Land-use planning for a more sustainable urban freight

This chapter questions the use of city and regional spatial planning in urban freight policies. It builds on the case study of France, with a focus on Paris. It then draws conclusions and proposes general directions for conceptual guidelines to better integrate logistics facilities into urban spatial planning and building permitting. This issue is important as the location of warehouses is one of the main drivers of the generation of freight trips in an urban region and is easier to change within the status quo. Freight mobility is responsible for an increasing share of emissions (air and noise) as well as congestion. Also, logistics facilities represent key infrastructures for the proper functioning of urban areas, as further evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the future, cities and regional governments will be increasingly called upon to help provide appropriate conditions for efficient logistics activities. Paris is an interesting case for logistics spatial planning: at the municipal, metropolitan and regional levels, zoning plans now integrate the need for logistics facilities. These plans achieve various degrees of success but provide valuable lessons the most important being that the public and private sectors both need to optimize warehouse locations and distribution networks so as to improve the logistics system performance. Both must give explicit consideration to the environmental impacts and quality-of-life concerns frequently reported by the communities most directly affected by the location and operation of supply chains. Freight and logistics planning must therefore become an integral part of land-use planning.