Quick Commerce – Standorte und Standortsysteme von On-Demand Online-Lebensmittellieferdiensten in Berlin

Antonia Gergs, Lynette Lacis, Hans-Hermann Albers, Lech Suwala•View original

OverviewTechnicalshimmer voice

Start with the feeling you had in 2020 when everything tilted online. Groceries weren’t an exception; they were the proving ground. As Gergs, Lacis, Albers, and Suwala showed in their Berlin case, COVID-19 didn’t just bump demand for on-demand groceries — it accelerated a new operational form: quick commerce built on inner-city dark stores, tiny assortments, small baskets, and a sub-60-minute delivery promise. It’s e-commerce fused to last-mile innovation, and Berlin offered the perfect lab because multiple players launched fast, scaled hard, and left a very visible footprint. Methodologically, they kept it simple and tight. Two field windows — spring 2022 and spring 2023 — and a mixed-methods design that lets the built system speak. On the ground, they did Begehung inspections and Kartierung mapping. In the stack, they aligned every site to Berlin’s geographic information system backbone, drawing on ALKIS and the Geoportal for spatial precision, and layered in statistics from the Berlin-Brandenburg office and market measures from CBRE VALUE to proxy purchasing power. Then they overlaid catchments, S-Bahn Ring geometry, and neighborhood characteristics. And because you need context as well as coordinates, they ran expert interviews across city governance, platform operators, and legal and data roles. The sample was deliberately focused — Gorillas, Getir, Flink — precisely because those firms concentrated the city’s pandemic-era dynamics and made the urban logic legible. By the second wave in spring 2023, they had fifty-seven warehouses in the inventory. These are compact facilities — often two hundred to four hundred square meters and at most around a thousand — fed several times a day to keep turnover moving. From the street, many read as non-retail: darkened glass, little signage, sometimes a ramp or staging area bleeding onto sidewalk or curb. That staging is part of the operating model, which prizes speed over display. The promise is delivery in under an hour on an e-bike or e-scooter, and the catchment logic follows: roughly a three-kilometer radius, dense micro-fulfillment, and very short cycle times. Spatially, the pattern is exactly where you’d expect demand density and bike accessibility to overlap. Clusters stack inside the S-Bahn Ring, with concentrations in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Mitte, and Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, and notable activity in inner parts of Tempelhof-Schöneberg, Pankow’s Prenzlauer Berg, and Nord-Neukölln. Outside the ring, coverage thins sharply. Only four sites sit in outer-ring locations — roughly seven percent of the total — and Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Spandau have no warehouses at all. The whole thing reads like a lattice pulled tight over the urban core and left a bit slack at the edges. If you align that lattice to people, the threshold is striking. Once areas hit about two hundred fifty residents per hectare, they’re almost always inside a three-kilometer reach of at least one warehouse. Berlin’s inner city averages about one hundred seventeen residents per hectare against a citywide average of forty-two, so the dots gravitate to where the density lives. Two dense pockets buck the trend — Spandauer Altstadt and the historic core of Hellersdorf — but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. Income cuts across the map differently. The most consistently served zones are high density with mid-range household purchasing power, roughly three thousand to four thousand euros per month. The higher-income end, above about four thousand five hundred, skews peripheral and often outside the active delivery mesh, while some Gründerzeit cores with lower-to-mid purchasing power are squarely inside it. The street-level siting explains the last mile. About three-quarters of the facilities sit on major streets, which shortens dispatch times and smooths rider routing. In land-use terms, around forty percent occupy residential areas and roughly thirty-eight percent sit in mixed-use zones, almost all in ground-floor, street-facing spaces that once held pharmacies, videotheques, bank branches, or generic retail. You can feel the inversion: instead of footfall driving storefronts, logistics drives frontage. It’s quick access, not display windows, that matters. Competition in this network is as dense as the coverage. Roughly seventy-five percent of warehouses lie within one kilometer of a rival’s facility. In practice that means overlapping catchments across the S-Bahn Ring, redundant service in central districts, and razor-thin time advantages deciding who wins the order. It’s the internal logic of platform urbanism made visible. Firms don’t align to Berlin’s traditional retail hierarchy — the inner core and nested centers — so much as they optimize two objective functions: geographic coverage and travel latency. The outcome is a tightly packed, inner-city network and a set of peripheries that remain structurally underserved. What’s interesting is how that network nests inside other platform geographies. When the team overlaid dark stores on short-term rental density and startup locations, the correspondences jumped out. Mitte, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Pankow, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, and Tempelhof-Schöneberg were busy on all three layers; Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Spandau were quiet across the board. Read one way, the signal is about digitally connected, on-demand adopters. Read another, it’s about shared urban substrates: amenity-rich blocks, globalized work patterns, and a built form that tolerates rapid repurposing of ground-floor stock. The operational details feed back into the built environment. Continuous restocking and fast turnarounds push activity into public space — curbside loading, clusters of riders, battery charging — which, in turn, creates frictions with neighbors over noise, congestion, and safety. Those are local manifestations of a bigger structural change the authors point to: an internal, city-wide warehouse layer that now sits alongside suburban distribution centers and larger urban logistics hubs. Together they form a more tightly interconnected urban logistics landscape than the pre-pandemic retail grid ever needed. Zoom out a notch and the pandemic’s role becomes clearer. Demand surged in a window when venture-capital-backed platforms were primed to scale. The result in Berlin was a rapid build-out of inner-city micro-fulfillment, overlapping catchments that privileged speed over traditional retail centrality, and a durability to the network that has survived the immediate shock. You can see the signature in the siting choices, in the concentration of facilities on arterial streets, and in the way coverage maps to density instead of to canonical purchasing-power geographies. What you won’t find in this study is a growth-rate time series. The two field windows — 2022 and 2023 — bookend the immediate acceleration and its settling, but the authors stay cautious about rates. Instead, they anchor the inference in field-validated location data, geographic information system overlays, and a governance lens grounded by interviews. That restraint pays off: the patterns don’t rely on model assumptions; they’re present in the data you can walk to, map, and triangulate. Governance, meanwhile, hasn’t caught up. Zoning categories, licensing rules, street-use rights, and the externalities of traffic and labor sit in gray zones. As Gergs and colleagues argue, this is bigger than a few permits. They call for a federal basis in the Baugesetzbuch to recognize micro-fulfillment uses, state-level plans that actively manage inner-city freight flows, and land-use concepts that specify where and how local consolidation can sit inside dense neighborhoods. Without that scaffolding, conflict mediation defaults to case-by-case fights over sidewalks and shopfronts rather than strategic allocation of scarce urban logistics space. Put it all together and the contribution is crisp. The Berlin evidence shows an inner-city warehouse lattice keyed to density, service latency, and platform co-location — not to the retail-center hierarchy or simple purchasing-power gradients. It documents the facility typologies, their sizes and siting, the reliance on major streets, the overlap of catchments, and the gaps at the periphery. And it threads those facts to a governance agenda that recognizes micro-fulfillment as a durable element of the urban logistics system rather than a pandemic oddity. One last thought to carry into your own city mapping. If you replicate this lens — field-validate sites, overlay them with density thresholds, travel corridors, and platform geographies — you’ll likely see a similar logic emerge: firms packing coverage where bikes can win on minutes, not miles, and a shadow network of darkened ground floors quietly redrawing access to everyday goods. The Berlin case doesn’t just describe that shift; it gives you the template to detect it, quantify its footprint, and, crucially, govern it.

