Photo: New-York-named-‘most-youthful-city’
New York named ‘most youthful city’
01 May 2015
by Richard Forster
New York has been named the 2015 Youthful City of the Year, narrowly beating London and Berlin to take the top position.
The index is the first attempt to quantify which cities appeal to and serve their young people aged 15-29. It ranks 55 cities from across the world using over 100 urban attributes like transport, music, film, employment and sports.
“This is not just another index,” Robert Barnard, Co-founder of YouthfulCities, told Cities Today. “The aim is to provide deep and useful comparative data that will accelerate youth driven urban regeneration in the world’s biggest cities. It is designed to be valuable to municipalities and youth.”
London, in second position, scored well in health and travel while Berlin was found to have high levels of digital access. Last year’s winner, Toronto, dropped to sixth place.
All six global regions are included in the index, with cities from five regions represented in the top 20. Africa’s highest placed city, ranked 35th, was Johannesburg. Tel Aviv took the Middle East’s best city for youth, with Tokyo topping Asia, and Mexico City coming out first in Latin America.
“The index itself is also different form others,” added Barnard. “It’s been built by youth globally to ensure its relevancy in each of the global regions. This is one of the hardest parts to building an effective global index.”
Now in its second year, having grown from 25 cities and 2,000 data points to 55 cities and 5,555 data points, Barnard hopes to see the number of cities in the index to expand to 100 by 2017. Barcelona, Milan, Copenhagen, Manchester, Prague, Athens and others have already been penciled in for next year’s index.
“Cities are starting to listen,” said Barnard. “In late 2014 Quito became the first municipality to work directly with YouthfulCities. Youth–and older generations alike–have a multidimensional view of cities. Other indexes focus on specifics like economic or environmental performance, but ours looks at 20 different urban attributes around living, working and playing in cities.”
