Urban freight challenges and sustainable city logistics: insights from a systematic literature review

Purpose: This chapter offers an objective and comprehensive evaluation of the challenges of urban freight and city logistics exacerbated by accelerated urbanisation, e-commerce and environmental issues and proposes solutions for sustainable urban freight city logistics. Design/methodology/approach: The study is a systematic literature review (SLR) following the PRISMA guidelines for transparency and reproducibility. A systematic search conducted in the four main databases (Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest and DOAJ) included peer-reviewed publications in English between 2019 and 2025. It used controlled vocabulary and free-text terms to capture all aspects of urban freight, last-mile delivery, sustainable logistics, digitalisation, infrastructure, governance and environmental impacts. Eligible studies focused on operational, technological, environmental or governance aspects of urban or sustainable logistics. A structured template was used to extract data and the analysis was conducted as iterative coding and thematic synthesis. Findings: The review identifies the following common issues and solutions: traffic congestion, infrastructure problems and solution paths, last-mile delivery inefficiencies, environmental impacts and governance gaps, and solution paths related to digitalisation and governance. They are integrated in a conceptual framework for sustainable urban freight systems. Practical implications: The findings offer policy-makers, urban planners and logistics practitioners practical suggestions to achieve the objectives of sustainable, efficient and equitable urban freight systems and the journey towards smarter, greener cities. Originality/value: The chapter goes beyond summarising existing evidence from the literature as it was systematically synthesised and reproduced from four databases under a protocol developed based on the PRISMA guidelines and offers a clear, reproducible evidence synthesis and a coherent conceptual framework that connects the dots of the diverse findings about the challenges of urban freight and the sustainability solutions presented in the research.