Study title

The dataset consists of semi-structured interviews with governance stakeholders in London: representatives of London boroughs, the Greater London Authority, business organisations and non-governmental organisations. The interviews focused on: how the governance system in London works, how individual actors responded to the Covid-19 pandemic, how the pandemic influenced Londoners’ local socio-economic status, and how individual actors envision an ideal London governance.This project responds to three global challenges: unequal urbanisation, growing complexity of the governance systems and a crisis of trust in democracy. More than half of the world population currently live in cities and this share is expected to increase. Modern urban areas are highly unequal, with vast shares of the population living in poverty and struggling to access city-services (Tonkiss 2018). The growing complexity of governance systems leads to an increased number of non-state actors who are not held democratically accountable and whose actions are difficult to control or regulate (Jervis 1997). Finally, along dropping trust in democratic governance, there is rising support for populism and growing acceptance for authoritarian practices (Foa and Mounk 2016). Due to the global impact and interconnected nature of these challenges, any social-scientific response to these problems cannot treat them separately. Existing interdisciplinary research tends to focus on solutions to some of these challenges, often without acknowledging its broader impact. For example, research on governing complex urban polities is focused on top-down and technocratic tools, which contributes to the deepening of the democratic crisis and further inequality (e.g. Kubler and Lefevre 2017). In turn, democratic and participatory solutions to urban inequality often rely on bottom-up communities and face-to-face decision-making, while ignoring the wider complexity of urban decision-making. Finally, research on the...