School:
UBC
Department:
Sociology
Course:
SOCI 361
Instructors:
- Neil Armitage
- Lucas Lau (TA)
City of Vancouver:
- Stina Hanson
Student Team:
- Eman Alsulaiti
- Ben Lum
Strategy:
- Vancouver Plan
Term:
Spring 2021
Summary
HUBBUB ★ WINNER – FIRST PLACE
The chief goal of our project is to design a youth outreach event to elicit feedback around inequalities that stem from 5 plausible City Futures outlined by the Vancouver Plan. The event empowers youth to engage with the deliberative process by facilitating civic literacy. Each activity is designed to repurpose elements of civic government structure, namely, the route to contribute to meetings and decisions at City Hall. This genuine platform equips participants with the skill and venue to collaboratively effect change towards an inclusive, accessible, and equitable future.
The scalable, adaptable event design encourages participants to identify and counter potential inequalities across each plausible City Future. The opportunity to propose policies to mitigate inequality reframes the deliberative civic process to allow for the inclusion of perspectives and recommendations from a demographic whose voice is not otherwise directly represented at a civic level.
Youth may suffer from age-based inequality in political participation, where it becomes difficult for them to have their voices heard such that they may transform their community. For racialised or marginalized youth, age-based inequality can also be compounded with other social barriers that they may face to participate in their everyday lives. In the process of creating the design, our team focussed on an intersectional lens that explores the experience of youth with disabilities in public spaces. This prompted an adaptable event plan that centers around accessibility as a measure of equality; a standard which the event hopes to instil in our current climate in anticipation of all future scenarios.
The event invites all participating Vancouver youth to engage with and explore the Vancouver Plan: a genuine platform for political engagement where youth are heard. Participants meet with other youth and learn from each other’s perspectives in an event where the City reduces barriers to civic engagement and literacy and invites their contribution, recommendations, and experiences.
