The role of learning cities in meeting today’s challenges for a better future has been a dominant theme in PASCAL work on learning throughout the period 2017 to 2021. This theme has been given urgency and direction by developments during this period, especially the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, while demographic change with ageing populations, the growing impact of the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, and the pace of change, in their cumulative impact have brought this sense of a time of disruption and turbulence with the world out of control.

UNESCO (2021) has responded to this situation by establishing an International Commission on Futures of Education to rethink knowledge, education, and learning “in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, precarity”. PASCAL research since its 2017 Pretoria Conference needs to be viewed in this context of harnessing learning in the quest for a better and sustainable future. The Pretoria Conference should be seen as the starting point in the PASCAL quest to contribute to this mission. This paper also draws on PASCAL work on learning city policy over the past decade which shortly will be brought into a consolidated document entitled, Learning and city futures: addressing the policy challenges.