Grétar Eyþórsson (p)

András Igari

The paper I propose to present at the conference is based on data from the Nordic research project Crisis Management In A Polycentric Nordic Local Democracy: Different Governance Structures – Different Results? (POLYGOV) financed by the Research Council of Norway, started in the fall 2021 and will go on until 2024. The project is a comparative study of the crisis management, organisation and functioning of local democracies in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark against the backdrop of the divergent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project compares the local and regional coordination and management strategies employed as the pandemic has unfolded from March 2020 to date, including the vaccination strategies.
In the paper I will use a case study based on interviews in Akureyri municipality in north Iceland to shed a light on how and which governmental level decisions or recommendations on crisis-reactions, were made and how actors at different levels reacted to them and implemented them. The interviews conducted in Akureyri show clearly that the decision making on the Covid-19 reactions was highly centralized at the state level and the role of the local level passive and to a high degree in implementing. The mayor of Akureyri who turned out to have a very good oversight over the process was interviewed as well as the chairman of the municipal council. I will with these interviews seek to answer the question how the top-down decisions from the state level were met. Were they met with local loyalty, with voice or did even anyone refuse to implement? This will all be looked at in the light of how Iceland succeeded in fighting the pandemic.

Anastasia Sherubneva (p)

Grétar Eyþórsson

The research is aimed to explore direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 to financial indicators of Russian companies and find out whether the impact of covid-19 and other factors on business performance is constant in space. We want to test the following hypotheses: 1) industries related to offline interaction have been hit more by covid than others; 2) the efficiency of the firm depends positively on the efficiency of its neighbors (both in non-crisis times and in times of crisis); 3) the impact of covid-19 on affected industries is stable in space.
We used information about 2117 companies in the Novosibirsk region from the "Spark-Interfax" database. We built two Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) - for 2019 and 2020 years separately. The dependent variable is the sales margin (SM), the independent variables are dummy variables for various industry groups (offline-services, transport, goods and industries not directly affected by the pandemic), the spatial lag of the SM, the age of the company, its scale, capital intensity, share of borrowed funds in assets, agglomeration effect and "municipal" variables - logarithms of the average salary in the municipality and municipal investment in fixed assets.
The results showed that:
1) transport and related industries were significantly affected by covid (in 2020, the SM for them decreased by 1.3 p.p.);
2) large companies turned out to be more resistant to the epidemic than small businesses (in 2019, the size did not affect the SM, in 2020, the SM in small companies decreased by 10-20% compared to large ones);
3) if in 2019 the share of borrowed funds in assets did not significantly affect the SM, then in a crisis situation, companies with a high level of debt were in a worse position (a high level of debt is usually found in companies that are already in an unstable situation (developing / in crisis, etc.), and the epidemic and restrictions multiply this effect);
4) both in 2019 and 2020 there was a positive significant spatial effect, and in 2019 it was more significant: 0.23 / 0.12 p.p. respectively as a result of a change in SM in neighboring companies by 1 p.p. (in 2020 there was less offline interaction in general, so the spatial effect decreased);
5) the regression coefficients, their significance and changes for the Novosibirsk region are stable (possibly due to the fact that only one region is considered).

Marta Szejnfeld (p), Lidia Mierzejewska, Magdalena Wdowicka, Kamila Sikorska-Podyma, Ewa Lechowska

Anastasia Sherubneva

Green infrastructure is an essential element of the stress-resilient city structure. Providing residents with access to these green spaces can help reduce this stress and thus improve the city's overall resilience. This is an issue that is particularly significant under the long-term stress caused by the Covid-19 pandemic or the armed conflict in Ukraine, which can lead to significant erosion of public health and psycho-physical well-being.
This paper aims to investigate whether the accessibility of green areas in three urban spatially different cities in Poland shows a relationship with the level of stress of their inhabitants, and to identify a new approach to shaping the spatial form of the city for reducing the stress of city inhabitants and in building city resilience.
The paper hypothesises that groups of residents with better access to green spaces show lower stress levels, which translates into the resilience of the entire city organism.
The study investigated both the subjective level of stress experienced by residents and objective stress, as determined by the salivary cortisol levels of the people surveyed. The above results were juxtaposed with spatial analyses of accessibility to green spaces using geographic information systems (GIS).
Such an interdisciplinary and innovative study made it possible to verify the assumptions made and to develop guidelines conducive to building a stress-resilient city. Conclusions from the research and analysis carried out can be used in adapting the spatial structure of cities to the needs and expectations of citizens, as changed by new stressors. Above all, however, to increase and build city resilience through better use and increased accessibility of cities' natural resources, which, according to the research conducted, influence the health of their inhabitants.

András Igari (p)

Marta Szejnfeld

Within a few months of its outbreak in Wuhan, China, the Coronavirus pandemic had appeared in almost every part of the world, highlighting one of the negative effects of globalisation: the rapid diffusion of harmful phenomena. However, information of the COVID-19 has spread faster than the pandemic itself: in our globalised, interconnected world, information spreads around the world in hours or days. This information (facts, rumours, fake news) has spread worldwide (mainly via Internet), and created an infodemic parallel to the pandemic.
The presentation will show the spatiotemporal pattern of the two phenomena- the COVID-19 pandemic and the infodemic related to it- in Europe. It will present relations between these two diffusion processes and geographical factors that may have influenced them, with a particular focus on the centre-periphery relationship, socio-economic inequalities, borders etc. To do this, I collected regional-level, weekly pandemic data (number of reported cases, number of reported COVID-19 deaths, excess mortality), weekly GoogleTrends statistics and socio-economic indicators from European countries. I subjected these to statistical data analysis: in addition to descriptive statistics, I used a spatial regression model. In addition, I created static and interactive maps and graphs to visualise the spatial diffusion of the two phenomena.
As a result, I got that the diffusion of these two phenomena is different. The pandemic waves were more prolonged in time than the infodemic waves, and their spatial patterns also differed. This may be due to the different geographical patterns of their (transport and communication) networks used as well as the regional inequalities of the other factors that hinder and facilitate their spread. However, a relation was also observed between the two phenomena: on the one hand, the spread of information influenced the effectiveness of the control of the pandemic, on the other hand, the emergence of the disease in a region / country clearly contributed to the increased interest in Coronavirus-related information in that area.