What is it about?
Grassroots logistics networks provided food and essential goods to New Yorkers who fell through the cracks of conventional supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering important lessons for engineers designing the next generation of distribution technologies. The study examines three community-driven distribution systems that emerged in New York City: immigrant street vendors in Corona, Queens; a theater-turned-food-pantry on Manhattan's Lower East Side; and the citywide mutual aid network. Each represented what researchers call "supply chains of last resort,” critical interventions filling gaps left by traditional logistics infrastructure.
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Why is it important?
The study contributes to human-centered engineering research by examining how people creatively appropriate and repurpose existing technologies – from WhatsApp to shopping carts – to build functional logistics systems without formal infrastructure. These alternative logistics networks demonstrate how technologies designed for individual productivity are being adapted for civic and ecological collaboration, raising design questions relevant to the development of future civic technologies.
Perspectives
There's a tendency in popular culture to forget about all the invisible infrastructural work supporting our lives until there is a breakdown, and in the emergency of COVID in New York City, we saw a lot of breakdown consider the work behind logistics as logistics engineering to design human creativity out of systems, creating brittle infrastructure prone to breakdown. Our cases show that embracing flexibility and recognizing inevitable supporting situated human action within infrastructures can produce more resilient systems.
Maggie Jack
New York University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Relational Logistics and Alternative Supply Chains of Last Resort, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, October 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3757500.
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