Our approach

First, we believe it is important in thinking about learning and the city, to distinguish between learning and education.

From socio-cultural theory, we understand learning as a situated, social process in which individuals learn through processes of encounter with others (in particular with more experienced others) and through their use of tools and artefacts. We understand cognition not as an individual function but as being distributed across and between people and artefacts. Learning is done through and with people and things. Learning can take place in any setting and can comprise many different forms of adaptation to environment or development of new capabilities, ways of knowing or understanding. Such learning can be advantageous to the individual or harmful, depending on what is learned and upon the social conditions in which the learner lives. Learning to navigate a dangerous neighbourhood is as much learning as learning to interpret algebra. In naturally occurring social settings, learning can be facilitated by social practices where informal processes of mentoring, observation and legitimate peripheral participation as apprentice alongside more expert others takes place. Such settings might include everything from learning to fix cars alongside a parent to learning to perform complex surgical operations. Our assumptions here draw on the work of Vygotsky, Lave and Wenger, Pea & Perkins (amongst others).

Learning takes place in social settings with histories, traditions and cultures and with people who have identities and histories within those settings. The tools used in those settings have particular histories and expectations of use within each culture of use; hammers, poems, websites, instructional leaflets, language all embody expectations of how they will be employed, expectations that may be specific to that culture or that setting. Different people encountering those tools for the first time or in a new setting, may therefore be alienated or acknowledged by these tools, making it relatively easier or harder to learn to use them. At the same time, institutions embody particular expectations about individual behaviour and performances, and expectations about the sorts of identity that individuals may or should exhibit within those institutions. As people enter these institutions, they may therefore find themselves misunderstood by the institution, misunderstanding its practices and/or having to alter their identity in order to participate in and understand these institutional cultures; while others whose identities and histories might have included insight into or experience of such settings before, may experience such settings as natural and frictionless. Our assumptions here draw on the work of Mary Hamilton, David Barton, James Wertsch, Dorothy Holland, Sara Ahmed, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein (amongst others).

Learning occurs in places and is essential to the capacity to inhabit those places. Places – such as cities – can be understood as themselves educational. To survive in them individuals have to learn to read the signs, make the connections, understand the practices of cause and effect that operate within them. These places draw attention to particular ways of being that are acceptable (crossing the road in particular places) and to those that are not (ball games on the new grass in the park). Such attention is drawn not through formal teaching processes, but by living alongside others and by attending to the messages, symbols and signs that such environments offer. The person and the place emerge together, through processes described by scholars such as Tim Ingold, Colin Macfarlane, Cynthia Chambers, as ‘learning to dwell’.

Drawing on educational philosophy, we understand education (as distinct from learning) as intentional practices developed by societies to create encounters between individuals and existing knowledge and ways of being in the world. Following Deborah Osberg, we resist setting the personal development of the individual and the socialisation into the world in opposition. Instead, we see educational spaces as those characterised by a process of ‘symbiotic anticipation’, in which conditions are created to support the encounter between person and world, between the unique experience, knowledge and history of each person and the existing resources and possibilities of what already exists, in order to enable something new to emerge. The position that we derive from this might be called ‘emergentist’; explicitly seeing intentional educational practice as a time and place of encounter with difference. This encounter, we argue, following Biesta, Lewis, Osberg – enables the new – in both person and world, and in their interaction – to emerge. Where such encounters best take place is subject of debate – either in the settings of formal education in which teachers are seen as convening such encounters – or in the processes of critical public pedagogy, in which citizens are collectively invited to name the world, reframe their understandings of it, and create new possibilities. Here we draw on the literature on critical and public pedagogy (Giroux, Sandlin & Burdick, Freire).

