Please find featured below attached a recent piece of work for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which argues for a repositioning of the strategic focus of town and city centres more in line with their DNA or 'personality'. The report also offers the first ever National Framework for Town Centre Performance in the UK with a set of key performance indicators that favour a 'DIY' approach from communities empowering them to gather the data for themselves without any previous knowledge of market research.

Please find featured below and attached for download, a paper on planning for the Shanghai Forum on Lifelong Education which will be held on 15 November immediately before the Hong Kong conference. Denise and I will participate and are preparing papers. The Forum is more ambitious than I expected and is now seen as “a permanent and international summit forum on lifelong education and learning city” and so is something we should take into account in any PASCAL activity in the learning city area beyond 2014.

There is now a growing social and political acceptance of private sector contributions to India's development. However, many recent big-ticket corruption scandals have brought into public glare the growing menace of crony capitalism. In addition, large-scale protests by tribal and other rural communities against displacement from their land, habitat and livelihoods have further painted business as a menacing predator.

On Tuesday, October 15, over 75 leaders in the regional food system came together to discuss how institutions could support the development of regional food systems. This day-long gathering hosted by the Center for Governmental Studies (CGS)-Northern Illinois University took place at the Loyola University Retreat and Ecology Campus in Woodstock, Illinois where participants were able to tour the on-campus, student-run farm.

Please find attached a programme, registration form and information sheet for the U21 RUR Workshop, Research Universities and their Learning Cities, to be held at Hong Kong University on 21^st November 2013. This event is being organised to follow the 11th PASCAL conference, Cities Learning Together, and is associated with the new Learning Cities 2020 initiative of PASCAL.