Young adulthood and the city: Exploring the micro-foundations of youthification

This article explores the micro-foundations of youthification—the growing concentration of young, unmarried individuals in amenity-rich central cities. While previous research has established age and lifestyle preferences as key drivers of this process, given the literature’s focus on quantitative analysis, the question of how young adults themselves come to associate young adulthood with urban living remains largely unexplored. Utilizing qualitative and quantitative data, we examine the cultural meaning-making processes underlying youthification in Tel-Aviv–Jaffa. Drawing on interviews with young adults from late GenX to early GenZ, we show that young adults’ attraction to urban life stems from an understanding of young adulthood as a transitional period for personal freedom and self-exploration, with the city perceived as the ideal setting for these pursuits. This cultural perception, reinforced by interviewees’ friends, influenced locational choices both directly through lifestyle preferences and indirectly through a homophilic desire to live among other young people. We support these findings with statistical analyses of Israeli census (1983, 2008) and registry data (2021), showing that the probability of young, educated singles living in Tel-Aviv–Jaffa—and in shared apartments—was substantially higher in 2008 and 2021 than in 1983. We argue that shared understandings of young adulthood operate as cultural mechanisms linking individual choices to stable social patterns, helping to explain youthification’s persistence across generations and varying economic conditions.