Central to our thinking about education is a recognition that multiple forms of knowledge exist and might productively co-exist. Alongside western canons of scientific and formal education are tacit ways of knowing that emerge from the learning processes we discuss above, as well as knowledge traditions that are associated with the body, with place, with indigenous traditions, with spirit, with affect and with relationality. One of the urgent educational questions currently being worked on by post-colonial and de-colonial educational scholars is]how to create conditions for encounter between individuals drawing on both indigenous and western modern knowledge traditions. Others working on this question from a different perspective, reframe the educational process as a distinctive temporality, understood as a space of suspension, in which different forms of knowledge are brought into the community but held in suspension from their origins – in other words, individuals are not anchored to particular knowledge traditions that they might inhabit, but invited to explore and participate different ways of knowing that might be brought by other participants. Here we draw on the work of scholars such as Vanessa Andreotti, Jan Masschelein, Martin Simons and Michael Young.

Understanding learning and the city, then, requires understanding both learning as the informal and ongoing processes of interaction with the people, places, tools and practices of life in the city and education as the intentional creation of conditions in which encounters between individuals and new (to them) forms of knowledge and history might be created in order to foster the symbiotic emergence of something new in the world. Learning processes are the ongoing practices of any inhabitant of the city, adapting, dwelling, improvising, observing, participating in the life of the city – whether as Lord Mayor or newest child. Educational processes are those practices that intentionally put individuals and the world into a moment of encounter, actively inviting sharing of knowledge, mentoring and exchange, open to the creation of new ways of being in the world. Such processes may exist in schools and universities, they may also exist in the world of community organisations, in public protests, in democratic meetings.

A city can be understood, in Brenner’ & Schmit’s (2015) terms, as a theoretical rather than an empirical category. A city does not, in any empirical sense ‘exist’ independently of the flows of people, resources and information that connect it to the countryside, towns, to other cities, to informational resources and governance structures that constrain and enable its existence. To call something a city is an ideological act that draws boundaries that cannot contain empirical reality. Instead of conceptualising a city as some sort of ‘container’ or ‘organisation’, then, we might be better to think of cities as ‘relational entities’ (Amin, 2007) or dynamic processes (Brenner and Schmidt, 2015), as ‘gatherings’ and ‘assemblages’ of human, material and discursive elements that are both relatively stable and constantly changing (Amin and Thrift, 2002). A city then, is more verb than noun, an ongoing discursive and material process characterised by complexity (Batty, 2009) that emerges through the myriad everyday interactions between inhabitants and the physical materialities of the space (Pink, 2012). Nor is any such city singular: complex processes of emergence generate ‘patterns of inequality spawned through agglomeration and intense competition for space’ (Batty 2008). As different bodies work on and are worked on by the city in different ways (Grosz, 1998), cities are constituted and experienced differently by gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability, wealth and age (Scott, A. 2010; Watson, 2000; Armstrong, 2007).

This recognition of the complexity of urban life is one of the reasons why urban planners and city leaders are increasingly interested in learning. As modernist central planning is increasingly seen to fail in conditions of complexity, anticipatory-, adaptive- and emergent- governance is being promoted as an alternative guiding principle for city leadership (Quay, 2010; Camacho, 2009). Such governance is premised upon a view of cities as terrains for experiments in living, a framing that positions both city leaders and inhabitants as learning through practices of improvisation and adaptation (McFarlane, 2011; Amin, 2014). How a city learns, who in a city is learning, and in particular, how a city can learn with, through and alongside its citizens (whose diverse experiences are necessarily different from those of city leaders) therefore become important questions (Greyling, 2014).

Rather than conceptualising learning as happening ‘in’ the city, therefore, we operate with the assumption that learning happens through cities, through the assembling of people, artefacts, ideas and practices in particular configurations that enable particular encounters, exchanges of ideas, particular habituations to using particular tools and working in particular places. We also, from an educational perspective, recognise that the educational institutions – both formal and informal – with which we might be concerned, namely those places that are intentionally attempting to facilitate the encounter between individual and new knowledge, are formed, as the wider city, through processes of more or less stable assemblages of people, objects, things, flows and practices. It is not the case that we can see, therefore, the ‘educational infrastructure’ in isolation from the city, as sitting ‘in’ the city – but as a set of processes with particular purposes that are deeply entangled with the flows and processes of the wider city. Here we draw on scholars such as Jan Nespor, Lipman et al.