It’s e-commerce fused to last-mile innovation, and Berlin offered the perfect lab because multiple players launched fast, scaled hard, and left a very visible footprint.

Methodologically, they kept it simple and tight. Two field windows — spring 2022 and spring 2023 — and a mixed-methods design that lets the built system speak. On the ground, they did Begehung inspections and Kartierung mapping.

In the stack, they aligned every site to Berlin’s geographic information system backbone, drawing on ALKIS and the Geoportal for spatial precision, and layered in statistics from the Berlin-Brandenburg office and market measures from CBRE VALUE to proxy purchasing power. Then they overlaid catchments, S-Bahn Ring geometry, and neighborhood characteristics. And because you need context as well as coordinates, they ran expert interviews across city governance, platform operators, and legal and data roles.

The sample was deliberately focused — Gorillas, Getir, Flink — precisely because those firms concentrated the city’s pandemic-era dynamics and made the urban logic legible.

By the second wave in spring 2023, they had fifty-seven warehouses in the inventory. These are compact facilities — often two hundred to four hundred square meters and at most around a thousand — fed several times a day to keep turnover moving. From the street, many read as non-retail: darkened glass, little signage, sometimes a ramp or staging area bleeding onto sidewalk or curb.

That staging is part of the operating model, which prizes speed over display. The promise is delivery in under an hour on an e-bike or e-scooter, and the catchment logic follows: roughly a three-kilometer radius, dense micro-fulfillment, and very short cycle times.

Spatially, the pattern is exactly where you’d expect demand density and bike accessibility to overlap. Clusters stack inside the S-Bahn Ring, with concentrations in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Mitte, and Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, and notable activity in inner parts of Tempelhof-Schöneberg, Pankow’s Prenzlauer Berg, and Nord-Neukölln. Outside the ring, coverage thins sharply.

Only four sites sit in outer-ring locations — roughly seven percent of the total — and Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Spandau have no warehouses at all. The whole thing reads like a lattice pulled tight over the urban core and left a bit slack at the edges.

