This study investigates the Impact of COVID-19 on London and highlight opportunities to mitigate the impact on the city. The findings are based on semi-structured interviews with experts and categorised through the smart city framework, which includes, smart: economy, people, governance, mobility, environment and living.

The role of digital education platforms such as DingTalk in mitigating the impact of Covid-19 on students or supporting sustainable prosperity.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent national lockdowns have had a significant impact on businesses of all sizes, particularly small businesses. Therefore, it is essential that small businesses are adequately supported to enable their sustainable recovery from the pandemic. The Mayor of London has assembled the London Recovery Board (LRB) to oversee and push forward initiatives to support the long-term recovery of unemployment rates, small business closures and lost economic growth caused by the pandemic. This report has identified two important factors which are crucial to businesses’ ability to grow and survive and have subsequently been impacted by the pandemic: (1) growing and maintaining social networks and (2) dealing with uncertainty. The impact of the pandemic on these factors has ultimately limited the ability of small businesses to develop their knowledge of business administration and obtain investor financing. Anchor institutions are private or public organisations which have the potential to make genuine social and economic impacts to their localities due to their size and spending power; they have been identified as important actors in the city (GLA, 2021). By using their spending power through procurement, anchor institutions have an important role in helping small businesses recover from the pandemic. Public and private anchor institutions can provide this support by establishing local procurement policies. To help anchor institutions strategically target resources, this report analysed the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses by industry. In addition, a tool has been developed for anchor institutions to use to help small businesses. The function of the tool is to help anchor institutions make informed decisions about setting and assessing the effectiveness of their local procurement policies. The tool does this by plotting the locations of small businesses and anchor institutions. This allows anchor institutions to identify where and what small businesses are in their locality. Coupled with a list of small businesses who were offered tenders, the tool also allows institutions to see how many small businesses they have offered service/product tenders to out of the total number of small businesses in the same industry, and therefore, the effectiveness of their local procurement policies.

During the COVID-19 crisis, a series of measures restricting travel and outdoor activities are taken to mitigate the pandemic and minimise its negative effects. These unprecedented methods have greatly changed the number and purposes of trips and mode choices in travel. However, these changes in travel behaviour during and post the outbreak still remains unclear. In addition, different groups may be affected to varying degrees in terms of social equity, which is not fully discussed in the existing literature. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to investigate the differences in individuals’ travel behaviour before and after the pandemic using Huzhou as an example. Semi-structured interviews through telephone are used to explore the influence of COVID-19 on travel and perceptions of different groups. The results indicate that first travel demand was greatly reduced and public transport became the least popular travel mode during the pandemic due to policy constraints and the fear of infection. Secondly, decreased travel caused a lack of activity participation, which might affect health as well as subjective wellbeing negatively. Thirdly, the degree and the duration of such impacts vary from person to person. Students, people with lower incomes, groups living in communities with small size and insufficient green spaces, and those working in tourism, catering, informal business and transport-related sectors were more vulnerable than others in society. The key argument is that changes in travel behaviour due to COVID-19 caused inequity in these groups, while such unfairness has been overlooked by the local government. Thus, policymakers need to pay more attention to social inequities due to transport and individuals’ heterogeneity. Besides, public transport systems in Huzhou should be further developed to promote social cohesion in the way of expanding networks, increasing running frequency, building and updating infrastructures, introducing new modes such as light rails.

Investigation into the impact of Covid-19 on the travel choice and behaviour, including how perceptions of public transport changed

This study looks into the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The main objective of this study is to enable an understanding of a favela as a capable urban governance institution. This rationale is made possible through the case study of local initiatives that surged in Rio during the crisis, by making use of Byrne’s (2005) complexity framework applied to social sciences. Through the analysis of this case, it becomes clear that three institutional conditions allowed local organisations to advance urban equality throughout the pandemic. First, a condition of formal government institution’s failure. Second, a condition of inadequate access to health and sanitation. Third, a structural inequality that portray favelas as a threat to be perceived by formal institutions as something that must be fixed. This understanding leads to a contribution to the academic and societal understanding of urban settings in Brazil. This paper contains important implications for future work in favelas, although its finding are somewhat limited to the specific context of favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

A model based on space syntax is introduced in simulating the transmission of COVID-19 and quantifying the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions.

COVID-19 poses a huge challenge to urban public-health emergency and governance systems. Those engaged in spatial planning and management are starting to think about how a ‘people-oriented’ principle can be incorporated into spatial-planning systems. The example of Changchun, China, is used to explore citizen views on the development of the post-pandemic city and on a future prevention and control system of spatial planning. Semi- structured interviews were used to explore the impact of COVID-19 on citizens’ life and work. The prevention and control system of Changchun spatial planning will be explored.

Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic caused an economic and physical exodus within the City of London. The guilds seized the opportunity to reclaim their historic seat of power. New guilds arose. The construction of the Replica Makers Livery Hall is rooted in the poetics of the process. Histories of the Postman’s Park site and London’s Brutalism elements are reinterpreted via the construction.