Performant planning and integration of Urban Logistics Spaces (ULS) in logistics networks are key to optimising the circulation of goods in cities. During the last three decades, several documents on ULS have been published, most of them proposing different methodologies for the design and location of Urban Distribution Centres (UDC). Until now, there is no international consensus on the definitions of ULS nor any apparent uniform classification. In this paper, a systematic literature review on ULS is presented. The objective is to identify their characteristics, criteria, and particularities to propose a unified taxonomy. By searching the papers from 1990 to 2019, a total of 216 publications were selected and classified. This review finds predominant orientation towards UDCs, considering high rotation storage, with specialised ULS being less studied. A general typology of ULS is proposed, adaptive to any urban context. Lines for future research are proposed to help both practitioners and scholars to provide insights into all types of ULS.

The main concern in city logistics is the need to optimize the movement of goods in urban contexts, and to minimize the multiple costs inherent in logistics operations. Inspired by an application in a medium-sized city in Latin America, this paper develops a bi-objective mixed linear integer programming (MILP) model to locate different types of urban logistics spaces (ULS) for the configuration of a two-echelon urban distribution system. The objective functions seek to minimize the costs associated with distance traveled and relocation, in addition to the costs of violation of time windows. This model considers heterogeneous transport, speed assignment, and time windows. For experimental evaluation, two operational scenarios are considered, and Pareto frontiers are obtained to identify the efficient non-dominated solutions to select the most feasible ones from such a set. A case study of a distribution company of goods for supermarkets in the city of Barranquilla, Colombia, is also used to validate the proposed model. These solutions allow decision-makers to define the configuration of ULS networks for urban product delivery.