For the second year running I had the pleasure of attending the Cork Lifelong Learning Festival. Because of a previous appointment, I had missed the UNESCO Growing Learning in Cork event and had only the Thursday and the Friday to enjoy the proceedings, being picked up at the airport on a wet and miserable Wednesday night by Willie McAuliffe (Chair of the Festival Organising Committee) after a 14 hour journey.

The UN Committee on Sustaianable Development has issued its draft report and invites feedback. The 10 challenges it suggests are:

I am continuously finding networks with synergies to the work we are doing in Learning Cities. The following two are of interest:

Liveable cities - a Singapore based network.

Fundacion Metropoli, Spanish foundation focussing on city networks.

These came from a paper by John Matthews about cities as leaders of green transformation.

While PASCAL's interest and influence extends to all the stakeholders in a community or a city, and its themes cover a wide range of contemporary issues, schools and the health of the planet are relatively sparsely covered. This blog addresses the issue of the knowledge and values that our children and grandchildren will need in order to repair the harm that that our greedy and self-indulgent generation has visited upon our only planetary habitat. But schools are only a part of the story.

Traditionally Learning Cites and Regions concentrate on the first of the two words, often with the prefix ‘lifelong’ and it is generally acknowledged that the provenance of the term ‘Learning City’ lies within the context of the growth of interest in lifelong learning throughout the world. However, successive projects and interpretations since 1998 have enlarged the scope of a learning city to include concepts not normally associated with formal educational terminology and structures. This paper shows how the span of learning city and region understanding has, in the past 13 years, expanded into many other realms of place-making activity, referencing programmes and projects initiated by the European Commission.

Full paper follows...