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Today’s young people are at the center of building. Civic leaders, policymakers, and municipal strategists in cities around the world are beginning to recognize youth as their city’s greatest assets. Youth are now widely recognized to be the world’s largest untapped resource — and the secret sauce to driving a city’s competitive edge, stimulating development, and finding new solutions to pressing urban problems. Yet for youth, they are faced with a crisis of affordability, in housing, transportation and daily living costs.
The YouthfulCities Affordability Index is a first-of-its-kind statistical ranking of the world’s top cities from a youth perspective. And Affordability is a critical issue. We compared cities on 9 Indicators of affordability to determine which cities were the most affordable for youth.
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.
Where is the best place for urban work in Canada? We set out to answer this question with our Urban Work Index, ranking 21 cities across Canada on various attributes to create a holistic picture of work.
The 2019 Canadian Index offers an expanded ranking of cities across Canada since our 2018 index, with 22 cities and 21 attributes. For this year’s version, we also worked to expand the indicator list to further capture the elements that youth care about in their city, collecting over 10,000+ data points for 123 indicators.
