The Learning City

Learning City Dimension 1: Partnering

The power of the vision of sustainability is, to a great extent, the power of integration, interaction, and interdependency. Colleges and universities that orient themselves toward the sustainable city effectively reposition themselves as interdependent partners in the city, rather than a series of insulated silos of higher learning. Effective partnerships are needed at all levels: between different sectors of the university, between the university and the urban community, other public agencies such as government, private enterprises, and between the urban university and rural outreach. A lack of common understanding and common purpose can divide applied researchers from pure or basic researchers, science from arts faculties at the same university, and stereotypes of “thinkers” versus “doers” throughout the city. Every kind of tie is important and each is difficult to achieve and maintain. Some have called the traditional lack of partnerships in the way campuses operate a case of the “stovepipe” model of the university in which isolated “stoves” of researchers create thin streams of smoke rather than building a fire with more heat together. Others refer to the sustainable city partnership challenge as the “sandbox” model — that is, the challenge of bringing different leaders and innovators to “play in the same sandbox” rather than stick to their private respective fields.

For the vision of the learning city to advance, collaboration must be emphasized above competition. Partnerships can serve college and university campuses at every level of work and learning: from leveraging resources and expertise in the design of campus structures, facilities, and research projects, to consultation in program design and curriculum review, to teambuilding in instruction and cooperative and service learning opportunities.

The research arm of the campus is the one to which universities have given partnerships the most punch. Research centres, institutes, and projects related to specific technical and theoretical aspects of sustainable communities are on the rise. For example, the University of New Brunswick established, in 1994, an Environment and Sustainable Development Research Centre as a focal point for partnerships between different parts of the university, government, and the private sector (http://www.unb.ca/web/enviro/). The University of Regina's Centre for Sustainable Communities, established in April 2003, is also a multidisciplinary, partnership-based research venture linking social policy and infrastructural, eco-efficiency concerns (prod.www.uregina.ca/csc/). Researchers and research institutes, to push this trend further, have to grapple with the challenges of re-envisioning their roles as advocates for other realms of change within the university, and as partners within the city and at national and international scales of approaching sustainable cities. In the realm of instruction and curriculum development, partnerships can lead students to more stimulating learning experiences coping with real-world problems as parts of interdisciplinary groups both within and outside the university. Ties with other public, private, and civil society groups in the city beyond the campus teach students the skills and cooperative competencies they will need to contribute to building, maintaining and serving sustainable cities after graduation.

Learning City Dimension 2: Serving

Increasing education and educational opportunities is a key element in bringing more potential partners to the forums of urban sustainability discussions and decisions. Whom does the learning city serve? is a key question of justice with which campuses must grapple in efforts toward urban sustainability. Since a sustainable city is a city that must be constantly in-the-making, sustainable cities require a continuous stream of dedicated makers, planners, workers, and participants. In 1916, John Dewey spoke of this group as the “community of inquirers,” assembled from all walks of life to work toward consensus on all propositions for change, drawing from diverse experiences and expertise, building intelligence within the group for the city at large. The community of inquirers should include all of us, in our home cities, contributing to both the means and ends of plans for the city through interactive processes that help each of us develop to our own individual potential. Also writing at the beginning of the 20th Century, Jane Addams (2002, 178) put the task this way: “We are gradually requiring of the educator that he [sic] shall free the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We ask this not merely because it is the man's right to be thus connected, but because we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford to get along without his special contribution.” Crucially, higher education needs to learn to reach beyond the traditional student body to better include and serve the different needs of other important groups in the city, such as adults, senior citizens, new immigrants, Aboriginal people and other visible minorities, people at risk and people living in poverty. This includes providing educational opportunities to members of these groups that connect with their lived experiences, as well as providing service to these groups through innovative curriculum and research activities. On the issue of serving the learning city, colleges and universities also cannot neglect instructors' needs for opportunities to improve their knowledge and skills in incorporating the new framework of sustainability into their teaching, research, and service.

Learning Dimension 3: Designing

Within campus land use, architecture, landscaping, and engineering lies a “hidden curriculum.” Everyone who looks at, rides through, or strolls around the campus is bound to take in lessons, often unintended, about the way the campus is laid out, tended, and managed, how it consumes and recycles energy and water and how it disposes of waste. In order for these lessons to be sustainable ones, the physical campus must present to its inhabitants and visitors an “institutional metabolism” that models ecological efficiency (Cortese 1999). Decreasing the throughput of nonrenewable energy and advancing renewable and responsible technologies can guide operations, purchasing, and investments; food, water, energy, and waste; building, landscaping, and transportation.

