ABSTRACT
Up to recently, academic geography did not pay much attention to logistics and freight transportation, as the focus was mainly on passengers and individual mobility issues. Textbooks on urban or general transport geography, like those edited by Hanson (2005), Taaffe et al. (1996) or Hoyle and Knowles (1998), have raised more freight related questions than they did in earlier editions, particularly with regard to trade and ports. The latter is probably the one logistics subject that received most reference from academic geography. Other core spatial implications of distribution and logistics have been directly addressed in geography by few authors who developed an insight into wholesale activities and their geographical distribution (Glasmeier 1992; McKinnon 1983, 1988; Riemers 1998; Vance 1970). Following the nature of retailing as an originally distributive activity, geographic research on retail and consumption is of interest in the logistics context too. However, retail geography does not pay much attention to distribution changes (Marsden and Wrigley 1996), although the physical movement of goods appears to be one of the costliest parts of retail activities (Christopherson 2001).
