The Development of City Logistics and Urban Freight Terms and their Research Directions

The research and development efforts in city logistics have significantly increased in the last few years. However, another term; urban freight, with similar aspects, was also present in the literature. This made the use of the two terms blurry and poorly defined, especially by combining the two terms and using the “urban logistics” term in some literature. For the previously mentioned reasons, we present the differences in these two terms through a bibliometric analysis performed with VOSviewer. We analysed the development of city logistics and urban freight in the literature over the years. We explored the keywords used most frequently, the geographical distribution of the collected literature, and their main research areas to define the differences and similarities between the two observed terms. In the second part of the study, we present the practical side of the topic by reviewing the selected international case studies and experiments in city logistics and urban freight. This revision resulted in several conclusions regarding the nature of these developments, especially the need for a substantial restructuring of the supply chain operations and coordination, as well as the common elements of the pilot cases and future research directions.