Meeting the Covid Challenge – Agility and Resilience of SUITS Local Authorities

Nienaber, Ann-Marie; Woodcock, Andree; Gut, Kat

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has created immense social, economic, and political disruption around the world. It has shown the importance of agile, functional and resilient cities. In the fight against Covid-19, public life has been reduced to a minimum, but local authorities (LAs) have had to continue to satisfy existing and emergent citizens’ needs and implement, sometimes at very short notice, extreme measures to restrict movement, commerce, education and leisure activities. This poses significant challenges as they have had to not only enforce and communicate government plans but also be proactive and respond to local needs of their cities whilst learning to work in new ways and support the health and well-being of employees. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced organizational change. In many instances, this has accelerated the rate of change, proving that new ways of working are effective and has led to a (temporary) advancement of sustainable transport. This chapter focuses mainly on the experience of SUITS LAs in the final year of the project.

Keywords
Covid-19 pandemic; Resilient Cities; Organizational Change; Sustainable Transport; SUITS