Corona Plaza in October 2025. Credit: Margaret Jack

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, according to new research from NYU Tandon and the University of Toronto.

Presented at the 28th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW), 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.

The research was conducted by Margaret Jack, Industry Assistant Professor in NYU Tandon’s Department of Technology, Culture, and Society, and Robert Soden, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the School of the Environment, of the University of Toronto.

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.

The Corona Plaza street vending community exemplifies this creative adaptation. Vendors used shopping carts, portable griddles, and folding tables to create temporary restaurants, while leveraging TikTok and YouTube for marketing, Zelle for payments, and WhatsApp groups for coordination, stitching together consumer technologies in ways their designers never intended.

At the Abrons Art Center, a performance venue transformed its stage into a food distribution hub serving over seven hundred families weekly. Theater technicians applied their engineering skills to construct a walk-in refrigerator using scenery-building techniques, and creatively used the theater’s fly system to lift one wall above their heads so they could move full pallets of food into the refrigerator.

The citywide mutual aid network connected thousands of volunteers who cobbled together digital tools (Google Docs, AirTable, Slack, and WhatsApp) to build complex workflows for volunteer management and resource distribution. Rather than waiting for custom-built platforms, organizers rapidly prototyped solutions using available technologies, then shared successful approaches across the network.

The study offers important insights into computer-supported cooperative work and infrastructure engineering. Jack and Soden frame these logistics networks as sociotechnical systems whose function depends not just on physical tools but on social networks and digital infrastructure, revealing design opportunities often missed by conventional technology development. The research challenges how engineers think about logistics infrastructure.

While companies like Amazon design tightly-coupled systems optimizing for efficiency and control, these alternative networks succeeded through flexibility and “seamfulness”—deliberately visible seams between system components that allowed for creative adaptation.

“There’s a tendency 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,” Jack explained.

“Our cases show that embracing flexibility and recognizing inevitable situated human action within infrastructures can produce more resilient systems.”

The study identifies specific opportunities for engineering research and design. Alternative logistics networks struggle with tools built by corporations for different purposes, pointing to a need for movement-aligned civic technologies designed specifically for grassroots coordination.

The researchers argue for “seamful design” approaches in logistics engineering, creating systems that highlight rather than hide complexity, empowering users to appropriate technologies in their own emergent ways.

However, these grassroots networks faced structural barriers that engineering alone cannot solve. Street vendors endured police harassment despite functional logistics systems. The Abrons refrigerator was dismantled due to permit requirements despite working perfectly.

As engineers design systems for climate adaptation and crisis response, the lessons from pandemic-era alternative logistics become increasingly relevant, demonstrating how community capacity and regulatory support can create positive conditions for resilient infrastructure even under severe resource constraints.

More information: Margaret Jack et al, Relational Logistics and Alternative Supply Chains of Last Resort, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3757500

Citation: How grassroots logistics networks fed New Yorkers during COVID-19 crisis (2025, October 22) retrieved 22 October 2025 from https://phys.org/news/2025-10-grassroots-logistics-networks-fed-yorkers.html

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