The Centre for BOLD Cities has received funding from the Dutch National Research Agenda (NWA) for the research project ‘Big Data for Youth Policy’. The project revolves around the use of big, open and linked data for determining how to recover ‘invisible youth’, i.e. unemployed, unregistered young people that are not enrolled in an education programme.
According to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), there are currently around 66.000 invisible young people in the Netherlands. These young people form a vulnerable group, prone to increasing social disadvantages, possible mental issues and the risk of criminalisation or radicalisation. The lack of official registration significantly hampers the opportunity of guiding the ‘invisible young’ in social, economic and cultural participation.
The urban social data platform Social Glass, developed by Delft University of Technology researchers, is pivotal to the project. With Social Glass, structured urban data can be combined with unstructured, dynamic data, such as sensor or social media data. The research team will use this platform to examine whether invisible youth can be retrieved.
The Centre for BOLD Cities has assembled an interdisciplinary team for this project, consisting of Liesbet van Zoonen (Erasmus University), Jason Pridmore (Erasmus University), Alessandro Bozzon (Delft University of Technology), Achilleas Psyllidis (Delft University of Technology), Marike Knoef (Leiden University) and Sarah Giest (Leiden University). In addition, the Centre will cooperate with the Knowledge Lab Urban Big Data, the Knowledge Lab Urban Labour Market, the municipality of Rotterdam and representatives of the G4 (cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht).