Urban microhubs, distribution centers within the city, respond to an increasingly long last mile.

In cities like Barcelona, many logistics centers have moved outside the urban nucleus in recent decades. The soil is cheaper, but the operation is complicated: more distance to the final customer and more vehicles entering the city.

And this is added to the pressure of e-commerce. In Spain, one in five purchases is already made online, according to the INE, and sales have multiplied by 34 since 2005. The volume of packages continues to grow and this increase is concentrated, above all, in the final stretch.
This explains why logistics already generates up to 20% of urban traffic, according to Deloitte.

Microhubs are a key piece to order the last mile. They act as intermediate points: they receive orders in large vehicles and redistribute them on short routes, often by bicycle, as companies like Cargobici already do in Barcelona.

They have two clear uses. They feed collection points – such as lockers or shops – and serve as the origin of home deliveries. In dense areas, they reduce the presence of vans because they allow the distribution to be concentrated in fewer and lighter vehicles.

In Barcelona, the challenge is to turn these logistics microcentres into a large-scale bet. This requires public involvement and real use by operators. Until 2024 there was an experience with 43 microhubs, 16 of them in car parks, but the initiative was not consolidated.

The contrast is seen in Paris, where several operators work with microhubs within the city and are part of the daily operations of the distribution. A 2010 study, The impacts of logistics sprawl, concluded that the additional emissions generated by the dispersion of logistics outside the city between 1974 and 2008 were 30 times higher than the savings achieved with the urban logistics centers promoted by the City Council. Everything points to the fact that the greater presence of microhubs in recent years has helped to correct part of the problem.

Experts do not always agree on how to optimize the last mile, but they do agree on an idea: intermediate spaces are needed within the city. Microhubs have a long history in urban logistics.