Vancouver Working Group Discussion Paper

The Youth Friendly City

Chapter 1: The Resilient City

How resilient young people actively engage in their communities to overcome adversity and promote healthier urban environments.

"[Cities] are a startling juxtaposition between the despairing and the hopeful, between disorganization and restorative potential. Alongside the poverty and unemployment, the street-fights and drug deals, are a wealth of cultural, economic, educational, and social resources."
- Margaret C. Wang and Edmund W. Gordon

Children, youth and their families often face seemingly overwhelming challenges in their day-to-day lives. What is most amazing is that often they are able to survive these challenges and thrive. In youth development the term “resilience” has come to the fore to describe this amazing ability of children, youth and their communities to rebound from adversity, to adapt, and to achieve healthy development.

This chapter is a testament to that ability. This chapter is not suggesting that the conditions that bring about resiliency should be taken as a normative state – they are not. The ideal is that all children and youth should grow up in safe, nurturing, and respectful environments. The unfortunate reality is that they too often do not. This chapter celebrates the indomitable human spirit, while recognizing that we as humanity must do more.

This chapter will explore how, in environments not always designed to enable their resilience, children and youth not only survive stress, oppression, and adversity, but draw from their marginalization to improve their urban communities. We will see how resilient, engaged young people mobilize in their communities to develop resourcefulness, improve problem-solving skills, develop critical consciousness, experience greater autonomy, and feel a greater sense of purpose and concern for social justice in and through their communities. By creating the conditions by which resiliency can thrive, we further explore the opportunities and challenges of policymakers to play catch-up to the critical changes young citizens are making locally to improve their communities. We will thus examine the following dimensions of resilience:

Resilience in a rapidly urbanizing world
Resilience in Youth Development: Shifting from ‘Clients' to ‘Citizens'
Resilience as Critical Consciousness: Young Citizens Create Critical Communities
Resilience as Resistance: Young Citizens Reclaim their communities
Resilience as Re-negotiation: Young Citizens Challenge the Social Contract

Resilience in a rapidly urbanizing world

Rapid urbanization, combined with a large demographic shift towards an overall young population in the developing world, has led to an explosion of children and youth in cities. For children and youth globally, the need to be resilient in an urbanizing world has never been greater.

The challenges young citizens face are numerous: the feminization and racialization of poverty; violence in and outside their homes; deteriorating public education; the stigma and isolation of living in inner-city neighbourhoods; discrimination based on age, race, class, gender and sexual orientation; pollution and other environmental damage; persistent un- and underemployment; the gradual destruction of naturally occurring social networks in the community; and the systematic breakdown of cohesive communities that provide young people with purpose and a feeling of inclusion.

Collectively, these forces threaten the healthy development of many children and youth who lack the protective of wealth, safe homes and neighbourhoods, and engaging communities to buffer them. Yet, as we will see, despite their disadvantages and marginalization, children and youth are making substantial contributions to their cities, communities, and neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, the dominant story of children and youth – those that make headlines, that reach the ears of policy-makers, and prevent many youth services from meaningfully engaging young citizens – is that young people are incapable, dangerous, lack commitment, and create too many barriers to good urban governance. It is their inability to conform to traditional standards of good citizenship, rather than their resilience that forms the dominant plot line of public narratives. Commitments to democratic principles such as active participation, civic responsibility and inclusion may also coexist with attitudes and behaviours that include negative feelings about young people as civic actors and differential treatment of and discrimination against them.

The stories of resilience and critical engagement shared in this document often take place outside of traditional modes of civic engagement. They are stories of survival, resistance, recreation, and renegotiations with civic processes and suggest a need to create communities that are more collaborative, diverse and inclusive. They demonstrate that government infrastructure and administrative practices may lag behind the critical thought and participatory practices of particularly resilient marginalized youth.

Resilience in Youth Development: Shifting from ‘Clients' to ‘Citizens'

Growing the strengths of urban children and youth, “rather than tallying up their weaknesses,” requires an intentional shift in thinking. Community engagement specialist, John McKnight, describes the process of seeing children and youth in a developmental perspective as leveraging their assets. When adults, systems, and communities focus on the strengths and capacities of young citizens, they begin to shift their deficiencybased perspectives to a more relevant and meaningful mindset. They no longer view children and youth as “clients or problems” to be solved, but rather as “citizens” who need the structural capacity to contribute to their own healthy development and to the broader community. One reason for this shift in thinking is the growing empirical evidence indicating that many children's problems have common antecedents and these can be better addressed by drawing on assets and enhancing protective factors.

The “client” label as it relates to young people, suggests needs and deficiencies; the notion of citizenship, however, suggests strengths and capacity to contribute. Moreover, many resilient children and youth know, through their own lived experiences, that the world is not fair and safe for everyone. Part of their ability to adapt and recover in their own lives lies in their realization that they have a substantial role in making things better for themselves and others. When adults and adult systems fail to provide the range of supports that contribute to healthy adolescent development, resilient young citizens fill the gaps for themselves and their peers by creating their own critical communities.

Resilience as Re-Creation: Young Citizens Create Critical Communities

In Canada, Aboriginal children and youth are more likely than their peers across the country to be born into poverty, to suffer poor health, abuse and neglect, incarceration, and placement in the child welfare system away from their families, and often, their communities. They live in a country with a colonial history, and live out the legacy of this oppression through inaccurate representation of themselves as a people in the education systems and mainstream media.

