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What's the Best City for Youth to Work in Canada? As Canada’s population ages, it’s now more important than ever to make sure our urban centres are vibrant places that attract and retain a youthful workforce. Now in its fourth iteration, the Urban Work Index 2024 ranks 30 cities across Canada to find the best [...]

L’indice du travail urbain 2023 classe 30 villes au Canada afin de déterminer les meilleurs endroits où travailler et vivre pour les jeunes.

The Urban Work Index 2023 ranks 30 cities across Canada to find the best places for youth to work and live.

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.

YouthfulCities is excited to launch our first-ever Canada-wide YouthfulCities Index in 13 Canadian cities. It is the first public national comparable urban index, measuring 121 indicators spanning all 20 youthful infrastructure areas. And the data has all been collected by youth across the country. It’s their data too. This Index creates credible data for decision-makers, provide inspiration for urban innovation efforts, launches a network of young urban decoders, and creates national exposure for Canadian cities.

What makes a city youthful? Drawing on the experience of launching the world’s first global cities ranking based off a youth perspective, we set out to dive deeper on what makes a youthful attitude.

This report is an amalgamation of data, research, and perspectives from the YouthfulCities Survey, Index, Global Summit Delegates, and Hackathons. It includes a total of 101 indicators organized across Youthful Cities’ 20 Urban Attribute categories, grouped into three themes: Live, Work, and Play.

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.

In 2014, we launched the inaugural Youthful Cities Index, the first ever ranking of metropolises from a youth perspective. In collaboration with thousands of young people around the world (across five global regions), we developed a rich reservoir of youth-centered data on what matters to young people in their cities.