YouthfulCities is a global social initiative working to rank the world's top cities from a youth (age 16 to 29) perspective. The project has involved over 1500 youth participants from around the world, and is currently developing a YouthfulCitiesINDEX, i.e., an index that ranks cities from the youth perspective, which is scheduled to be launched in October 2013. Currently, YouthfulCities is operating in 25 of the large urban centres worldwide and collecting data on 100 indicators, grouped into 22 categories ranging from public space, transportation and affordability to employment and political participation.
There are currently opportunities to get involved with the YouthfulCities initiative, and they have described these opportunities as written below.
The Academic Advisory Board
YouthfulCities is looking to recruit six professors passionate about urbanization, youth and social research methods to put their brilliant minds towards reviewing and verifying the data of the YouthfulCitiesINDEX over the next few months before the October launch. Please see this document for details and feel free to contact me for more information.
Data Collectors/Researchers
There are a few cities that are lagging behind in data and YouthfulCities is looking to fill data gaps. They have developed a Data Workbook which clearly stipulates what data needs to be collected along with how it should be collected. These are the cities with data gaps:
LA, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Istanbul, Mumbai, Shanghai, Manila, Cairo, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Buenos Aires
30Network: Pop-up Think Tank
The overall purpose of 30Network is to gather a group of bright young minds, across a variety of sectors to explore the idea of a youthful city and to move from ideas to action. Over 4 sessions participants go through a series of exercises of re-imagining their cities with the objective of ideating new concept(s) centred on creating a better city for youth to live, work and play in. These concepts are then launched with the participants of 30Network after the think tank has come to an end. Thus far, this network has been started in Toronto, London, Sao Paulo, Lima, Bogota and soon Lagos.