The digitalisation of our economy and society means a profound upheaval for local authorities and the retail sector. Online retail is decoupling shopping from shops and town centres and leading to a shift in sales from bricks-and-mortar retail to the internet. The result is a continuously growing volume of parcel and delivery traffic as well as a considerable loss of footfall and shop vacancies in city centres.

In order to meet these challenges, TU Dortmund University - Department of Urban and Regional Planning - and the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for the Central Ruhr Area (IHK Mittleres Ruhrgebiet), together with various practice partners, have developed alternative concepts to conventional doorstep delivery as part of the Bundle Up project. The focus is on concepts that bundle the offers of various delivery services, create synergies for the centres through supplementary service functions and can reduce traffic for door-to-door delivery. The central element of the inter- and transdisciplinary work was "Design Thinking", a structured methodological approach for the co-creative development of innovative solutions for complex tasks.

As a result, three different types of concept were developed:

• Pick-up stores as a new operating concept with a white-labelled parcel station and supplementary services
• Pick-up depots as a combination of pick-up store and micro-depot
• Pick-up trailers as mobile parcel stations

The target group of the research project is primarily practitioners, i.e. potential implementers and multipliers in municipalities, the retail and service sectors and courier, express and parcel services. The project results are prepared in a correspondingly application-orientated manner and include both analysis findings and information on the design thinking process as well as reference projects and prototypes for the concepts developed. Recommendations for implementation and an explanatory film are intended to make it easier to put the previously purely theoretical models into practice.