Understanding Learning Cities as discursive, material and affective infrastructures

ABSTRACT

Cities around the world are increasingly developing city-wide lifelong learning strategies to promote individual and civic adaptation to major economic, technological, and environmental challenges. Such initiatives, however, have not yet received commensurate research attention from education researchers and it is not yet clear that we have the theoretical or methodological tools to research the complexity of learning at a city scale. This paper attempts to outline one approach that might respond to this challenge by drawing on the concept of ‘lively infrastructure’ from urban studies. Based on 11 months of detailed ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Bristol, the paper draws on this concept to trace how learning infrastructures are produced, accessed, and reshaped by individuals and serve to provision particular forms of learning in the city. In so doing, the paper argues that learning infrastructures need to be understood as discursive, material, and affective; as deeply interconnected with other city infrastructures, particularly childcare and transport; and as capable of morphing to create both radical new forms of learning activity as well as consolidating existing practices of exclusion and inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Cities
• urban
• ethnography
• learning
• assemblage
• inequalities

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to all the participants in the project for their time, expertise, and insights and to the collegiality of the Knowledge, Culture and Society Research Centre and the City Futures network at the University of Bristol. Thank you to the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback in the review stage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The concept of the Moses bridge is taken from the infamous urban planner Robert Moses whose bridges were designed in such a way that impeded access beneath them by public buses, thus providing, at a time when the black population of the city were highly dependent on public transport, an invisible form of segregation.

Additional information

Funding

The Reinventing Learning Cities project as a whole was funded as part of Keri Facer's Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities Leadership Fellowship (AH/N504518/1). Magda Buchczyk’s post-doctoral position was funded both by this grant and by the University of Bristol.

Notes on contributors

Keri Facer

Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, and Chair in Climate Change Leadership at the University of Uppsala. Her work is concerned with understanding the capacities needed to think and work intelligently with the problem of ‘the future’; the role of university–community partnerships in building new knowledge adequate for contemporary challenges; and the role of learning in the city as a form of adaptation and mitigation of economic, technological, and environmental disruption. From 2001 to 2007 she was Research Director at Futurelab. From 2012 to 2018 she was Leadership Fellow for the AHRC Connected Communities Programme. In 2017 she was chair of the second international conference on Anticipation.

Magdalena Buchczyk

Magdalena Buchczyk is an anthropologist and a Senior Research Associate at the School of Education, University of Bristol. She is currently working on the AHRC-funded Reinventing Learning Cities project, exploring the ways in which cities learn through social and material processes. Her research focuses on the ethnographic exploration of everyday life through material culture and learning practices. Her fieldwork includes museum collections, archives and heritage sites, craft workshops, and community and public spaces in Poland, Romania, and the UK. She has co-curated exhibitions in Constance Howard Gallery, Horniman Museum, and Pilsudski Institute in London, and Hamilton House in Bristol.