CityRings — a Strategy for Enhancing Lifelong Learning in Cities and Regions
through International Links between Stakeholders

The PALLACE Project — An Example

Professor Norman Longworth (Norman_longworth@csi.com)
Professor Sam Allwinkle (S.allwinkle@napier.ac.uk)
Centre for Continuing Education
Napier University
Craighouse Road
Edinburgh EH10
Tel +44 131 455 6144

CityRings - Global Learning City/Region Networks and the PALLACE project

Imagine, if you will, a system of linked learning cities and regions around the globe, each one using the power of modern information and communication tools to make meaningful contact with each other:

• School to school to open up the minds and understanding of young people
• University to University in joint research and teaching to help communities grow
• College to College to allow adults of all ages to make contact with each other
• Business to business to develop trade and commerce
• Hospital to hospital to exchange knowledge, techniques and people
• Person to person to break down the stereotypes and build an awareness of other cultures, creeds and customs

And so on — museum to museum, library to library, administration to administration

Imagine that these links include both the developed and the developing world so that say Sydney, Sapporo, Seattle, Southampton, Shanghai and Kabul, to pick 6 at random, form one Learning Cities ring among a hundred similar networks.

Imagine that one tenth of the money used to develop military solutions to human and social problems were to be spent on people and tools to make more than 100 of these rings work effectively…..

Imagine that such links had started ten years ago. What difference might it have made to today's world?

Isn't this one of the key challenges to us in the Learning Cities movement? Isn't this a worthy objective?'

OK — so it's a stupid, hopelessly idealistic, idea, BUT...

Imagine the advantages…..

• Thousands more people and organisations contributing to the solution of social, cultural, environmental, political and economic problems
• A giant leap in mutual understanding and a tranformation of mind-sets through greater communication between people and organisations
• Profitable economic, trade and technical development through contact between business and industry
• Active interaction and involvement, and a huge increase in available resource through the mobilisation of the goodwill, talents, skills, experience and creativity between cities and regions
• Fewer refugees developing problems can be anticipated and addressed through cooperation between the cities
• Its sustainable because its so much more dispersed. Governments and NGOs are no longer the only initiators of aid to the underdeveloped. Action is now shared with the cities and, through them, the people, organisations and institutions in the city/region have a real world-class focus and raison d'être
• Again three major advantages — understanding — understanding — understanding leading to solution - solution - solution

What an opportunity to make a real difference!

Where is it happening?

We can find the beginnings of such a movement in the European Commission's Pallace project (Promoting Active Lifelong Learning in Australasia, Canada, China and Europe). This pioneering project established multilateral links between cities, creeds, cultures and countries to facilitate the building of a new learning and understanding world.

In its two-year time span, PALLACE linked stakeholders - schools, adult education colleges, cultural services departments, elected representatives and community builders - in:

• the Adelaide and Brisbane regions of Australia
• the Auckland region of New Zealand,
• the city of Beijing in China,
• Edmonton in Canada,
• Espoo in Finland,
• Edinburgh in Scotland
• Sannois in France

The objective was to stimulate these stakeholders to develop greater knowledge, experience and practice in helping themselves and each other to understand the nature of the learning city and their own role in helping it to grow. It arose from work on learning cities, towns and regions carried out in Europe, notably the highly successful European Commission's TELS (Towards a European Learning Society) survey of Lifelong Learning practice in 80 cities, and the rapidly increasing Learning Community activity in Australia, Canada, China and New Zealand.

The interaction between these partners was at many levels of the learning city, engaging a variety of individual stakeholder groups in collaborative pilot activities, and increasing knowledge of their roles in learning city and region development. Each partner ran a separate sub-project, as follows:

The sub-projects

Global schools networks are not new, but the network which South Australia put together was the first to involve children, teachers and parents in debate about the learning city and what schools can do to help create it. There is a huge add-on value to this activity in that it not only creates heightened awareness of what a learning city can be but also potentially mobilises hundreds of people to contribute to it. This of course required some creative management and the development of tools such as questionnaires to help increase understanding but its beauty was that the answers came from the future citizens themselves, and were not imposed upon them by others.

