The previous issue of Logistyka presented part 1 – Introduction to ecologistics, which included, among other things, an account of the narrowing of the field of ecologistics. Ecologistics is not merely a sanitation problem and a bundle of waste management processes, although environmental sanitation, understood as care for its municipal hygiene, and waste logistics belong to the fundamental issues of environmental management. Referring ecology only to the waste disposal logistics process means dealing with an “end-of-pipe” problem, i.e., focusing on the end of a process that is conditioned by appropriate decisions throughout the entire logistics chain.
In the tasks of urban ecologistics, unfortunately, only such shaping of logistics processes (transport, warehousing and storage, production, disposal) and their management are perceived as minimizing harmful emissions of exhaust gases, noise, and vibrations into the environment, which is also intended to determine the ecological orientation of the logistics concept in the city [2]. Such delimitations leave outside of ecologistics numerous fields of its interactive bond with the environment, especially those significant in areas of high concentration of forces and resources, i.e., in cities and their urbanized surroundings.
Below, an attempt has been made to synthetically outline the actual content and scale of the problem, although it has been concentrated in accordance with the title of the work.
Basic concepts and issues of problem identification
1. The urban directive of the city’s function, synthetically formulated in the Athens Charter – a document of the IV International Congress of Modern Architecture in Athens in 1933, reads:
city = housing + work + recreation + municipal services + communication.
The interdependence of these factors and the levels of their functional quality determine the image of the city, including its marketing attractiveness for residents, the economy, and the environment. The contemporary role of controlling these factors to ensure the city conditions for sustainable development is imposed on urban logistics.
2. Urban logistics in the classical convention (of movements in the street network) is
• logical spatio-temporal ordering of the flow, especially through the central area of the city and the agglomeration, of various types and intensities of individual passenger car traffic, delivery, waste collection, and often also transit traffic, as well as public transport means (buses and trams, in rare cases trolleybuses) operating on the street network
• formulation of assumptions for the optimization of the city system in terms of planning, controlling, and supervising all processes occurring in this system that are significantly movement-conditioned, in economic, ecological, technological, and social dimensions.
3. Urban logistics in the systemic convention is
• logical global shaping of the human urban economic space along with adherence to the principles of minimizing logistics expenditures in its composition and operation, characterized by the fact that it is essentially a logical-semantic emanation of the general system theory, determining the set of elements of the city’s infrastructure and superstructure and the urbanized cultural environment interacting with them, as well as the logistics relations between these elements and their physical and functional properties, often concurrent and process-wise metalogistic or even macrologistic
• strategic and operational management of the city as a system, with all its internal and external conditions (most generally visible in a SWOT analysis), in assumptions and implementation leading to the optimization of the effects of the service function of logistics in the civilizational development of the city and its interactive environment, while simultaneously proving that logistics is also a stimulator of the dynamics and quality of this development.
4. Urban logistics in the ecological convention is
• reference to urban space of the principles and standards of ecological logistics, i.e., ecologistics, which generally constitutes the problem of ecologizing the management of human economic space, its cultural composition tailored to the needs of quality of life, and infrastructure according to the directives of humanizing the environment of existence, science, work, and recreation
• urban ecologistics meaning the ecologization of all logistics processes in the management of the city’s infrastructure and superstructure and the environment interacting with it, and thus a specific perception and adherence to the required standards of environmental protection and public safety, while maintaining desired quality and economy norms, also understood as a method of designing and implementing supply chain management, respecting the economic rationale of minimizing ecological nuisance and desired environmental protection standards in all links of this chain, delimited by appropriate infrastructure and superstructure.
The article comes from the journal “Logistyka” 2002/6.