Urban Distribution Centers and Food Logistics
The urban distribution of goods is an important activity to maintain commercial and productive activity and to supply the population (BESTUFS, 2007). Efficient transportation and distribution systems are important to improve a city’s competitiveness, due to the revenue it generates, such as job creation (Sanz et al., 2013). One of the most popular research and application issues is that of the development and analysis of urban logistics platforms (Boudouin, 2006; Gonzalez-Feliu et al., 2014; Taniguchi, 2015; Waller, 2016).
From the various types of urban logistics platforms (Boudouin et al., 2014), urban distribution centers (UDC) remain the most studied category. Also called urban consolidation centers (UCCs) and city distribution centers (CDC), the various works refer to slightly different notions having all in common the following elements: UDC are platforms that allow the consolidation and distribution of goods directed to urban zones (of different extension), in an aim of sustainability improvement of urban goods transport. UDCs bring diverse types of products together and have become a solution to reducing the logistical impact of food in cities (Russo et al., 2013). There are monocentric and polycentric cities (Anas et al., 1998) that determine the location, the number of centers, and the combination of products. Moreover, UDC can be mono-user and multi-user (Ville et al., 2013), have a city or zonal influence area (Gonzalez-Feliu et al., 2014), deal with general or specific transport (BESTUFS, 2007) or present different degrees of collaboration (Janjevic et al., 2016), among others.Moreover, and with the increase of interest for food logistics in urban areas, the notion of food hub (considered as a collaborative structure among producers and logistics stakeholders related to food value chain) are starting to be developed (Palacios-Argüello et al., 2017). Morganti and Gonzalez-Feliu (2015) show the interactions between Food Hubs and urban logistics platforms, identifying the UDC as one of the most suitable common points. Therefore, the deployment of food-based UDC became a popular subject (Morganti and Gonzalez-Feliu, 2015), mainly in Latin America (Palacios-Argüello and Gonzalez-Feliu, 2016; Palacios Argüello et al., 2017). Most food-based UDC are nowadays related to wholesale produce market and marketplace distribution. However, they deal with either small cities (Morganti, 2011) or to zones of big cities (Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2006).
Localizing the facilities—the UDCs—is the process of choosing a geographical location among several to conduct operations. The fields of location theory and modeling have their roots in the works developed by Weber, Hotelling, Christaller, and Losch, which remains an active field of knowledge (Sanabria et al., 2016). In a Metropolis like Lima, where food distribution needs to be addressed in a systemic way, it is important then to analyze the localization patterns of potential UDCs and link them to the food distribution chains. But to do this, it is necessary to first know the city context. Therefore we present below the main background and context issues for the city of Lima and the urban food systems related to urban supply.