There has been considerable development of the concept of the Learning City in recent years as cities have sought to address a myriad of challenges. This has usually involved in successful cases a good deal of innovation ,at times with entrepreneurial initiatives, particularly in social areas and with partners such as universities. Shanghai and Beijing provide good examples. While Learning City initiatives have expanded in new areas, such as East Asia, initiatives in some other longer established areas have not been sustained.

This experience raises the question whether successful Learning Cities need to develop a capacity for on-going systematic innovation as a requirement to be sustainable in the longer term. In short, they need to build a learning and entrepreneurial culture able to continue innovating and adapting to new challenges.

This paper considers this question, drawing on experience from Learning Cities documented in city stimulus papers in the PASCAL International Exchanges (PIE). I also bring in management perspectives drawing on a useful book by management guru Peter Drucker on Innovation and Entrepreneurship to explore some common features between sustainable Learning Cities and entrepreneurial organisations and cities.

The Learning City journey

While antecedents of Learning Cities can be traced back through history, the modern idea of a Learning City emerged from work by OECD on lifelong learning. In 1992 OECD conducted a project in a number of cities to test ways in which learning strategies developed by cities could provide lifelong learning opportunities. This initiative led to a report titled City Strategies for Lifelong Learning prepared for the Second Congress of Educating Cities in Gothenburg in 1992.

The concept of city strategies for lifelong learning defined the main thrusts of the initial generation of Learning Cities, for example in the Learning Towns program supported by the State of Victoria in Australia and the subsequent Australian National Learning Community Project 2001.

However, it soon became evident that the learning objectives of cities could be harnessed in progressing a broader range of aspirations for good cities. These included community building, environmental objectives, place making, and enhancing health and well-being. The story of Learning Cities since 1992 has been one of an on-going broadening of objectives through harnessing learning strategies. This is an unfinished story.

Converging strands and EcCoWell

PASCAL sought to map these developments through its Program of International Exchanges (PIE), which ran from 2011 to 2013, and which led to the development of the EcCoWell concept. EcCoWell was seen as a prototype for a holistic and integrated development of a sustainable Learning City that brought together, in synergistic ways, economic, ecological, community, cultural, well-being, and lifelong learning strands of development in cities.

The initial EcCowell clarifying working paper in March 2012 was influenced by the seeming convergence of the ideals and objectives built into the concepts of Learning Cities, Healthy Cities, and Green Cities. The convergence of key objectives and aspirations between Healthy Cities and Learning Cities was taken up in papers prepared for the PASCAl Hong Kong conference in November 2013. While this was a useful step, there is a need for a more comprehensive approach that extends across all sectors relevant to sustainable Learning Cities that enhance the well-being and quality of life of inhabitants of cities. This approach may perhaps be seen as a merging and interaction of the concepts of EcCoWell and that of the Entrepreneurial Learning City.

The city of Cork contributed much during 2013 in hosting a seminar on EcCoWell in March 2013, and following up with an International Conference in September. This has provided a platform for further development in the new PASCAL Networks program in a Network that includes Cork, Taipei, Glasgow, and Tampere.

The PIE experience with EcCoWell has pointed to issues involving learning, innovation, and entrepreneurship that need to be explored further. Might systematic innovation and entrepreneurship be the missing ingredients to bring life and vitality to the EcCoWell concept?

Learning, innovation, and entrepreneurship

While the Learning City idea has led to considerable innovation in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Cork. Taipei, and the Hume Global Learning Village, entrepreneurship has usually not been a component in the strategies adopted. In a few cases , such as the Hume Global Learning Village, building a learning culture in the community has been seen as a long term objective to be achieved through a number of stages.

Peter Drucker in his work on innovation and entrepreneurship comments on innovation as the tool of entrepreneurs (Drucker,p17-18). However, he argues for a concept of “systematic innovation” rather than an ad hoc approach to innovation.

Systematic innovation therefore consists in purposeful and organised search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of opportunities that such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.