The increasing popularity of such “green” building, engineering, operations and investments is due in no small part to the fact that it often saves the school money. The National Wildlife Federation's Campus Ecology Program found that twenty-three sustainable infrastructure operations projects in fifteen colleges and universities across the US save $17 million annually (Eagan et al. 1998). Among many recent initiatives, the Association of Canadian Community Colleges (2000) has developed a set of guidelines for systematically implementing and financing energy efficiency projects, CO2 reduction, and energy action plans. Campuses are pursuing environmental audit and environmental assessment procedures, increasingly with the help of fine-tuned frameworks (Campus Consortium for Environmental Excellence 2000a, Campus Ecology Program 2001, Canada Office of Energy Efficiency 2000). Not only can such initiatives save money, they can produce energy and food, research and education opportunities, and enthusiasm. Oberlin College (http://www.oberlin.edu/ajlc/ajlcHome.html) broke ground on its vanguard “green” building in 1999. More an integrated building-landscape system than a simple building, it was designed collaboratively by students, faculty, and architecture and design professionals and is in a continual process of evolution, striving to consume less nonrenewable resources, better assimilate wastes, produce energy and food, and support better research in ecology and ecological design.

Such frameworks tend to focus on the physical materials balance and regulatory framework of the campus, and tracking these on a repeat basis, with the intent of strategically focusing reform efforts. Often the assessments and audits themselves are collaborative within the college or university and with other interested partners. Mount Allison University (http://www.mta.ca/environment/) has conducted two comprehensive environment audits, in 1998 and 2000, with a Campus Environmental Policy passed in the interim. The audits cover 11 areas: buildings, energy, transportation, air quality, hazardous materials, solid waste, paper, food, water, finances, and environmental education. Campus sustainability assessments can be driven by state and other governmental strategies, as in the New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (http://www.njheps.org/), which has partnered with the State Greenhouse Gas Action Plan to accomplish a 3.5% reduction in state greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2005.

The other hidden curriculum designed into the campus is found in the lessons of institutional policies and procedures that govern staff and faculty. How do university policies and procedures treat, evaluate, and reward the people who spend their formative or professional lives on campus? Answering this question in favour of the learning city can mean instilling aspects of “personal sustainability” for faculty and staff, such as increased job security for sessional lecturers, flexible schedules and work loads, and for students, alternative admission standards and grading systems. The task is to connect the daily processes of the campus with the sustainable learning missions of students, researchers, and instructors. Changing the curriculum to reposition the campus as a learning institution experimenting toward the sustainable city ultimately leads to changes in the institutional make-up of the campus itself. Since many campuses contain microcosms of the institutions in the surrounding city and region, institutional models on campus provide living experiments for urban sustainability in the institutions beyond the campus. These living experiments also help create markets and greater demand for sustainable and just goods, services, policies and procedures, proof that the institutions can operate effectively and the structures can achieve cost savings through eco-efficiency.

Learning City Dimension 4: Teaching

The primary output of universities and colleges is educated people who go on to affect the world in potentially powerful ways through their professional and personal lives. It is no stretch of the truth, therefore, to say that a university or college's main impact on urban sustainability comes from its curriculum. More than a set of syllabi, course listings, and credit points, a curriculum is a plan for attaining learning goals. For learning goals that are social and sustainable, the curriculum must be dynamic and interactive, incorporating, responding to, and anticipating changes within the university and the surrounding city. Linking with the partnership dimension, an interactive curriculum requires consultation with many different concerned groups, including students and educators but also employers, government, alumni, and others. Building consultative, reciprocal relationships with this wide range of partners in education helps to create the allegiances that are required for a change of course in the way our cities develop, as well as a more solid consensus on the vision for learning goals - and a wider network of paths to take in achieving these goals. Within each city's vision for learning goals in sustainable development, the curriculum should reflect:

An emphasis on ecological and systems thinking over mechanistic and fragmented thinking;
Active, experiential learning and real-world problem solving in addition to the skills of a particular discipline; and
Clarity of values regarding the larger role of the education system in achieving a sustainable city.

Curricula should lead to ecological literacy and both the tendency and the ability to study broadly across disciplines, as well as deeply in a single discipline and should revolve around finding common values and ethics in all disciplines. Clearly, a move toward campus-wide expansion of curricula demands a vision, which in most cases demands a strategic plan. The vision and plan must in turn be shared by faculty from the ecology department to the kinesiology lab, by the university administration, by students and by the university's wider network of interested parties, including businesses and community organizations. Curriculum expansion sometimes begins at the scale of a single course, from which it may build within and across different faculties and with other partners. Other times, curriculum change happens at the level of an entire faculty. Organizations like the World Resources Institute are at work to integrate environmental learning into the curriculum of business schools (http://business.wri.org/projects.cfm, Finlay et al. 2000). Others have begun the task of expanding curricula beginning with medical schools (http://www.ceem.org) and still others with schools of theology (http://www.crle.org/index.asp). In some cases, universities are recognizing the value of establishing sustainability as a curriculum theme throughout the institution. Sea to Sky University, slated to open in 2006 as Canada's first secular, private liberal arts college, will approach this through its trio of foci on environmental studies, Pacific Rim studies, and international relations throughout the curriculum (www.seatoskyu.ca). Incremental and systemic change can be pursued at the same time.

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