Good(s) planning in cities — A review of urban planning scholarship on large freight generators

Urban freight transportation is both a traffic concern and a spatial issue. Yet within urban planning, freight remains overlooked. To advance the interface between urban planning and urban freight, it is important to understand how planning scholarship approaches urban developments with significant freight implications. Are these implications accounted for and if so, in what way? To this end, we systematically reviewed ten leading urban planning journals, using as a diagnostic lens the concept of ‘large freight generators’, i.e., facilities that produce and attract a large number of freight trips. Our findings reveal that the spatial and temporal dimensions of freight operations are rarely treated as explicit objects of urban governance. Planning should more explicitly account for the moving, storing, and handling of goods within cities, anticipating rather than merely accommodating freight demand. When freight is overlooked, facilities are displaced to peripheral areas and operations spill excessively into streets and curbs, exacerbating congestion and conflicts, and concentrating environmental externalities. In response, we outline a planner-facing research agenda that calls for systematic consideration of freight operations across space and time and deliberate integration of goods and services, especially in new residential neighborhood developments.