Agility and Resilience of Local Authorities - the Covid challenge

The Covid-19 pandemic has created immense global social, economic, and political disruption. 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. Still, 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 enforce and communicate government plans, be proactive and respond to the 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 organisational 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 paper focuses mainly on the experience of SUITS, the H2020 CIVITAS SUITS project, called Supporting Urban Integrated Transport Systems, in the final year of the project.