Drucker,p31

The notion of systematic innovation could apply equally to a strategic approach to building a sustainable Learning City as evident, for example, in the Shanghai and Beijing Learning Cities and the Hume Global Learning Village.

Drucker takes this argument further in articulating his concept of an entrepreneurial society which also seems to have much in common with a sustainable learning society underpinned by a well established learning culture.

What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady, and continuous. Just as management has become the specific organ of all contemporary institutions, and the integrating organ of our society of organisations, so innovation and entrepreneurship have become the integral life-sustaining activity in our organisations, our economy, our society.

Drucker,p236

This could be seen as a statement on the learning society, suggesting things that these concepts have in common.

Frontiers to be addressed

While there has been good progress in clarifying relationships between Learning Cities, Healthy Cities, and Green Cities, there are a number of frontiers that remain to be explored in developing the concept of sustainable Future Learning Cities.. These include, in particular, the economic dimension of Learning Cities and the interface with the Smart City concept- very important in the context of the digital revolution and innovative approaches to learning which harness technology.

While it is well known that effective learning cities build human, social, cultural, and identity capital, how these are applied for entrepreneurial purposes has received less attention. This reflects a fairly general neglect of economic aspects of Learning Cities.

While I suggest that the Smart City interface and the economic dimension of Learning Cities are the priorities, there are other aspects that need to be brought more fully into thinking about Future Learning Cities. These include place making and the cultural dimension of city development. This is an area where the Cultural Network of PASCAL can make a contribution.

Implications for PASCAL Networks

I have posted this paper to suggest some common interests that the PASCAL EcCoWell and Entrepreneurial Learning City Networks have in common in the hope that their exchanges will develop these ideas further in articulating a vision for Future Learning Cities. So my answer to the question of whether successful Learning Cities are always entrepreneurial is that they should be, although this has usually not been the situation in the past, apart from some areas of social innovation.

Developing the concept of sustainable Learning Cities has been a learning journey over three decades in which there have been contributions from bodies like OECD, the European Commission, PASCAL, and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong learning. In the case of PASCAL, our experience with PIE is now being carried on in the more sharply focussed Learning Cities 2020 Networks program which offers five directions and perspectives in developing ideas about sustainable Future Learning Cities. The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning has contributed much in promoting international interest in the idea of Learning Cities, and is continuing this work with the Global Learning City Network.

While I have focussed on some implications for the EcCoWell and Entrepreneurial Learning City Networks, all PASCAL Networks can contribute to the great challenge of identifying and promoting the characteristics of sustainable Future Learning Cities.

So I leave the following question for all Networks:

What contribution can your Network make to sustainable Learning Cities for the Future?

I hope that all participants in Networks will respond to this question directly below or if you wish to post a more significant piece, submit a new blog.

In concluding this paper I return to EcCoWell and Entrepreneurship, and the question this paper poses. An Entrepreneurial Learning City may be seen as a creative amalgam of the characteristics of rounded Learning Cities built upon holistic EcCoWell principles. Is this the path to the entrepreneurial society described by Peter Drucker? If so, what steps need to be taken.

Perhaps Drucker should have the last word:

We need to encourage habits of flexibility, of continuous learning, and the acceptance of change as normal and as opportunity – for institutions as well as for individuals.

Drucker, p242

References

Drucker,P (1985),  Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Butterworth-Heinemann,Oxford

Huang J (2012), Shanghai Stimulus Paper - http://pie.pascalobservatory.org/cities/shanghai

Kearns, P (2011),  Hume Global Learning Village - http://pie.pascalobservatory.org/cities/humegloballearningvillage

Kearns, P(2012), Living and Learning in Sustainable Opportunity Cities - http://pie.pascalobservgatory.org/eccowell/

OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (1992), City Strategies for Lifelong Learning, OECD, Paris

Yuan, D (2012), Towards the Learning City of Beijing : Policy and Strategy - http://pie.pascalobservatory.org/cities/beijing