Youth perspectives on urban liveability-an intergenerational dialogue on intermediary cities

Ecorys UK and Fondation Botnar are partnering to apply for a networking event aiming to create an interactive space for intergenerational dialogue on Urban Liveability. This encompasses the basic determinants of overall wellbeing for society including shelter, safety and primary investments for health and well-being such as education, health promotion, clean air, water, safe public spaces. Youth today are bearing the brunt of unplanned urbanisation and lack of basic liveability while dealing with complex societal pressures and contextual challenges linked to urban living such as crime, poor transport, over crowdedness. Our event will highlight basic infrastructure and services issues in intermediary cities and propose evidence-based frameworks and tools as well as recommendations for safety, resilience and sustainable development centring young people’s well being. With several urban complexities at play, partnerships are key to addressing these core urban liveability issues in intermediary cities. Our event will facilitate meaningful discussions with young people and city stakeholders to co-create a shared vision. Young people’s observed knowledge and lived realities are critical information that can shape local planning. If provided with the space and tools, they can be a resource for local officials and contribute towards designing urban ecosystems that enhance liveability in cities. Our event will bring together stakeholders representing civil society, philanthropy, local youth leaders, researchers and policy makers. Speakers will share innovative solutions and case studies from several intermediary cities demonstrating the strength of partnerships to address issues of equity, grassroots participation, and community well-being by centring young people as equal partners in the design and transformation of urban environments. Our session will be designed as a “Question-and-Answer” style interaction with speakers requested to respond to a question on urban liveability sharing partnership models that are strength based, impactful and scalable to progress localisation of SDGs. We will be placing several practitioners and youth leaders as embedded speakers in the audience to ensure that the session promotes interaction between panellists and participants resulting in solution driven discussions as well as capture the intergeneration knowledge transfer between youth, practitioners, policy makers, civil society and local officials present in the room.