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

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. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.