Smart Cities Mission in the Face of COVID: Scope and Scale of 'Smart' COVID Responses in India.

COVID has expedited and expanded the already precarious smart city development in India with the multitude of 'smart' COVID responses-broadly known as CovTech-introduced since the early days of the global pandemic. This paper offers an analysis of the scope and scale of smart responses to COVID in the first 20 cities prioritized for smart city implementation-as part of the Smart Cities Mission in India. The analysis unravels the diversity within the smart COVID response, as 125 COVID applications, 14 COVID-War-Rooms, and numerous examples of smart public place initiatives are discussed.

The City Under COVID-19: Podcasting As Digital Methodology.

This critical commentary reflects on a rapidly mobilised international podcast project, in which 25 urban scholars from around the world provided audio recordings about their cities during COVID-19. New digital tools are increasing the speeds, formats and breadth of the research and communication mediums available to researchers. Voice recorders on mobile phones and digital audio editing on laptops allows researchers to collaborate in new ways, and this podcast project pushed at the boundaries of what a research method and community might be.

Evidence for localization and urbanization economies in urban scaling.

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of Australia and the USA. The number of workers and aggregate incomes in specific high-income knowledge economy-related occupations and industries show increasing returns to scale by city size, showing that localization economies within particular industries account for superlinear effects. However, when total urban area incomes and/or gross domestic products are regressed using a generalized Cobb-Douglas function against the number of workers in different occupations as labour inputs, constant returns to scale in productivity against city size are observed.