A new type of municipality created by citizens
Crowdfunding and food delivery have become measures for reactivating local shopping districts. Leveraging the cohesion and resilience that were cultivated under the surface, people living in the local area are combatting serious financial difficulties caused by the pandemic. Teleworkers realize that they can make a small contribution to protect their local society without relying on the local government, for example, by asking for lunch delivery from a restaurant in their area. In this way, the citizens’ movement to try to optimize the society on their own begins to spread.
Under the influence of the pandemic, people’s concerns about shortage of supply have caused non-malicious hoarding, which led to the stockout of certain products and made people anxious. People who saw such a situation accept a circumstance where fluctuations in supply and demand of daily necessities are constantly monitored and purchase restrictions are imposed when there is excessive demand, which was like when the balance between supply and demand of electricity was quantified and posted in the city after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The new service, which combines the city government’s personal information management with non-governmental supply chain management, gives people the reassurance of “planned supply and demand” and builds a relationship of trust between the citizens and the city. The city’s ability to coordinate its government alongside companies and citizens to achieve cooperation and produce results is made visible, and becomes a competitive factor that attract people to the city.
The ability of each city to coordinate them can also be a factor used when people choose where to live. Therefore, differences in the coordination abilities of cities widen, and in cities with weak coordination ability, partnership agreement is promoted to complement each other. To dispel their anxieties, they build a community that involves companies, universities, and the city government, which is led mainly by the citizens with centripetal force. A “local government” appears and creates a region-specific infrastructure to achieve the local production for local consumption of food and energy. In addition, it builds a safety net that functions even in the event of a disaster. Since issues within the city spread over the internet, for example, via social media, people who have had little involvement with the city can get an opportunity to contribute to the city.
As free work styles such as telework become widespread, the number of individual activists and NPOs, who spend their spare time addressing issues that are difficult to be solved by the city government such as noise and surplus food in the region, increases. A local currency is created as the basis for supporting mutual relationships within the city, and a community fund that is neither government subsidy nor bank loan begins to function as new public property that is shared by everyone in the city. Community entrepreneurs appear to create new value for the city by using the fund collected for the city. They implement a city system that meets the needs of the city, such as infrastructure development.
The community fund grows and the common understanding of running the city with their own fund is completely established. A tool to form an agreement among the citizens also appear as a means of exchanging opinions in order to decide investment destination and how to manage the fund, and it also begins to function as a platform for announcing the needs of the citizens and as skills and resource matching. On the other hand, some problems begin to appear, for example, there are a lot of conflicting opinions, or some citizens who actively speak out get preferential treatment within the community. Office workers who are in their office during the daytime and spend less time in the city and people who are not good at communicating with other people miss the opportunity to participate in the discussions and become “vulnerable people in the community”. Rebuilding a local community that is fair to everyone by bringing out the thoughts of people who cannot speak out has become a new issue.
