Our figure of the month 10/2020: Are socially necessary services breaking away in the countryside?

30.09.2020

On the urbanization of service provision

How can we ensure the supply of services in areas that are particularly necessary for our society? This is the topic of our project "To provide socially necessary services: Is working for the common good attractive?" (GenDis), which is being conducted since November 2019 by the Sociological Research Institute Göttingen (SOFI), the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) and the GWS.

Socially necessary services are strongly location-based and region-specific studies are therefore of central importance in this context. In rural areas, specific problems relevant to the project question are sometimes bundled. Our figure of the month documents that in the sectors of socially necessary services there are indeed recognizable urbanization tendencies. For this purpose, sector-related employment data were evaluated for all 401 district regions in Germany according to their district type (metropolitan, urban district, rural district with densification approaches, sparsely populated rural district). The focus is on services that can be regarded as particularly relevant to society, as defined in the GWS Kurzmitteilung 2020/03.

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