We recognize that we live in a complex, fast-changing world where social, economic and political norms are constantly redefined. Economic growth and employment, urbanization, demographic change, scientific and technological advances, cultural diversity and the need to maintain human security and public safety represent just a few of the challenges to the governance and sustainability of societies. We affirm that, in order to empower citizens-understood as all residents of cities and communities-we must strive to give them access to and encourage their use of a broad array of learning opportunities throughout their lives. (Unesco Learning Cities Network, Beijing Declaration, http://www.uil.unesco.org/fileadmin/keydocuments/LifelongLearning/learning-cities/enunesco-global-network-of-learning-cities-guiding-documents.pdf) This attention to learning as a means of adapting to social change is not simply the concern of agencies such as Unesco. Increasingly, urban studies scholars are arguing that without attention to learning, knowledge and education, all other moves toward, for example, resilient, smart or sustainable cities, will not be achievable (e.g. Hambleton, 2014a/b; May & Perry, 2018). Urban planners, city mayors and engineers around the world are therefore exploring new ways to integrate development, engineering, adaptation and learning processes that frequently frame cities as 'living labs' (Folstad, 2008). Such experiments, however, are often conducted with little reference to existing literatures and theories of learning and urban education or to the education research field in general. At the same time, the educational research field has not yet fully engaged with these city-scale developments and has not yet begun to provide substantive empirical analysis or theoretical foundations to address this question of how 'cities' can be understood to 'learn'. As Sandlin et al have argued: the shift from spaces that are governed by institutional metaphors and hierarchies to spaces in which education and learning take on more performative, improvisational, subtle, and hidden representations potentially calls for researchers and theorists to examine their methods, epistemological and ontological assumptions, and language to avoid the synecdochical association of education as schooling.

Cities are getting interested in education and learning. Urban planners, geographers, international agencies, and city leaders are beginning to adopt a language of 'learning' and 'education' to try to make sense of how cities and their inhabitants might adapt to contemporary challenges from economic inequality to sustainability. There are now international networks of 'Smart Cities' and calls for 'Wisdom Cities' (Hambleton, 2014); there are networks in which policymakers, industrial partners, and academics who see the city as a 'laboratory' share information about experimental learning; 1 and above all there is the longstanding (dating back to at least 1972) aspiration amongst an international network of cities to be recognised as 'Education' or 'Learning Cities' in which schools, universities, workplaces, and civil society work together to promote learning across the life-course. From one perspective, of course, it is possible to dismiss such developments simply as another in the long list of Brownie badges that cities increasingly accrue to promote themselves in competition with each other-alongside badges for 'resilient cities', 'happy cities', and so forth. From another, this increased attention to learning as central to the formation of viable cities, generating investment, policy action, and producing real effects on the ground, merits critical scrutiny. This Special Issue on Learning Cities aims to begin that process. In this extended introduction, we explore the nature of the inquiry that might be adequate to dealing with the complex interconnections between space, place, policy, education, culture, materiality, and technology that are necessarily engaged when learning becomes a focus of attention at the scale of the city. What is a city? Why would 'cities' be interested in learning? A city can be understood, in Brenner and Schmid's (2015) terms, as a theoretical rather than an empirical category. A city does not, in any empirical sense 'exist' independently of the flows of people, resources, and information that connect it to the countryside, towns, to other cities, to informational resources and governance structures that constrain and enable its existence. To call something a city is an ideological act that draws boundaries that cannot contain empirical reality. Instead of conceptualising a city as some sort of 'container' or 'organisation', then, we might be better to think of cities as 'relational entities' (Amin, 2007) or dynamic processes (Brenner & Schmid, 2015) as 'gatherings' and 'assemblages' of human, material, and discursive elements that are both relatively stable and constantly changing (Amin & Thrift, 2002). A city then, is more verb than noun, an ongoing discursive and material process characterised by complexity

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This article addresses the historical context of a museum collection of Romanian artifacts in light of British–Romanian diplomacy. The museum's holdings are unpacked through a study of the events that led to their acquisition in the 1950s. It is argued that the ethnographic investigation of the historical and political landscape in which the collection emerged reveals the importance of the collection’s performance on the Cold War cultural stage, where acts of exhibiting museum artifacts across the Iron Curtain served to create certain representations of the modern state. Particular attention is paid to the often‐overlooked European folk art collections residing in European ethnographic museums. The history of the Romanian collection held by the Horniman Museum of London (UK) demonstrates that an anthropological critique of these holdings can help explore the complex histories and the political relations that underpinned the movement and display of folk artifacts across the Iron Curtain. [Cold War, museum ethnography, state, Romania, Britain]

Drawing on fieldwork in Bristol, UK, the article resituates the increasingly popular policy framing of a "learning city" within recent anthropological debates on urban political materiality. Using research findings from fieldwork conducted in sites of informal and non-formal learning on the margins of a UNESCO Learning City, we argue for an ethnography that is attentive to the ways in which learning manifests itself in everyday life. Through three field sites-a community space, a bicycle workshop, and a contested heritage campaign-we demonstrate the significance of material culture, controversy, and care as constitutive of learning processes within urban life. Through these examples, we aim to reframe questions on the complexity of learning at a city scale as part of affect-driven knowledge and the material, embodied transmission of skill and everyday practice. By tracing how learning plays out in everyday life, we can begin to interrogate what happens beyond the neoliberal forms of educational governance, and the extent to which the everyday practices challenge or reinforce top-down formulations as well as potentially transforming forms of knowledge production.