More than 300 hundred guests will congregate tonight at Queen West’s Great Hall to celebrate Toronto, "the world’s most youthful city."
The youthful city accolade, awarded to Toronto this past November, comes courtesy of the
YouthfulCities project, "a social venture" launched in 2012 with the goal of mapping the world's cities from "a youthful perspective." YouthfulCities, which plans to release the index annually, was established in 2012 by
Decode, a global youth market research firm.
While the index has been publicly available for months, tonight’s event, says Sonja Miokovic, global director of YouthfulCities, is about celebrating Toronto’s success as well as creating dialogue on how to use the data to improve our urban environment. It also serves as a kind of homecoming for YouthfulCities, itself a Toronto-based organization (as Miokovici and the YouthfulCities website states, the aggregators were in no way biased towards their home-city as the categories used were selected by youth in all participating regions).
"The event is really about launching the index at a national level, celebrating Toronto's success, and sharing with our city some insights from the Toronto data. We've also collected data from other Canadian cities that we will share at the event to give an idea of how other Canadian cities are performing. [Toronto was the only Canadian city officially included in this year’s survey]."
Tonight’s celebration, which also doubles as the official Canadian launch of YouthfulCities will include a panel discussion with Toronto civic leaders, (including Che Kothari of
Manifesto and Allan Broadbent of the
Maytree Foundation) and presentations by representatives of Toronto youth-based nonprofits (including
1 Love T.O. and the
For Youth Initiative).
As Miokovic points out, although Toronto ranked highly in many categories, it still has a ways to go in others.
"Toronto was the top winner overall, but it only narrowly beat Berlin and New York and in some sub-indexes Toronto was not one of the leaders. So while we did great in terms of digital access, youth employment, economic status, food and nightlife etc., we didn't do quite as well in civic participation or in safety and mental health. The survey shows that these are really areas we should be thinking about and maybe we need to look to see what other cities are doing well...One of the great things about the index and the sub-indexes is that it helps us to share best practices and local learning at a global scale."
The first YouthfulCity Index ranked 25 cities using 80 unique indicators. The organization hopes to expand to 75 cities for the 2015 rankings. Full index and methodology details available at
youthfulcities.com.
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Sonja Miokovic, Global Director, YouthfulCities