This semester, I participated in the UN Youth Voice Competition as part of my Global Goals course. The competition encourages young people between Years 7-10 to come up with creative solutions to given prompts regarding world issues. Participants presented a prepared 5-minute speech proposing their solution to their chosen problem, then answered 2 impromptu questions about their speech from the Voice judges.
The topics for this year’s preliminary rounds are listed below:
• How can the government encourage a fair transition to renewable energy for Australian industries?
• How can the international community sustainably utilise resources in outer-space?
• How do we better design Australian spaces for residential living?
• What can be done globally to increase the resilience of healthcare systems?
• How do we increase access to international travel in a post-covid world?
• How can Australia better support its ageing population?
I chose Topic 3, looking into how we could better design Australian cities such as Perth for residential living. While there were many ways to approach this task, I decided to focus on something I knew well: urban sprawl.
Perth is a long city, around 150km, as I discovered in my research. Our urban sprawl earns us the dubious title ‘Longest city in the world’. The continuous expansion of the metropolitan area has had many negative impacts on the standards of our residential living spaces, and I wanted to link the two topics in a way that would help people to understand the inherent connection between urban sprawl and the detrimental effects it has on peoples’ health and quality of life.
My solution proposed a 3-point plan to improve the design of residential living spaces in Perth. The first of these points was to end the expansion of the city. The larger the city is, the more disparity there is between the inner suburbs and the outer ones. Lower income communities tend to live in outlying suburbs, where land is cheaper, but there’s much less access to facilities such as free healthcare and public transport. Urban sprawl doesn’t just cause economic ‘segregation’, it also perpetrates the cycle of poverty, so stopping it would be the first of many steps to improving the lives of our most vulnerable.
The second and third points to my solution focused on how we could redesign our existing spaces to not only accommodate for more people as our population grows, but also to foster a stronger sense of community based on our shared identity as West Australians. Creating more green spaces, making housing in the inner suburbs cheaper, and bringing the city closer together are just some of many ways we could achieve this. Close-knit communities have been proven to improve both physical and mental health, and is, in my opinion, one of the most significant things that can be done to improve residential living spaces and quality of life.
My participation in the Voice competition this year was an extension of my initial Global Goals project, where I researched ways to increase youth awareness and understanding of our government and political system. My goal was to help people my age realise the importance of politics, and how we can help drive change by raising our voices. In entering Voice, I hoped to make myself heard on issues that mattered to me. While it was intimidating to be confronted with huge, real world issues, I enjoyed the challenge of breaking down my topic and developing a solution to a problem that has plagued Perth for many decades.