Companies innovate and change the services and products they offer, because their survival in the market depends on it, governments must innovate and create because the quality of life of their citizens depends on it.
Most governments dedicate their management to improving or increasing what already exists. Thus, they build more squares, renovate service infrastructures, add more green spaces, modernize sports facilities, etc. But there are very few who create, those who provide services that did not exist before or, even, that were not requested. Some administrations manage to do so and mark a before and after, they position themselves at the forefront of public management and build a brand of government, while most administrations are forgotten as quickly as they pass, because they did not generate a leap in quality. of life of his city.
Let's mention as an example only three possible areas of creation applicable to any City Council:
Sport
In the area of sport, a new way of practicing them has emerged, which is online. On a planet where 7.8 billion people live, and with an online population of around 4.4 billion, almost half of that number knows about eSports (video games), according to the report by Newzoo.
In the United States, only the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) outperform eSports in number of viewers. That means that eSports are the third most watched sports category in the US, surpassing the NBA, the most famous basketball league in the world. In 2015, the South Korean Olympic Committee introduced eSports to study in a “second level” of sporting consideration.
Which leads us to think how many municipalities organize sporting events that include eSports, in the same way that they carry out soccer, basketball and other well-known disciplines. How many seek to integrate them and give them a space in the sports and social life of the community.
Job
The labor market is also changing rapidly, with new phenomena emerging to consider, in this case digital workers. The country with the largest number of statistics on this sector of the economy, and which can be taken as representative of developed countries, is the United States. According to data from Freelancers Union as of 2017, 36% of North American workers work remotely and it is projected that by 2027 these workers will be 50.9% of the labor market. The recent pandemic caused by COVID-19 has possibly given a decisive boost to this trend, which will be reflected in the coming months.
These new jobs do not need industrial estates, factories, or large infrastructures, their needs are different, but how many municipalities take them into account? There are few cases of cities that seriously and forcefully promote the development of this sector, either by creating Coworking spaces (areas of joint work) or fostering interrelationships within the city to empower its workers.
We do not intend to expand on the relevance of this section or its different approaches, we leave two links to other articles that deal with the subject from different perspectives.
Living place
The problem of access to housing has historically been related to families with insufficient income, promoting low-cost social housing with subsidized financing as a solution.
Currently, a new phenomenon has occurred, the problem is not low income, but the unequal competition between permanent housing for residents and temporary housing for foreigners, for tourism purposes.
In 2019, more than 1.4 billion people (OMT) traveled the world. The number of tourists grows year by year, the last increase was 9.7% between 2017 and 2019. The second country that receives the most international tourists in the world is Spain (82.7 million).
There are many reasons that lead us to think that tourism will continue to grow as a long-term trend, even seeing it at this time, July 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This scenario poses a problem for the permanent residents of the cities visited, since the price of housing increases disproportionately to that of income. Thus, a citizen must compete with German, Norwegian, etc. salaries when looking for accommodation.
Perhaps it is time to think of a new solution, to unfold the real estate market, promoting the construction of homes intended only for permanent residents.
These brief examples serve to illustrate how many needs we are neglecting simply because we do not know them or because we want to address them with ancient paradigms.