If you align that lattice to people, the threshold is striking. Once areas hit about two hundred fifty residents per hectare, they’re almost always inside a three-kilometer reach of at least one warehouse. Berlin’s inner city averages about one hundred seventeen residents per hectare against a citywide average of forty-two, so the dots gravitate to where the density lives.

Two dense pockets buck the trend — Spandauer Altstadt and the historic core of Hellersdorf — but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. Income cuts across the map differently. The most consistently served zones are high density with mid-range household purchasing power, roughly three thousand to four thousand euros per month.

The higher-income end, above about four thousand five hundred, skews peripheral and often outside the active delivery mesh, while some Gründerzeit cores with lower-to-mid purchasing power are squarely inside it.

The street-level siting explains the last mile. About three-quarters of the facilities sit on major streets, which shortens dispatch times and smooths rider routing. In land-use terms, around forty percent occupy residential areas and roughly thirty-eight percent sit in mixed-use zones, almost all in ground-floor, street-facing spaces that once held pharmacies, videotheques, bank branches, or generic retail.

You can feel the inversion: instead of footfall driving storefronts, logistics drives frontage. It’s quick access, not display windows, that matters.

Competition in this network is as dense as the coverage. Roughly seventy-five percent of warehouses lie within one kilometer of a rival’s facility. In practice that means overlapping catchments across the S-Bahn Ring, redundant service in central districts, and razor-thin time advantages deciding who wins the order.

It’s the internal logic of platform urbanism made visible. Firms don’t align to Berlin’s traditional retail hierarchy — the inner core and nested centers — so much as they optimize two objective functions: geographic coverage and travel latency. The outcome is a tightly packed, inner-city network and a set of peripheries that remain structurally underserved.

What’s interesting is how that network nests inside other platform geographies. When the team overlaid dark stores on short-term rental density and startup locations, the correspondences jumped out. Mitte, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Pankow, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, and Tempelhof-Schöneberg were busy on all three layers;

Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Spandau were quiet across the board. Read one way, the signal is about digitally connected, on-demand adopters. Read another, it’s about shared urban substrates: amenity-rich blocks, globalized work patterns, and a built form that tolerates rapid repurposing of ground-floor stock.

The operational details feed back into the built environment. Continuous restocking and fast turnarounds push activity into public space — curbside loading, clusters of riders, battery charging — which, in turn, creates frictions with neighbors over noise, congestion, and safety. Those are local manifestations of a bigger structural change the authors point to: an internal, city-wide warehouse layer that now sits alongside suburban distribution centers and larger urban logistics hubs.

Together they form a more tightly interconnected urban logistics landscape than the pre-pandemic retail grid ever needed.

Zoom out a notch and the pandemic’s role becomes clearer. Demand surged in a window when venture-capital-backed platforms were primed to scale. The result in Berlin was a rapid build-out of inner-city micro-fulfillment, overlapping catchments that privileged speed over traditional retail centrality, and a durability to the network that has survived the immediate shock.

You can see the signature in the siting choices, in the concentration of facilities on arterial streets, and in the way coverage maps to density instead of to canonical purchasing-power geographies.

What you won’t find in this study is a growth-rate time series. The two field windows — 2022 and 2023 — bookend the immediate acceleration and its settling, but the authors stay cautious about rates. Instead, they anchor the inference in field-validated location data, geographic information system overlays, and a governance lens grounded by interviews.

That restraint pays off: the patterns don’t rely on model assumptions; they’re present in the data you can walk to, map, and triangulate.

Governance, meanwhile, hasn’t caught up. Zoning categories, licensing rules, street-use rights, and the externalities of traffic and labor sit in gray zones. As Gergs and colleagues argue, this is bigger than a few permits.

They call for a federal basis in the Baugesetzbuch to recognize micro-fulfillment uses, state-level plans that actively manage inner-city freight flows, and land-use concepts that specify where and how local consolidation can sit inside dense neighborhoods. Without that scaffolding, conflict mediation defaults to case-by-case fights over sidewalks and shopfronts rather than strategic allocation of scarce urban logistics space.

Put it all together and the contribution is crisp. The Berlin evidence shows an inner-city warehouse lattice keyed to density, service latency, and platform co-location — not to the retail-center hierarchy or simple purchasing-power gradients. It documents the facility typologies, their sizes and siting, the reliance on major streets, the overlap of catchments, and the gaps at the periphery.

And it threads those facts to a governance agenda that recognizes micro-fulfillment as a durable element of the urban logistics system rather than a pandemic oddity.

One last thought to carry into your own city mapping. If you replicate this lens — field-validate sites, overlay them with density thresholds, travel corridors, and platform geographies — you’ll likely see a similar logic emerge: firms packing coverage where bikes can win on minutes, not miles, and a shadow network of darkened ground floors quietly redrawing access to everyday goods. The Berlin case doesn’t just describe that shift; it gives you the template to detect it, quantify its footprint, and, crucially, govern it.