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The Learning City
Executive Summary
The learning city is a city that approaches sustainable development as an ongoing educational process. This kind of learning is an essential social function of the city. Although social learning needs to occur throughout the city, the urban institution best suited for reinvigorating the learning city is the school. With this in mind, we focus particularly on the role of universities and colleges in the learning city. This working paper discusses four critical dimensions of the learning city in which universities and colleges around the world are actively innovating. Presented also are project profiles from 16 institutions, five located in British Columbia, five elsewhere throughout Canada, and six in the United States and Europe. Each project profiled represents learning in at least one of four critical dimensions: partnering, serving, designing, and teaching. The projects are far from a comprehensive set but give an idea of the range of innovations toward the learning city occurring in many parts of the world. In Vancouver, these are precisely the lessons needed in the visioning and planning of a new Learning City project based at the Great Northern Way Campus (GNWC). The GNWC is a campus, currently under development, that belongs to four major institutions in Vancouver, including two research universities, Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the University of British Columbia (UBC), the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), and the Emily Carr institute of Art and Design (ECIAD). The GNWC offers the Vancouver region an important opportunity to further the vision and practice of the learning city in the direction of sustainable development, an opportunity that is explored at the end of this working paper.