Understanding Financial Viability of Urban Consolidation Centres: Regent Street (London), Bristol/Bath & Nijmegen

Abstract

The concept of an urban consolidation centre (UCC) has been extensively researched. Despite the potential positive environmental and social impact, the main obstacle remains the lack of a sustainable business model. The goal of this paper is to understand how to organize UCC viability as a concept providing environmental and social benefits while at the same time providing a sustainable business model (social and logistical value propositions of multi-beneficial relations between the involved stakeholders). A research framework will be designed to analyse and evaluate financial viable UCCs. The framework consists of four main stream components, namely: organizational integration, revenue streams, key-resource provisioning and buyer-supplier relation. These four types of relations result in the so called ORKB-framework to analyse the created added value. The research framework is applied and evaluated for the following urban consolidation centres: Regent Street in London, Bristol/Bath, and BinnenStadService in Nijmegen. With the development of the framework we want to reveal some of the uniqueness for each specific situation in order to address the UCC-environment more effectively when the dynamics regarding value creation and the needs of the involved stakeholders are better understood.