Israeli Learning Cities Initiative - The Dialogues Recommendations - April 2013

The aim of this small report is not to go into details of describing organizational structures or infrastructures of collaboration, which must be delivered by the Israeli initiative itself, but to offer clear and hopefully useful recommendations to the Israeli stakeholders in support of their successful learning cities program. It is at the same time the aim to allow global discussion forums some insight into the Israeli initiative.

Background

We carried through a long visit in 2011 to establish international dialogues around the establishment of the Israeli role model learning city of Modi’in. Modi’in is a brand new city in Israel, located right at the center of the country between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and between the Northern and Southern regions of the country. The strategic plan is to take the city’s now 80.000 inhabitants to around 250.000 and to take the city from a place where people live to a place where they live and work. The city is in all aspects a young city, with an average age of 32. The idea is to include learning city visions and practices into all dimensions of a new city.

Modi’in is the role model learning city for Israel and for the national initiative of learning cities. Not a role model in the narrow sense, like a learning city to be copied by others, but in the sense of a hub, an experimentarium, a resource center and a accumulative knowledge and inspiration center for the upcoming learning communities and cities in Israel. The role model project is strongly supported by the Municipality of Modi’in. The resource center role is strongly supported by two national organisations, the Union of Local Authorities in Israel and the Israeli Adult Education Association.

The visit in April 2013 aimed to establish a number of dialogues with very different stakeholders in different parts of Israel to allow the monitoring of the present strategic step: taking the national learning cities from Modi’in to a number of new learning cities across the country. Part of the visit therefore included celebrating the second Israeli learning city of Ra’anana in the central part of Israel, and establishing dialogues with potential new learning cities in the northern part of the country, characterized by coexistence between Jewish and Arab communities.

The overall aim of the visit was to discuss this second phase of the national initiative and in particular to discuss the challenges linked to taking the initiative from a role model city and to a network of learning cities. There are vital challenges linked to such a step, as it requires strong visions, leadership and coordination, but in particular strong inspiration and resource allocation actions.

The Israeli Learning Cities Initiative is a top-down initiative with considerable policy support, and therefore the creator of the initiative, Dr. Orna Mager, is extremely focused on how to balance the top-down initiative against strong community activities directly involving different groups of citizens. Also in this field Modi’in will be the role-model, not telling what to do in new learning cities, but offering inspiration on how to work together in the local communities. The Israeli Learning City Initiative is deeply linked to and inspired by the European Xploit project as well as by various global learning cities platforms, such as Pascal and the emerging UNESCO learning cities network initiative. It is a clear value in the common understanding of the initiative among Israeli stakeholders that the Israeli initiative must be linked strongly to international platforms, networks and dialogues.

It is precisely the mission of the Advisory Board to offer a strong bridge between the Israeli initiative and the European and global platforms.