The Learning City

Introduction

The goal of the sustainable city is not an ultimate end but a process of urban change. Our ability to move this change in more sustainable directions depends fundamentally on our ability to learn: from our past successes and mistakes, from our neighbours next door and around the world, and from the more-than-human world that supports our cities. Learning for the sustainable city means new lessons in topics from engineering to business management to poetry and semiotics; but it also means lessons in personal and professional collaboration, integration of different ideas and issues, making decisions and allocating resources to implement them. These are not lessons for particular individuals, whether trained experts, decision makers, or isolated philosophers. Learning for the sustainable city operates at a higher level than that of the individual, at the level of social learning. Social learning is the education we get in conjunction with our communities, as a factor of economic conditions, and by the grace of our environment - and is a key factor in the democratic and sustainable development of our cities. Learning is a democratic and sustainability necessity and thus an essential social function of the city.

Every realm, institution, and relationship within city life holds the potential and indeed the mandate for social learning in the call toward urban sustainability. In fact, the promise of a sustainable city within a democratic society is that of citizens engaged together in a lifelong, continuous, public education. This education must occur “in the laboratory, in the judge's chamber, in the business manager's office, in the politician's and the economist's studies - in short, anywhere that problems arise and decisions are made” (Blanco 1994, 35).

Although all institutions within the city are ultimately responsible for social learning about sustainable development, educational institutions may be the best place to start assessing the status of social learning and the sustainable city. Educational and social philosophers like John Dewey and Jane Addams noted that the school is the only modern social institution designed to facilitate experimentation (Westbrook 1991). Schools have to experiment - they are where the majority of our professionals prepare for their work running and recreating the remainder of our society's institutions. Many of those at work to promote sustainable development through the United Nations and other frameworks have looked to academia to be “one of the most perceptive” realms of society and “one of the first to sound the alarm” on unsustainable trends (Corcoran et al. 1998, 6, Orr 1994). As the Sierra Youth Coalition (2001, 1) points out, the “phrase and concept of education for sustainable development is mentioned over 600 times throughout Agenda 21.” Alas, UNESCO noted in 1996 that “education is the forgotten priority of Rio” (Corcoran et al. 2002, 102). Education, sustainably conceived, should enable us to think of ourselves no longer as mere individuals in pursuit of personal achievement but as full participants and members of the city and the greater good we can create. It is with this philosophy of education, and its application within institutions of higher learning, that this preparatory paper on “the learning city” is concerned.

The following pages report on the results of a survey undertaken from December 2003-March 2004 into the state of sustainability in higher education in British Columbia, across Canada, and around the world. 1 Through reading about, corresponding with, and talking to proponents of sustainability efforts underway at universities and colleges at a range of scales, resource commitments, and duration, we have gathered here snapshots of some of the world's most inspiring and sustainable learning city efforts. Some of these snapshots will be familiar to many readers, such as efforts at the University of British Columbia, renowned for breakthrough research on sustainability. Others will be less familiar to Canadians, like initiatives at the Technological University of Catalonia, Spain, and a coalition of universities in South Carolina.

Projects catalogued in this preparatory paper also represent institutions' variable emphases on different issues within the all-encompassing challenge of sustainable cities. We group these different emphases in four critical dimensions: partnership-building within the university system and with government, NGOs and industry; improving service, which includes service to nontraditional students, community outreach, and lifelong learning; improving design through infrastructural innovations in “green” university systems and institutional innovation in human resource management policies; and teaching innovations in all relevant curricula. Different institutions have started with different dimensions, leveraging interpersonal synergies and opportunities as they exist. Like all sustainable development efforts, we find that examples within these dimensions are often connected. Indeed, the more efforts are intertwined in different dimensions, the more they create the synergistic outcome of embracing the moral obligation of higher education to work toward sustainable cities. At the same time, initiatives that approach all four dimensions in an integrated manner are difficult to find. Few universities have undertaken systemic change and fewer governments have made it a priority.

The preparatory paper benefits from much good work already done in this area, such as April A. Smith and the UCLA Student Environmental Action Coalition's 1993 report Campus Ecology, which sparked a change in attitude in environmental, institutional, and social accountability within colleges and universities in North America, and Environment Canada's (2002) Framework for Environmental Learning in Canada which followed two years of consultation with 5,500 citizens. Many nongovernmental organizations have also provided significant groundwork for this project, including the Sierra Youth Coalition, the (US) National Council for Science and the Environment, and Second Nature, along with many others. In 2000, four such organizations, the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, COPERNICUS-Campus, the International Association of Universities, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), formed a Global Higher Education for Sustainability Partnership, representing over 1000 universities, in hopes of further motivating change by working in concert. 2 Based on the consensus represented by voluntary agreements like Chapter 36 of Agenda 21, entitled “Education, Public Awareness and Training” and a suite of visionary declarations, 3 this coalition is convinced that “if the leaders of major disciplines and institutions do not make sustainability a central academic and organizational focus, it will be impossible to create a just, equitable, and sustainable future” (Corcoran et al. 2002, 100).

In addition to contributing an additional notch of analysis, communication and international understanding to this movement for sustainability in higher education, the paper has two purposes. The first is to serve as a focal point for building intellectual capital with a view to fostering and propelling intensive international study and debate within the overarching theme of the Sustainable City at the 2006 World Urban Forum in Vancouver. The second related purpose is to assist in forging locally toward creating a new Learning City effort at Vancouver's emerging Great Northern Way Campus. 4 This new effort draws upon local, national, and international lessons in trying to create learning cities starting from institutes of higher learning. The Great Northern Way Campus (GNWC) is a joint venture of four major learning institutions in Vancouver: British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (ECIAD), Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the University of British Columbia (UBC). With the support of all parties involved in this collaborative endeavour, ideas and energy are moving the Learning City toward establishment as a legacy of the 2006 World Urban Forum. The final pages of this preparatory paper provide an opportunity to present an initial vision for the Learning City at GNWC that offers chances for partnering, serving, designing, and teaching sustainable development in Vancouver.

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