Does the route to recovery involve getting commuters off buses and onto bicycles? Do the difficulties of the past 12 months make fare rises inevitable? And should metrocards double up as vaccine passports? During our recent WBEF webinar Can public transport recover from the COVID-19 pandemic? you asked us. Here, our expert panel responds.

Dr Nader Naderpajouh is an incoming Senior Lecturer at University of Sydney and Alison Whitten is Sustainable and Resilient Precincts Lead at City of Melbourne. Nader and Alison authored the RICS Research Trust report Governance of participatory planning for resilient communities together with Bilal Ayub and Rita Peihua Zhang (of RMIT), and Sebastian Fastenrath and Lars Coenen (of the University of Melbourne). We spoke to them about participatory planning practice in Australia - a growing nation with a controversial colonial past. Can participatory planning present inclusive and liveable solutions to these challenges?

Effective public transport land use policies positively affect sustainability efforts by lowering private vehicle use. Across most OECD nations, land use strategies are the purview of local, rather than national government. When it comes to climate adaptation, cities are in the driving seat.

Panellists on our recent WBEF webinar were unanimous in their belief that public transport will recover. Post-pandemic, mass transit networks may look and feel different, but many of the changes will be for the better.

Dr Nader Naderpajouh is a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University and Alison Whitten is Sustainable and Resilient Precincts Lead at the City of Melbourne. They are also the lead authors of the RICS Research Trust paper Governance of participatory planning for resilient communities , together with Bilal Ayub and Rita Peihua Zhang (of RMIT), and Sebastian Fastenrath and Lars Coenen (of the University of Melbourne). We spoke to them about participatory planning practice, and how we can engage with local communities to create a resilient, inclusive, and liveable built environment.

Compact cities offer residents improved levels of access to services and economic opportunity. But over-densification can be damaging to health and wellbeing, and lead to the marginalisation of vulnerable communities.

As a world leading city, London’s progress towards UN Sustainable Development Goals will be instructive. So how can public and private sector leaders drive the agenda forward and, crucially, how can they take local communities with them?

Fears that densely populated urban centres could be breeding grounds for contagious disease have been disproved by research. What’s more, urban densification, when well-managed, increases economic opportunity and reduces emissions.

A new insight paper from London Sustainable Development Commission looks at how social value can help the UK capital city to build back better. In this excerpt, the paper's authors consider how the public realm can be put at the heart of a new localism agenda.