Particularly in the Western world, the media has long been acknowledged as purveying social values and influencing young people's notions of themselves and their world. Yet, despite the media's attempt at objectivity, racism regularly creeps into words, pictures and ideas. The impact on Aboriginal youth in Canada is profound; they see the media as playing an important role in further demeaning and silencing their communities. A growing number of Aboriginal youth in urban centres are choosing to express their resilience through various media.

Redwire Native Youth Media, Vancouver, Canada

In 1997 Redwire Magazine grew out of a grassroots Native youth activist group. Redwire became Canada's first-ever aboriginal youth-run magazine, telling their stories in their own voices. Young urban Natives came together using media to promote social justice, build communities of understanding, and create their own systems of representation. Using media was a way to counter the stereotyping about Native people in the media, and a way to fight the continued oppression and cultural erasure of Native people. Redwire operates with Native youth staff, writers, artists and publishers in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside, the most economically depressed urban area in Canada. Believing that “our voice is our weapon,” resilient youth created this award-winning quarterly publication to give Aboriginal youth across Canada, a chance to heal, to have voice, and to express themselves.

By recreating media into a forum that young urban Natives can speak from, Redwire both provides insights into the state of youth in their community, and challenges their community's youth to take control over their own ideas and stories, and to contribute to the public understanding of social justice. Their messages are often rebellious, brave and passionate, but it is a critical process that helps them realize their power and identity as Native youth. Redwire helps challenge the ways in which Native people, and Native youth in particular, are treated in the broader political realm.

Project R.E.E.L. (Redefining Expression, Education, and Leadership), Montreal, Canada

Using media as a tool of resilience seems to be a global development for many marginalized and racialized youth. In Montreal, Quebec, for example, Black youth face similar challenges of poverty, racial profiling and criminalization, and pervasive negative media stereotyping. Through Project R.E.E.L. (Redefining Expression, Education, and Leadership), a local group of English-speaking youth are using the medium of film to purposefully combat the helplessness and hopelessness Black youth often feel in response dominant media messages and to challenge the mainstream with their own representations of Blackness.

Growing Up in Cities media projects, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Johannesberg, South Africa

In Buenos Aires and Johannesberg media is also the tool of choice for resilient working-class and squatter settlement children to use their personal marginalization to deepen a broader dialogue about community change. In these Growing Up In Cities projects, city kids, age 10 to 14, use photography to document their daily lives for public engagement. In Johannesberg children used video as a tool for tell their story, raising awareness about what it is like to be a child in a squatter settlement, and bringing pressure on the local government to deliver the urban services that had been promised in a resettlement area.

Resilience as Resistance: Young Citizens Reclaim their Communities

Like the Native and Black youth in Canada, and the children in Argentina and Jordan, Mexican children are engaging in ways to push boundaries and shake barriers. Resilience often lies in the power to resist and reclaim as well as to recreate. Consider the resistance movement waged by the people of Tepoztlán, a village of 14,000, 43 miles from Mexico City. Drawing on their strong Indigenous tradition of mobilizing the interests of the collective, children, as integral partners in the community, participated fully in the Tepoztecos' resistance to defend their homes in the biological corridor, a protected area, from the onslaught of international tourism development projects.

In the face of environmental threat, risk and fear, young Tepoztecos participated in night watches, marches and demonstrations and daily meetings in front of the City Hall. They even became victims of state violence in opposition to their cause. Because these children belonged to a community that valued and respected their capacities to contribute, they stood firm in their belief that the rights to the land were for those who lived it, worked it and protected its ecology. In the end, Tepozteco children experienced their own power as this resilient community won its resistance struggle when the global tourism project was finally cancelled.

Resilience as Re-negotiation: Young People Challenge the Social Contract

As the demography of much of the world's population shifts in age towards a younger generation, what are the implications for social, political and economic engagement?

Even as North America experiences a graying of its overall population, Aboriginal peoples are experiencing the opposite trend. Aboriginal children and youth are fast becoming the majority in their communities. These demographic shifts are creating a new window of opportunity for policymakers to capitalize on the strengths of their young citizens. Engaging them in the policy agenda, community life, and the development process is critical to the sustainability of urban areas.

The engagement of diverse, resilient young people cannot happen neatly in conventional ways. In manifesting their resilience, young people are often ahead of policy-makers in critical thought and practice. Further, children and youth often witness and experience critical social and cultural progress with dramatic speed outside the political sphere, so that governments must play an opposing or catch-up role. As leaders in the process of development, young people may be the most valuable resource in determining the conditions of family, school, neighborhood and community environments.

Conclusion

Years of social science research indicate that young people have a natural participatory drive to engage with the human and natural world. They seek more relevant, interactive and participatory forms of engagement than periodic voting in electoral politics allows for. Young citizens today seek multiple arenas for mobilization, expression and civic engagement. By developing a greater understanding of child and youth-driven strategies of resilience, decision-makers can work with young citizens to design more inclusive, effective protective and intervention models. These models of resilience in action require a collective responsibility and commitment to collaborative processes of engagement that may be outside of conventional modes of civic engagement. Such strategies of active engagement exist in urban environments globally and require policy-makers to be open to supporting experiential, challenging and emerging participatory processes that are inclusive of multiple perspectives. Most of all, fostering resilience in young people requires a fundamental paradigm shift from prescriptive modes of intervention for at-risk or marginalized young people, to support for their innate capacity for transformation and change in overcoming serious challenges to development and well-being.

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