"You are important in the world of stewardship, whether it's stewarding a park or stewardship in a neighborhood." Vin Cipolla, President of the Municipal Arts Society of New York (MAS), spoke with encouragement when he addressed high school students at a recent award ceremony for the CITI Youth Program. With more than two million people in New York City under the age of 20, it's never too early to have a voice in shaping an urban vision for the city's future.

CITI Youth stands for Community Information Technology Initiative, a MAS project that takes high school students into the heart of urban planning, with maps as their guides. After learning how digital maps can be used as an important tool in community decision-making, students are placed as Map Technicians in paid internships with their community boards. Teenagers from the Bronx to the Lower East Side are finding that not only can they attend meetings and speak out about neighborhood development, but that they can also spread their enthusiasm about technology such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to older board members. The sense of pride this interaction brings to the students was expressed by one named Dimitri, who talked about how empowering it was to feel that he was helping elected officials make better decisions and actually making a difference.

The CITI Youth initiative gives the next generation a chance to shape their urban environment and motivates them to care about the quality of the streets, parks, and buildings they inherit. Kids who are involved in the place-making process stand a better chance of growing up with a strong sense of community and commitment to their neighborhoods.

Learn more about CITI Youth and other MAS efforts to promote smart urban design, planning, and preservation. Or get started making your own NYC neighborhood map with NYCityMap, the same mapping tool used by CITI Youth's map technicians, compliments of the NY Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication (DOITT).

Smarter urban planning decisions can be made with GIS digital maps, which are used by CITI Youth students (pictured above) to help community board members better gauge impacts from development on neighborhoods. Maps can display many layers that provide information about the urban environment, such as how close schools are to public transportation, or where you can go to find fresh food and a nearby park to enjoy lunch outside. Parks, wifi hotspots, and green markets throughout lower Manhattan are shown in the map above, generated from NYCityMap, a public mapping tool provided by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication (DOITT).