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The narrative of urban sustainability transformations epitomises the hope that urban governance can create the conditions to plan and govern cities in a way that they contribute to local and global sustainability and resilience. So far, urban governance is not delivering: novel governance approaches are emerging in cities worldwide, yet are unable to transform conventional policymaking and planning to allow for innovative, co-beneficial and long-term solutions and actions to emerge and institutionalise. We present a capacities framework for urban transformations governance, starting from the need to fulfil distinct output functions ('what needs to happen') for mobilising and influencing urban transformation dynamics. The framework helps to diagnose and inform urban governance for responding to disturbances (stewarding capacity), phasing-out drivers of path-dependency (unlocking capacity), creating and embedding novelties (transformative capacity) and coordinating multi-actor processes (orchestrating capacity). Our case study of climate governance in New York City exemplifies the framework's applicability and explanatory power to identify conditions and activities facilitating transformation (governance), and to reveal gaps and barriers of these vis-à-vis the existing governance regime. Our framework thereby functions as a tool to explore what new forms of urban transformation governance are emerging, how effective these are, and how to strengthen capacities. • Existing urban governance is unable to address persistent problems. • Effective governance support of transformation lies in collective capacities. • We develop a framework of four capacities for urban transformation governance (UTG). • We use the framework to explain the development of UTG capacities in New York City. • The framework enables explaining, evaluating and supporting UTG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In New York City (NYC), the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 induced a significant shift in the use and accessibility of urban green spaces (UGS). To understand the impact of COVID-19 on the access to UGS, we conducted a spatial analysis of geographic access to UGS and perceived access based on data collected from a social survey deployed from May 13 to June 15, 2020. We examine geographical accessibility to UGS and how this compares to perceived accessibility, or the ease which residents feel they can access a UGS. We further explored the correlation between spatial access to UGS and fifteen social vulnerability variables including economic status, household composition, minority status, and housing type for different zip codes. The results show that geographical proximity variables can predict a number of the perceived access variables, particularly those related to COVID-19 measures. Although lower-income communities were found to have higher spatial access to UGS, many of the same communities, including people living in crowded and multi-unit buildings, on average only have access to smaller green spaces, suggesting an uneven distribution of larger quality parks. This observation is further confirmed by survey results. These findings have implications for policies surrounding the distribution of UGS and whether equitable access is provided to NYC residents, with implications for similar patterns that may exist in other cities. • We compare geographical access to urban green spaces (UGS) with perceived access. • Geographical accessibility can predict perceived concerns regarding social distancing. • UGS environmental justice implications are related to perceptions of UGS qualities. • We overlap COVID-19 vulnerabilities with the availability of UGS at the zip code level. • Many working-class neighborhoods are highly impacted by COVID-19 and have smaller UGS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]