Success Story: Yo u t h Re-Envision the Cities of the Future

Of the 600 million people in the southern part of the Americas, 80 percent now live in cities where the problems of inequality and violence impact vulnerable populations, including youth. In these cities one in five people live in informal settlements with no access to essential services, no recognition of land property, and little to no political representation. Additionally, forty-one of the fifty most violent cities in the world are in the Latin America and Caribbean – a region which accounts for thirty-nine percent of the world´s homicides, according to an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) study. Data from IDB shows that there are 7.1 million youth seeking employment with another 15.1 million neither studying or working. The statistics are grim and point towards a reality where millions of youth are not able to find employment and have few channels to take ownership of their cities and to shape and transform them. Photo: More than 1,000 young people from all over Latin America and the Caribbean partici- In response to this challenge, the Civil Society Innovation Initiative pated in Urban Campus: Youth for the Future (CSII) partnered with the Chile-based Un Techo Para mi País of Latin American Cities, which took place in (TECHO), Spanish for “A Roof For My Country”, a youth-led Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2018. nonprofit organization that mobilizes youth volunteers to fight extreme

poverty in Latin America. In 2018, TECHO and CSII launched Ciudades x Jóvenes (Cities by Youth), a movement that allowed young people to participate in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) – the United Nation´s roadmap for urban development ““Latin America and the Ciudades x Jóvenes encouraged young people to design the cities of the Caribbean is a region of future by creating open discussions about the challenges youth face in cities without citizens.” their cities and the solutions they propose to address these challenges. In four months, Ciudades x Jóvenes was able to organize almost five Felipe Bogota thousand young people through hyper-local small-group engagement LAC Director sessions called Citizen Tables, led by TECHO representatives and TECHO others from more than sixty-five cities in the LAC region. During Citizen Tables, youth developed nearly nine hundred recommendations to improve their cities in the areas such as mobility, housing, violence prevention, and others. These recommendations were incorporated into the Youth Regional Action Plan over a two-month period. After its review, the Youth Regional Action Plan was recognized in late October 2018 by UN- Habitat and by various governments as a document that would serve to advise and shape the urban policies for the future. Ciudades x Jóvenes led to the organizing of an event known as the Urban Campus with the theme of “Youth for the Future of Latin American Cities.” One thousand young people from more than nineteen countries in LAC attended and showed their commitment to building the cities of the future. “Before the Urban Campus,” said one participant. “I never questioned why my city was built the way it was.”