E-commerce-related last-mile logistics have a great impact on cities. Recent years have seen sustained growth in e-commerce in most developed countries, a trend that has only been reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The perceived impact of this phenomenon varies depending upon the perspective of the players involved: individual members of the public, companies, or the public administrations. Tackling the issue from these perspectives, the goal of this article is to explore the kinds of impact this phenomenon has and will have. We use as the basis for their classification the so-called triple bottom line (TBL) of sustainability, encompassing people, planet, and profit; we complement this with the impact classification used by the European Science Foundation’s impact assessment working group. After performing a systematic review of the literature following PRISMA guidelines, our results show that, albeit to different degrees, the four impact dimensions analyzed (economic, social, environmental, and technological) have only received incipient coverage in the existing literature. Given its ever-growing importance, we believe that greater attention needs to be paid to this phenomenon, especially with regard to those aspects having the greatest impact upon urban systems and the different stakeholders involved. Only in this way can the public policies needed to mitigate these externalities be properly implemented.

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The rise of the platform economy is rapidly changing the traditional economic and business environment. The phenomenon is being widely studied in academia, although so far this has taken a general approach. Lack of precise data and differences in markets hinder more specific analyses that could illustrate the real impact of these trends. This chapter offers an exploratory study of the impact of food-delivery platforms on urban logistics. The study is based on data scraped from the app of the Barcelona-based Glovo, consisting of affiliated restaurants, delivery times, and cost of the delivery. The physical premises identified for the restaurants were georeferenced to study how they are spread and clustered in the city. Restaurants were also matched to their parent companies to obtain economic data from the specialist SABI database. The research questions aim to provide understanding of what types of restaurants have joined the platform, how this has affected their annual turnover, where their physical premises are located, and how the consumer's location affects the service.

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