Similarly the Adult Education project led by Papakura/Auckland linked students and staff in Adult Education colleges in debate about what such an institution and its people can do to help transform their own city into a learning city. Here again there was the possibility of new resource, not only in the development of new insights among the participants, but also in the ways in which they use those insights in a practical way. In both these projects the outcomes can be used by others to expand the number of people actively engaged in building the learning city and greatly accelerate the developmental process.

Such an outcome is written into the Cultural Services project led by the City of Espoo, one the world's foremost learning cities. Here the objective was to engage museums, libraries and galleries in debate about their own contribution to the development of lifelong learning in the city. The result was an attractively presented portable display which any city can use to explain what a learning city is, the place of the arts and education in it, and what the citizen can do to further it. The sub-project also assessed public response to the display, inviting the opinion of citizens and encouraging them to be specific about what their own engagement might be. Awareness, insight, mobilisation, involvement.

A Learning City needs Leadership and that was the theme of CEFEL's project for elected representatives. CEFEL is the French national organisation for the training of councillors at town and city level. Alain Bournazel, its President, organised links between councillors in Sannois, France and those in Marion, Australia to debate the nature of the learning city and to decide the strategies they would want to put into place to help create it. He made use of learning materials and the results of previous learning city surveys such as TELS to bring the objectives and activities of the PALLACE project to their attention. We also gained some insight into language and culture differences in this sub-project.

Two projects addressed the issues of establishing learning communities within a city or region, but they were very different from each other. The City of Beijing is establishing a lifelong learning centre in a suburb of a million people. It wanted to explore creative and innovative ways of bringing together the different sectors — schools, adult education, business and industry, community organisations, the city and district administrations — into one huge facility that will promote and deliver lifelong learning. We all learned from, and contributed to, this ambitious programme, which told us much about how people can be persuaded to become active lifelong learning citizens. We also learned much about language and culture differences.

The Queensland project was of a different nature. South and West of Brisbane there is being created a 'Learning Corridor' a scheme to encourage greater community involvement in Lifelong Learning and community activities. The four suburbs involved are different from each other in social composition, age, existing facilities and income, but they have the promotion and improvement of community life as a common aim. Here the two major universities, UQ and QUT, combined (another first for PALLACE?) to help build lifelong learning structures into community life in the corridor, in places using public/private investment companies. Many cities will be interested in the results of this.

Finally, but definitely not leastly, a learning city will use technology creatively in many different ways. Our Albertan partner therefore addressed the needs and contributions of the technology providers in the city — how they can improve the learning infrastructure and its performance in the schools, the colleges, business and industry and higher education. Out of this came a seminar for technology providers in participating cities.

So we had seven sub-projects which pushed back the frontiers of what we know about, and how we build, the learning city and the learning community using the technology that is available to us. Not all were successful and none achieved the very high expectations of its project manager, partly because it was grossly underfunded (50,000 euros for travel and seminar development only — all personnel involved, including the project manager, giving of their time and effort freely), and partly because ambitious projects of this kind take far longer to come to fruition than hoped for. Nevertheless, the insights and perceptions gained from running, interacting and participating in these projects were many and various.

But the real challenge will come when we can include into these cityrings cities and regions from the less-favoured countries of this planet. The breakdown of stereotypes and long-standing hatreds is only possible through a combination of education and communication. It won't happen tomorrow or next week or even next year. This is a long process of learning about each other that can take as long as 20 or more years.

But it must start as soon as possible, and it must include as many people of all ages, so that by the year 2020 we can point to a positive diminution of hatred, terror and mistrust, to replace it with cooperation, knowledge, understanding and wisdom. This is infinitely preferable to the military projects being peddled by those countries whose leadership lacks the creativity or will or imagination to develop more lasting solutions. And it is infinitely less expensive. It requires less than 20% of the money presently being spent on instruments of war or defence. Project participants are now looking for assistance to any organisation, governmental or non-governmental, religious or secular, foundation or personal, that will help to save this precious planet from its own contradictions.

Three seminars took place during the two year period, in Auckland, Edinburgh and Edmonton. These helped both with the dissemination of project activities and results and with the establishment of Learning City and Region networks where they do not already exist.

Further information can be obtained from the project manager Longworthnorman@aol.com