Around the world, cities are seeking the recipe for economic success in a rapidly changing global marketplace. Indispensable assets in a post–industrial economy include well-educated people, the ability to generate new ideas and to turn those ideas into commercial realities, connectivity to global markets, and multi-modal transportation infrastructure.

There are 71 days to go until the RIO+20 conference in Brazil. This link provides details of a range of events within the conference including in food security and sustainable agriculture, sustainable cities and transition to a green economy, all of which may be of interest to PASCAL subscribers.

Dr Yuan shows how learning city strategies can be applied successfully in a city as large as Beijing. He indicates that there is much in this Beijing stimilus paper that merits close study with a number of lessons that he believes are of value to learning city initiatives around the world.

Understanding Society is an initiative by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council, which contains headline findings from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey. This offers data on 14 topic areas using results from approximately 100,000 individuals in 40,000 households, as well as young people aged 10-15. Topics include social support networks, housework and gender, risky behaviours of 10-15 year olds, population diversity, employment and racial discrimination, immigrants and overseas remittances, higher education and social background, working hours, employment and the recession, sports participants and measuring well-being:

http://research.understandingsociety.org.uk

Kampala City has evolved from a small town of 8 km² through a “City of Seven hills” at independence in 1962 to one of the fastest growing cities in Africa. Today Kampala City occupies more than twenty five hills that include Makerere Hill on which the country’s biggest and oldest university is located (Kibirige, 2006). The hills have steep slopes separated by wide valleys. The city derives its name from the land of “Impala” (antelope) that roamed the area before it was taken over for human settlement.