Rerouting the Last-Mile:Contested Spatialities and Mobilities of Urban Logistics Innovation

As the logistics sector shifts toward sustainability, innovations in last-mile delivery are increasingly driven by vehicle electrification and the automation of routing, tracking, and management systems involving artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies are widely promoted for their potential to reduce CO₂ emissions, lower fuel consumption, shorten travel distances, and cut operational costs. Yet, they also intensify freight traffic in and around cities and increase workloads for logistics workers in response to growing consumer demand. Such adverse effects not only undermine the promised sustainability gains of these innovations, but also generate spatial conflicts in dense urban environments and exacerbate safety risks for logistics labor. Addressing these challenges requires an understanding of how workers navigate new vehicles and digital technologies in the last mile – not simply as the final step of a delivery process but as an active, constraining socio-material space shaped by multiple layers of regulation and policy. Drawing on critical geography and mobilities scholarship, this dissertation examines how workers interact with logistics innovations, and, in doing so, shape the spatialities and mobilities of last-mile delivery. Across case studies in South Korea and the Netherlands, the chapters illustrate how urban logistics innovations are selected, adapted and contested by workers, exposing tensions between machinic order and the physical realities of the last mile. While both countries have experienced sustained growth in last-mile delivery alongside the expansion of e-commerce, their trajectories differ; South Korea has prioritized automation for rapid delivery, whereas the Netherlands has invested heavily in electrification. Challenging dominant narratives that reduce logistics to speed, optimization, and algorithmic control, this dissertation demonstrates how workers develop embodied and tacit knowledge as they navigate complex and dynamic urban environments. Following the introductory chapter, the thesis comprises three empirical chapters that foreground the perspectives of diverse logistics workers, including delivery drivers as well as managers in warehouses and at headquarters. Using qualitative methods, the study examines their adaptive strategies in response to newly introduced technologies and their ongoing negotiations between efficiency and sustainability. Drawing on content analysis and 26 interviews with employees of PostNL – the largest logistics service provider in the Netherlands – the dissertation broadens socio-spatial understandings of sustainable logistics by centering workers’ labor and mobility practices, particularly within urban contexts. Chapter 2 examines how AI shapes the driving behavior of food delivery riders on motorcycles, based on a content analysis of 175 Korean newspaper articles. It reveals the contested spatialities of platform labor under algorithmic management, in which riders’ autonomy to choose tasks, routes and speeds is significantly constrained. An algorithmic feedback loop that rewards speed and efficiency over traffic safety intensifies time pressure, encouraging unsafe driving and traffic violations. By highlighting the mobile and embodied implications of profit-driven mobilities, this study extends debates on AI urbanism. Chapter 3 situates freight transport within the broader sustainable mobility transition by examining the electrification of freight fleets. Drawing on interviews around PostNL’s operational strategies in Dutch Zero-Emission Zones (ZEZs), it highlights the socio-spatial benefits of using light electric freight vehicles (LEFVs), including reduced traffic congestion and improved flows for cyclists and pedestrians, alongside its more widely recognized environmental and economic gains. It argues that logistics flows should be understood not merely as operational or technological matters, but as critical components in spatial planning and governance. Chapter 4 introduces the concept of logistical assemblage to capture how logistics innovations are enacted in practice – not as the execution of planned scenarios or simulation models, but through workers’ flexibility and creativity in responding to the unsettled and unpredictable realities of the last mile. Centering PostNL workers’ adaptive capacities and embodied knowledge, the chapter examines how they negotiate new technologies, tightening environmental regulations, fluctuating delivery demands, and the material constraints of dense urban environments. It emphasizes that these interactions between human and non-human elements around the sustainable last mile not only maintain daily operations but also underscore the importance of workers’ wellbeing and experience in shaping viable paths toward sustainable logistics. This dissertation concludes that emerging technologies such as AI and light electric freight vehicles fundamentally reshape the daily operations and mobility practices of logistics workers, with significant societal implications alongside environmental and economic effects. By centering workers as key actors who negotiate the spatial constraints of the last mile with digitally configured route-planning systems, the research reveals the contested spatialities and mobilities produced by urban logistics innovations. In doing so, it demonstrates how last-mile delivery is continuously shaped through embodied practices that unfold across diverse urban spaces and regulatory contexts. The dissertation makes three main contributions. First, by integrating insights from critical geography and mobilities scholarship, it foregrounds logistics workers’ experiences to trace how delivery routes, and other locations such as warehouses are relationally connected in the making of sustainable logistics. Challenging techno-optimistic approaches in operations management, it highlights the role of workers and situated expertise in advancing sustainable urban logistics. Second, rather than treating the last mile solely as a logistical process or a site of optimization, the dissertation conceptualizes it as a contested socio-material space in which workers engage with urban policy, vehicle technologies and algorithmic management through mobile labor. This framing provides a more nuanced understanding of how sustainable logistics is enacted, negotiated, and sometimes resisted in everyday practice, advancing an approach to studying delivery labor and its mobilities in situ and in motion. Third, the dissertation introduces the concept of the logistical assemblage to broaden understandings of delivery labor – not merely as task execution, but as the exercise of embodied and spatially embedded expertise along routes. In doing so, it contributes to critical geography and mobilities literature by illustrating the heterogeneous and contested experiences of freight flows, rather than reducing logistics to problems of optimization alone. Overall, this thesis’s focus on the urban and digital dimensions of the last mile contributes to key societal and academic debates at the intersection of mobilities, sustainability, and AI in cities.