The idea of the city that learns is associated with a utopian framing of the city as a site in which better futures can be invented, explored and put into practice (Evans, 2011). Such an aspiration is driven, in part, by despair at the capacity of nation states or international regimes to address contemporary problems; see for example the popularity of books such as Barber’s ‘If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities’ or Katz and Bradley’s ‘The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are fixing our broken politics and fragile economy’.

Our own interest in learning and the city is driven by a particular set of assumptions about the future and about futurity that are worth explaining here.

First, we recognise that the future emerges from a set of conditions in which certain constraints and latent possibilities will be established. For our interest in sustainable cities, the constraints and possibilities that act as parameters for life in the city include flows of water, food, energy and wider patterns of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, setting expectations of particular parameters of heat and cold within which a city might survive. We also consider flows of wealth, goods and people that will be shaped by these patterns as they have unpredictable impacts elsewhere, and flows of wealth and people that create or limit certain possibilities for action and intervention – such as international tax laws, competition rules, public or private ownership, citizenship requirements etc. (Here we draw on the work of Barbara Adam and Chris Groves in particular)

At present, the conditions governing constraints and possibilities look to be producing futures of significant and rapid disruption to infrastructure, ways of life and foundations for survival. The attempt to constrain global warming above pre-industrial temperatures to 2 degrees requires, for example, massive (up to 75%) cuts in carbon emissions by 2025, which requires substantial changes to current ways of living and organisation of life in cities. Should such a goal not be met, then these conditions require us to begin to address how cities can mitigate the impact of the significant and disruptive weather conditions that they will be facing. These conditions might best be understood not as a technical problem needing a set of clear solutions, but as a change in cultural context, in which learning to live with and within a ‘nature’ that is significantly more unpredictable and likely hostile than before is required. Just as the 90s 2000s were spent learning how to live with the ‘knowledge economy’, so the 2010s and 2020s need to be spent learning how to live with Gaia – Lovelock’s term for the self-correcting (and human-ignoring) natural systems of the planet. (Here we draw on the work of the IPCC, the Balaton Group, James Lovelock, Bruno Latour)

Second, we recognise that the future does not yet exist, and that new possibilities do and will emerge at the interaction between action and the world as it currently exists. The potential of the world exceeds its current manifestation, and as such, the possibility of new realities emerges. Such new realities are unlikely to include changes to fundamental underpinning laws of physics (such as the laws which mean that the carbon currently in the atmosphere will continue to exert a heating effect for centuries); but they may bring into play new ways of responding to such facts that are not currently envisaged or imaginable in current conditions. Learning to live with Gaia will not be successfully achieved, however, by attempts to engineer ‘solutions’ to nature (which suggests a profound misunderstanding of the complexity of climate science and global systems) but to recognise that we are part of natural systems and that nature exceeds our capacity to model and govern it. Instead, a form of innovation and improvisation will be required that involves coming to know each other, working out forms of accommodation, learning how to collaborate. Both old forms of knowledge and emerging technologies will be required. Indeed, the forms of knowledge that will be required are not yet known. This too requires exploration. (Here we draw on the work of Amitabh Ghosh, Ernst Bloch, Mike Hulme, Zoe Todd, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Roberto Unger)

Futures, therefore, are both constrained and potentially novel. The educational imperative, in this situation, is to build encounters with the knowledge of existing constraints and resources and to actively and intentionally create opportunities to generate novelty from such encounters. Such novelty might be the application of old knowledge in new ways – for example, the development of community ownership of transport – rather than just the development of technological ‘innovation’ for its own sake.  Such novelty might be the development of new knowledge for old problems – such as applications of novel technologies to create new ways of addressing inequality in housing or energy consumption.