Laetitia Dablanc, urban planner, research director at Gustave Eiffel University and director of the Logistics City chair: “Urban logistics is sorely lacking data”

She is a logistics researcher… Laetitia Dablanc recognizes that “ logistics is a rather unusual subject of study in the world of social sciences. Most researchers tend to focus on passenger transportation or on urban planning, but outside the warehouse context ”. She has headed the Logistics City chair since its creation in 2019 within a Gustave Eiffel University laboratory, and works to observe warehouses and freight transport with a team of around ten people and the support of four sponsors : Sogaris (which founded the chair with La Poste Immobilier), the Île-de-France Region, the Métropole du Grand Paris, and the Gustave Eiffel University Foundation. “ The idea for this chair actually arose at an Afilog cocktail event at the end of 2018! In 2023, it was renewed for a five-year period, with our sponsors committed through 2027 ”, notes Laetitia Dablanc.

Logistics City has also benefited from Laetitia Dablanc’s experience with the MetroFreight program at Metrans, the research center of the University of Southern California. “ This 10-year program involved pooling and analyzing logistics data in four major cities around the world : Paris, Seoul, Los Angeles, and New York, she explains. For example, we compared the cargo-bike market in Paris and New York, the environmental policies pursued in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, e-commerce in Seoul and Paris… We therefore worked on around 30 comparative projects, around the broader concept of ‘freight landscape.’ These methods proved useful for the Logistics City chair’s program, which, for instance, uses a database of 80 cities worldwide to conduct spatial analyses of warehouses (the Logistics City chair’s ‘Warehouse Database’) ”.

After earning her degree at Sciences Po, Laetitia Dablanc studied urban planning in the United States before completing a PhD in transportation and logistics at the École Nationale des Ponts on freight transport in major urban areas. “ Before returning to research, I worked for seven years for French cities within GART (the Association of Transport Authorities) and for the Paris Chamber of Commerce in its research department ”, she explains.

Her entire career has enabled Laetitia Dablanc to develop, with her teams, a proposed scientific program, to which sponsors subscribe in five-year cycles and whose results they review annually. “ They can withdraw from the program if it no longer suits them, but they cannot steer it or request that a publication be withdrawn, the researcher specifies. It is also important to remember that collective funding enables us to remain independent from our sponsors ”. The program on which the chair was renewed is structured around three major themes. “ First, we look at logistics real estate from the perspective of urban planners, geographers, and economists : where warehouses are located worldwide, how their locations are changing, why they are in one place rather than another, and we connect this with indicators relating to the type of city (size, density, form, and the population’s socioeconomic characteristics). We also study operational urban planning, meaning how these warehouses fit into their local area, Laetitia Dablanc lists. A second theme concerns e-commerce and changing consumer habits, observing their impacts on urban logistics. We also examine the working conditions of e-commerce platform delivery drivers and how they have evolved over the years ”. Lastly, a final area of research concerns urban logistics policies, such as France’s ZAN law or the introduction of low-emission zones, with a comparative dimension as well (low-emission zones and logistics in Europe). The question of new data sources is also central to research on public policy.

All these topics require handling enormous quantities of data, whether macroeconomic or microeconomic. “ I do not technically master that part of our work, but I am responsible for finding and hiring the people with the necessary expertise, such as the research engineer we have just recruited or even the students at the Institute of Geographical Sciences, consulting researchers or PhD candidates, explains Laetitia Dablanc. My role is to initiate projects, manage the chair’s staff, and analyze the results of the studies conducted. The issue of new data fascinates me ”. Nevertheless, the researcher believes that urban logistics is sorely lacking data, particularly on flows. “ French cities, even more so than European cities, lack knowledge; for both technical and legal reasons, they do not have sufficient control over information on the number of delivery vehicles, their format, the number of goods delivered, and so on, she observes. Yet in countries other than France, data are collected more easily. In Barcelona, Spain, for example, delivery drivers have an app they must activate when they arrive at a delivery point. This tells us how long delivery takes, where it takes place, and the quantities involved… This enables public authorities to establish assessments and models, determine the size and design of infrastructure needed for urban logistics ”, and propose benchmarking indicators.

For Laetitia Dablanc, data collection is indeed essential to address the current and future major challenges of urban logistics. “ We need it to continue decarbonizing economic activities in cities, but also to determine the best locations for hubs and warehouses in general, whether small or large, within city limits or on the urban periphery, she emphasizes. Local authorities drafting their mobility plans, local urban plans (PLU), territorial coherence plans (SCOT), and regional plans for spatial planning, sustainable development, and territorial equality (SRADDET) need it in order to develop their land consistently ”. One of the next steps Laetitia Dablanc has set herself is to study micro-mobility in urban logistics (on-foot deliveries, for example). But here too, collecting data is proving difficult...