Public and Public-Private Cooperation in Building Resilient Urban Logistics: The Case of “La Chapelle International, Paris”

Introduction

According to 100resilientcities.org, « resilient cities develop seven qualities that allow them to withstand, respond to and adapt more readily to shocks and stresses: they are reflective, resourceful, robust, redundant, flexible, inclusive and integrated ». It can thus be inferred that urban logistics contribute to making cities resilient by combining these qualities. In a context where cars and trucks are widely used, resourcefulness calls for smarter transport modes, using alternative energy to fossil fuels. Robustness suggests that the system should be properly conceived and properly managed to prevent congestion. Offering alternative solutions to traditional road transport also provides redundancy and flexibility as it gives the possibility to users to better adapt to disruption and changing circumstances. Inclusiveness and integration, which aim at bringing together city dwellers and various institutions, may be better obtained by using a variety of institutional tools such as cooperation between public players and public-private partnerships. In this chapter, by emphasising the contribution of partnerships to the development of alternative urban freight transport modes, we clarify how resilient cities can emerge.

Various public welfare obligations such as improving transport patterns and reducing pollution, engages public entities into the promotion of cleaner alternatives for freight transport and sponsoring a radical transformation of ongoing behaviours. The development of intermodal urban freight logistics, including inbound and outbound flows, is however particularly complex (Browne et al., 2004). Urban freight logistics are normally mainly operated by private actors and involve a wide variety of supply and demand participants including freight and logistics companies, forwarding agents, shippers, loaders, service companies, road and traffic authorities, government, and those living and working in urban areas (Browne et al., 2004). Goods flows are also heterogeneous (Ogden, 1992, Dablanc, 2007) and have become a major issue with the advent of web-based sales that multiply last kilometre small sized deliveries (Morganti et al. 2014). The scale of transport operations also necessitates public authorities to work on a larger scale than just the city itself. Inter-local or cross-regional levels would be more relevant. While authorities control and improve traffic flows by setting up delivery times, reducing speed, prohibiting given truck sizes, motorizations or energies within the town, these remain insufficient as attitudes evolve only slowly and fossil fuel energy is still widely used. Moreover, increasing regulation and constraints on existing solutions without providing alternative offers may disorganize economic activities and create legitimate discontent. Promoting resilient urban logistics therefore requires that public authorities provide newly designed infrastructures and engage into innovative projects on a much larger scale than before. Besides being complex in terms of ordinary management, such projects also need to induce effective behavioural change on the part of transport users.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the cooperative challenges that lie behind the establishment of an intermodal infrastructure designed as an alternative to traditional urban distribution.

Although many authors argue that urban logistics management requires integration at an inter-local level, there is not much work on how and why such inter-local cooperation should be organized. While there are some publications on public-private partnerships in relation to urban logistics (Browne et al., 2004), there are few contributions related to cooperation among public players. In this chapter, we rely on current work in contract theory, cooperation between public entities and public-private partnerships to highlight the importance of cooperation among public actors in urban freight logistics development. Public cooperation is viewed as a prior condition to the creation of new infrastructures and the development of public-private partnerships. It enables us to build a consistent framework to understand how public and private actors articulate resources to develop new intermodal infrastructures. We then confront this framework to our case analysis of the Paris “La Chapelle International” project of intermodal transport. As a result, we conclude how cooperation could provide large cities with resilient urban logistics.