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.
The Youthful Cities Index uses data from across the five partner cities, with 300 youth researchers engaged across the globe to consider 21 urban attributes that research showed to be the key components that youth care about across ‘live’, ‘work’ and ‘play’ attributes, totaling over 750 points of data. The Index highlights both strengths and areas for improvement in each city and is intended to serve as a resource for young people, as well as policymakers and city officials, keen to attract and retain young people. Youthfulness in this context is not limited by age but defined by mind-sets and a coming together of creative, innovative and dynamic ideas.
The Youthful Cities Program sees the Coventry City of Culture Trust working with four international partner cities each selected for their youthful profile: Beirut (Lebanon), Bogotá (Colombia), Detroit (United States of America) and Nairobi (Kenya). The four project teams are focused on different artforms spanning music, poetry and spoken word, street art and digital storytelling. All projects are supported by expertise from international and Coventry based arts organizations that are collaborating to build a program of creative development and ideas exchange that manifest in new work that will be featured across the City of Culture Program.
The project team of twelve street artists and creatives are working towards the creation of a new wall in FarGo village in early September and a new wall in Bogotá in Oct.
The Cov x Beirut team, of twelve writers and artists (six from Coventry and six from Beirut) are currently writing a new creative piece ‘Transnational Lag Express’ building on the themes and learning from their exchange that will be premiered at the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival 23-26 September.