How can we help?

An open letter from Arup’s City Modelling Lab in response to the coronavirus pandemic

As the world responds to the spread of coronavirus, we want to offer what we can in the way of help. We have a team of domain experts (in transport, energy, climate change, air quality, and economics), data scientists, software engineers and designers. Our team is available to help. If you are working on coronavirus response initiatives and need more hands— please get in touch at citymodelling@arup.com

We are seeing widespread changes to how people live on a day-to-day basis. Our typical movements and activities are now restricted in many global cities as a result of Coronavirus. As a team largely based in London — our home has just been added to the list of countries that are banning non-essential travel. The full consequences of restricting so many people to their homes are unknown, but they will have a profound impact on our communities.

While we seek to understand how we can be most helpful, working with others who are responding to the coronavirus, we are also looking at ways we can contribute our existing work (without adding noise.) In the coming days and weeks we will be accelerating our efforts to share tooling which might be of use to others, working on agent based models as part of response efforts.

There are many difficult issues that we will need to reconcile in the coming months. We know that we need to work together, and pull in the same direction to help keep people safe. If you are working on coronavirus response initiatives that could make use of our people — please get in touch at citymodelling@arup.com.