ABSTRACT
Bradford in West Yorkshire is Britain’s youngest city. More than 30 per cent of its 530,000 residents are under the age of 20 and it has the highest proportion of under-16-year-olds of any place in the UK. As deindustrialisation continued in the 1980s, places such as Bradford lacked the economic resilience to respond to the growth of new knowledge-intensive and technologically driven industries. Despite its history, Bradford is still an important economic centre with an economy worth over £9.5 billion, the eighth largest in England and the third largest in Yorkshire after Leeds and Sheffield. Young people are the future of cities such as Bradford but they are more exposed to economic disruption than the population as a whole. Automation, artificial intelligence, and continued globalisation will boost jobs in some British cities over the coming decades but will also widen the economic divide.
