How do you organize sustainable last-mile delivery in a dense city center? Not from behind a desk, argue Maja Kiba-Janiak and colleagues in a paper (City Logistics 2025). They report on a co-creation process in the New Center of Warsaw (NCW), where the city, businesses, couriers, residents and international experts jointly developed solutions for zero-emission city logistics.
The process
Between June and December 2024, the team ran a structured process: expert panels with international academics and organizations (including C40, ALICE and several Dutch institutions), workshops with local government, couriers, e-platforms and retailers, surveys among 100 businesses and 100 residents, and focus groups with receivers and couriers. The distinction the authors draw is useful: stakeholders who actively engage in co-creation become actors — the rest remain bystanders.
The findings
The challenges are familiar. Two-thirds of businesses lack unloading space on their premises, so delivery vehicles block parking spaces and pavements. Most deliveries happen between 8 and 10 a.m.; outside the official time windows of 6–8 and 10–12. Enforcement puts drivers between a rock and a hard place: illegal stopping or late delivery. And the city itself lacks a freight strategy, with logistics tasks scattered across the municipal organization.
Five priorities emerged: a single freight coordinator within the city administration, incentives for cargo bikes, a microhub near the NCW, a Freight Quality Partnership, and smart loading zones managed digitally. Notably, the top priority was not infrastructure but governance: reorganizing the city’s own structure.
The sobering part
Here it gets interesting. The workshop enthusiasm for microhubs and cargo bikes evaporated in the survey: 83 of 100 businesses are unwilling or unable to switch. But all eight companies already delivering by electric vehicle were open to it; experience breeds willingness. Resistance was concentrated among businesses that organize deliveries themselves and among participants who feared microhubs would “disfigure” the streetscape. Once shown concretely where and how such facilities would be built, opposition softened.
The lessons
Co-creation works, but it demands more than a few workshops: a permanent stakeholder platform, education (many residents don’t speak the language of city logistics), communication beyond social media, and crucially visible follow-through. Nothing kills participation faster than ideas that vanish into a drawer.
For cities working on zero-emission zones, Warsaw offers a mirror: the technology is the easy part. Organizing the conversation, and your own town hall, is the real work.
Source: Kiba-Janiak et al., Transportation Research Procedia 98 (2026) 115–122, open access.