Impacts of city logistics initiatives: a systematic literature review

The multidisciplinary nature of City Logistics (CL) and evolving technological and organizational models make the state of the art fragmented. This work proposes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to uncover trends and gaps in CL initiatives focusing on impacts. A predefined set of keywords is used to search Scopus, considering papers published before 2024, and backward and forward snowballing are carried out. The resulting corpus is analysed to identify major CL initiatives and their impacts, while the initiatives are classified according to the Avoid-Shift-Improve (ASI) framework to clarify their intervention approaches. Results show that economic impacts are less studied than operational ones, partly because of difficulties in collecting and sharing sensitive economic information. In addition, there is a need to understand the economic and social potential of recent initiatives, such as drones and autonomous vehicles, which will become clearer with wider adoption. Logistics packaging innovations require further research due to increasing waste generated by e-commerce and the potential of initiatives like the Physical Internet and delivery robots. By explicitly considering trade-offs among impacts, the analysis moves beyond validating individual effects and supports the anticipation of recurrent tensions associated with different initiatives. This work encourages further research on CL initiatives by highlighting mature and underexplored solutions, considering the evolving nature of urban logistics driven by changing habits and sustainability awareness. Moreover, it offers stakeholders a comprehensive review of the existing initiatives to guide future investments and highlights the need for fully informed CL processes based on digital technologies.