Urban Work Index 2023

Young people live in a monthly deficit position in Canadian cities making urban centers unaffordable to the country’s future generations. On average young people are losing $750 per month by living in cities across the country.

In 2019 Youthful Cities launched the first Urban Work Index with the help of RBC Future Launch and focused on topic areas traditionally associated with work and cities like affordability, employment, and entrepreneurship.

The Youthful Cities Program is a partnership between Coventry UK City of Culture, the British Council and Youthful Cities to facilitate a cultural and creative skills exchange between young people across the globe. It has been developed to enable young adults (age 18-25) to creatively respond to important, urgent and youth-focused issues in their cities, encouraging more active participation in civic matters.

At Youthful Cities, we know data is so much more than just numbers. We create a variety of web apps, data visualizations, and interactive data stories to activate the data we work so hard to capture.

Youthful Cities uses the community action research model to collect public opinion data, which can take the form of surveys or interviews. We hire youth from local communities and involve them in the process from start to finish.

Youthful Cities has nearly 10 years’ experience working with data to rank cities both in Canada and globally. The 6 Urban Attributes – connectedness, openness, dynamism, playfulness, curiosity, and inventiveness – help us shape our indicators and give our work a unique perspective.

Open Up is Youthful Cities’ Open Data Literacy + Activation Program that builds open data capacity in the youth-serving sector by empowering organizations and their changemakers with tools to activate open data in order to enhance their organization’s impact.

Enabling youth through a pop-up “think and do tank” co-creation model to effect change in their cities. Hackathons are a condensed version of the lab model that can be delivered virtually.

Summits bring together great people and spark dialogue around important issues. They provide unique opportunities for networking and connection. To make sure great ideas don’t fall through the cracks, summits can be combined with the virtual hackathon model following the conclusion of in-person sessions.