Modelling systemic COVID-19 impacts in cities

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted public health, the economy and society—both directly and indirectly. Few approaches exist to understand these complex impacts in a way that (1) acknowledges cross-sectoral interdependencies; (2) models how short-term shocks translate into impacts on longer-term outcomes; (3) builds in local, contextual variation; and (4) recognises a wide set of priorities. The Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) is proposed as an approach with these capabilities, and applied to Edinburgh (UK) between March–October 2020 to identify city-level impacts of the pandemic and associated policy responses. Results show changing priorities in the system and suggest areas which should be targeted for future urban resilience planning in Edinburgh for both short-term shocks and long-term recovery. This makes both methodological contributions (in the form of testing a new complex systems approach) and practical contributions (in the form of city-specific results which inform different aspects of resilience) to urban science.