Place-making is an important theme for PASCAL.  A recent posting by Chuck Wolfe on the Sustainable Cities Collective website usefully identifies a number of aspects of placemaking which, in his view, are likely to be dominant in 2012.

Traditionally Learning Cites and Regions concentrate on the first of the two words, often with the prefix ‘lifelong’ and it is generally acknowledged that the provenance of the term ‘Learning City’ lies within the context of the growth of interest in lifelong learning throughout the world. However, successive projects and interpretations since 1998 have enlarged the scope of a learning city to include concepts not normally associated with formal educational terminology and structures. This paper shows how the span of learning city and region understanding has, in the past 13 years, expanded into many other realms of place-making activity, referencing programmes and projects initiated by the European Commission.

Full paper follows...

I have just received information from Peter Mayo about a new book by Brian Findsen and Marvin Formosa - Lifelong Learning in Later Life : A Handbook on Older Adult Learning* (here on Amazon).

*Selections from the opening chapters are featured below.

I spotted some time after the event that the eThekwini Municipality, which incorporates the city of Durban, in South Africa is positioning itself as a learning city with the launch of the Municipal Institute of Learning (MILE) in December 2010.

This initiative, which is reported as a first in the history of local government on the continent, aims to enhance the capacity and knowledge of local government practitioners in Africa in order to be effective in the delivery of core competencies.

• Tuesday 10 January 2012: Pedro Rosa Mendes: The Portuguese through the Wallace Line in the Malay Archipelago - Two Sides of an Identity
• Tuesday 31 January 2012: GCID Student event:  BaFa’BaFa’
• Wednesday 8 February 2012: Rwanda Scotland Alliance (RwSA) & GCID: Showcasing Rwanda