Cordeliers parking hub, operational since 2012, has cut 14 tonnes of CO2 annually and improved delivery productivity by 20% for one of its users, while recently expanding to include a cargo bike cooperative and a food waste collection service.
What enables success — and what undermines it
Cottet is careful not to oversell. Several experiments struggled to find viable business models, and coordination costs are real. The chapter is honest about recurring failure modes: insufficient parcel volumes, timing mismatches between operators, private cars occupying loading zones, and the different administrative rhythms of public and private partners.
What consistently distinguishes the cases that scaled from those that stalled comes down to a few factors: regulatory pressure (a low-emission zone that actually forces operators to change behaviour), public land made available through transparent tendering, proper physical conditions (ground-floor access, adequate dimensions, basic worker amenities), and genuine iterative collaboration between stakeholders who invested in trust before they invested in infrastructure.
The broader lesson is structural. Logistics should not be planned around what space is available after everything else is decided. It should be treated as a spatial function in its own right, integrated from the earliest stages of urban planning; not as an afterthought, but as a design condition.
Based on: Cottet, M., “Mixed Use of Urban Space for City Logistics,” in Urban Logistics Transformation (Springer, 2026).