Transition Governance for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems : Exploring Small and Medium-Sized Cities

Urban freight systems play an indispensable role in contemporary cities. By enabling the continuous flow of goods, they support economic activity and contribute to urban prosperity. At the same time, these activities generate substantial negative externalities, including emissions, noise, congestion and increasing pressures on urban space. As freight activities grow, their impacts intensify, underscoring the need to understand how urban freight systems can be transitioned toward sustainability. Urban freight systems are complex socio-technical systems embedded in broader societal contexts. Transitions of such systems are characterized by long-term, multi-actor processes involving the co-evolution of interdependent factors. These processes challenge established practices, vested interests and structures, while simultaneously requiring actors to align with a normative direction of development. Existing knowledge about transitions in urban freight remains fragmented, with limited understanding of how system dimensions, governance arrangements and contextual factors interact in shaping transitions. This thesis addresses these gaps by exploring how transitions in urban freight systems are affected by different factors, such as city organizations’ governance, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized cities, an understudied but important context.The thesis is based on four studies, three qualitative case studies of small and medium-sized cities and one systematic literature review. Together, these studies explore barriers to transitions, how city administrations in small and medium-sized cities govern their urban freight systems from a transition perspective and how city administrations’ resources and governance activities affect their capability to govern these transitions.The research develops a socio-technical transition lens for urban freight systems, synthesizes and reconceptualizes previously isolated barriers to change as interconnected stabilizing factors within a complex system, and generates new ...