Cargo mobilities by bike: urban deliveries and the logics of logistics

Cycle logistics services have re-emerged across Europe in response to urban and environmental challenges and as a sustainable solution for delivering goods. While most studies approach cycle logistics through optimisation and substitution perspectives, this paper offers a critical analysis of how cycle logistics practices navigate tensions between logics of logistical circulation and embodied mobilities. Drawing on interviews with cycle logistics companies and courier services in Malmö (Sweden), we explore how cycle logistics practices are shaped by bicycles as technology, urban infrastructure, organisational intentions, and embodied labour. Placing our work within the debates concerning critical logistics, mobilities, autonomobility and vélomobility, we conceptualise cycle logistics as a site where circulation, embodiment, and socio-technical power relations are negotiated. We show that cycle logistics practices articulate different and sometimes competing logics of efficiency, situated service and autonomy, which shape whether cargo cycling reproduces, adapts, or unsettles dominant automobility and logistical regimes. Ultimately, this paper expands the conceptual boundaries of vélomobility by integrating commercial cargo cycling and contributes new insights into the political economy and ontologies of mobilities.