Towards a research agenda for the ‘actually existing’ Learning City

Abstract

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

The Stuff of Contention and Care: Affective Materiality and Everyday Learning in Bristol, UK

“…The language of learning is becoming ubiquitous in planning offices and municipal institutions, as well as among policy makers, development consultants, and urban scholars (Campbell 2012; Longworth 2006). There remain, however, deep conceptual challenges to both theorizing and studying learning in the city (see Facer & Buchczyk 2019b).…”

Advancing Learning Cities: Lifelong Learning and the Creation of a Learning Society

“…It provides a globally applicable framework for cities to come to grips with the concept and its application. The editorial of the Oxford Review of Education's 2019 special issue on learning cities flags some of the arguments against, and potential pitfalls of, normative learning city models, i.e., that they may tend to prioritize certain forms of education and training based on an economic rationale and neglect other domains; that the governance approaches they promote could result in giving too much emphasis on planning while neglecting actual practices; and that international networks, benchmarks and indicators might encourage cities to conform to a vision far from their reality (Facer and Buchczyk 2019).…”

Universities as Lifelong Learning Institutions: A New Frontier for Higher Education?

“…Driven by the principle of inclusion, learning cities advance policies and practices that foster sustainable development, social justice and active citizenship through lifelong learning. As such, they emerge as complex objects at the junction of education, economics, geography and political sciences (Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk 2019). Within the learning city, universities are often seen as key agents for the transfer of knowledge and the development of innovation networks.…”