The educating city becomes a promoter of wellbeing and of life opportunities for citizens; it is organised as an inclusive space for living together, holding dialogues and connecting, while also favouring the growth of innovation and creativity.
© Ana Yael Zareceansky
Barcelona has made a commitment to an educational role stemming from its interest in the progress of its people. This interest is borne out in its ways of conceiving urbanism and infrastructure, the tone with which it emphasises the public role and socialising function of art, culture and leisure, and the support lent to innovative forms of citizen participation.
The spaces and the times we live in and organise; our ways of living and of living together; tendencies in relationships and welcoming people; festival and commemoration rituals; beliefs, values and ideals that we share; devices and technologies, cultural symbols and artefacts; preferred communication systems, and even the ways of being and doing inside a space are ways in which a city contributes to the education (or miseducation) of the people, and also ways in which people contribute to produce an urban model.
In keeping with its theme and focusing on the challenge of inclusion, the 2014 International Congress of Educating Cities had three thematic axes: inclusion as a right, collective participation and commitment, and the city as a space for innovation and creativity. In other words, the pyramid of the educating city of the future is built on three complementary and integrated models: the inclusive city, the participatory city and the creative city, models that jointly support three types of capital that are nothing without people: human capital, social capital, and intellectual and creative capital. This means the educating city becomes a promoter of wellbeing and of life opportunities for citizens; it is organised as an inclusive space for living together, holding dialogues and connecting, while also favouring the growth of innovation and creativity in this same space.
Moreover, the three pillars of educating cities feed off one another. Inclusive policies – in housing, employment, health, education, culture, etc. – encourage participatory commitment from the citizens. And the increase in associative density, the strengthening of community ties and the multiplication of cultural exchanges promote and attract talent and creativity, art and innovation, the creation of ideas and economic progress, learning, entrepreneurship, the building of trust, and the opportunity to share projects.
Ten metaphors which sum up a project
These three substantial thematic axes allow for the visualisation of ten images, ten metaphors on the configuration of new educating cities.
1. The Moebius strip, a geometric shape with only one face. Between city and education there are no outer or inner faces – one on the outside and the other on the inside. They are the same face. The city educates; education urbanises. Education transforms the life of our cities. Urbanity and community spirit are embodiments of the city’s educational footprint. If there are smart cities it is not because there is smart infrastructure, but because there are smart citizens.
2. Beyoncé. A playful piece of postmodern graffiti in Paris read: “Liberté, Égalité et Beyoncé”. It was an error for our cities to have overlooked the value of fraternité. The city is a community; it creates links, affiliations and means of penitence. There is no common good without a sense of belonging to the community. Belonging is achieved by way of three possible routes: a) applying real and universal citizens’ rights that enforce the social contract with the welfare state, b) the preservation and sharing of a shared cultural and linguistic heritage and c) active participation in civic association processes. Solidarity is not charity, and inclusion cannot be paternalistic, but instead must be citizens acting freely.
3. Yin and yang. Talent and equity, educational success and social cohesion, learning and service are factors that we often see and experience as antitheses, when in fact they are two sides of the same coin. We have to incorporate people’s needs, capacities and opportunities into a single educational package. By learning you can serve, and by serving you learn.
4. Preparing a sauce. There is a central subject in education, the person, but there are many educating agents, and all are essential (schools and universities, authorities, social entities, families, companies, citizens, the media, museums, sports centres, churches, etc.). We need to strengthen our awareness of how we are educative agents. Then we will need partnerships, complementarity and shared responsibility to learn to work together. The key is knowing how to put it all together. This is the new task of relations leadership.
5. Josep Pallach. This teacher, pedagogue and political leader repeatedly insisted that “politics is pedagogy”. The best and most genuine stewardship of power must have an educating mission. Without this, politics offers its poorest and most tractable façade.
6. Plato: the soul feeds the body. Physical urban space (the body) depends on the mental space of its citizens (the soul). Without (good) mentalities and predispositions there is not (good) urbanisation. Compare the image of Japanese football fans picking up their rubbish at the end of their team’s game in the Brazil World Cup to the Barcelona city clean-up crews, who every year after the festival eve of Sant Joan have to spend the whole morning cleaning up beaches turned into a squalor worthy of pigs. Educational change must primarily be a change of mentalities.
7. Newton and the space/time equation. The educating city is space (agora, urbanism, mobility planning), but there is also time: rhythms, cadences, beats. We need a new and worthy organisation of timetables that makes our cities less stressful and much more balanced. Currently, time and our educational trajectories are discontinuous, fragmented and often endogamous. We need new spaces and new rhythms.
8. Collaboratories. Together we know and are capable of more. In the binomials memory/project, inheritance/difference, imitation/innovation, legacy/creativity, there is always the risk of simple repetition of the past, or the false belief that one is always starting from nothing and/or breaking new ground. We need to experiment collaboratively and learn to combine continuity and change. Creativity does not necessarily imply ditching the past, but rather holding a constant dialogue with it.
9. Internet. The physicality of the city is progressively having a new layer added by another of people’s environments: the web. Children and adolescents hide away at home, but over the internet they are bowling down streets and through squares that are larger than life. There is a new virtual urban space for contact and participation. It needs to be understood and put to educational uses.
10. Soul. Cities need law and order, but they also need soul, a pulse, a heartbeat. Public urban spaces must be held in high esteem. They are not anonymous, belonging to nobody; they belong to all, shaped over months and decades of accommodating life and lives shared. Educating cities transmit not only knowledge, learning and tools, but also emotions and values.