Working Paper SIET 2012 Urban supply chains and transportation policies 1 Romeo Danielis*°, Elena Maggi**, Lucia Rotaris*, Eva Valeri* *University of Trieste, Italy, **University of Molise, Italy, °corresponding author: danielis@units.it Abstract For a firm the logistics challenge consists in the integrated planning, control, realization and monitoring of all internal and network-wide material, part and product flows, including the necessary information flows, for the purpose of satisfying customer needs and realizing a profit. For a system of firms, the term supply chain is used to identify a system of activities, people, technologies, information and resources targeted at transferring a product or a service along the entire chain: from the provider of raw materials to the end customer. As most end-consumers are located in urban areas, a supply chain does include a distribution system to deliver the goods in that complex environment that is a town or a city. Since supply chain decisions are typically taken in order to achieve commercial efficiency disregarding wider environmental objectives, city authorities need to reconcile the conflict between the private objectives and the social ones. The paper has tried to contribute to the existing literature on this topic by: a) characterizing the urban supply chains (USCs); b) discussing how a USC can be modelled, which role do actors play and how the coordination issue can be handled; c) showing how transport decisions, in particular whether to use own- account or third-party transport operators, are dealt within each USC and by each actor; d) and analysing how USCs are affected by the many proposed freight transport policies. 1 This research was supported by the University of Trieste grant “Finanziamento per Ricercatori di Ateneo”.