60 min Brainstorm: Sustainable Opportunity Cities
Cross-sectoral Approaches to Building Sustainable Opportunity Cities
Led by Dr Peter Kearns, Co-director of Pascal International Exchanges, Kenmore Australia
Respondent: Roberta Piazza, University of Catania
Tuesday 26 March, 1.00-2.00pm
Venue: Teaching Room, Ground Floor, Urban Studies, 25 Bute Gardens
Cities almost everywhere are challenged by a raft of big issues resulting from on-going urbanisation, environment protection issues, public safety concerns, and demographic change in a context of growing inequality in many countries, social fragmentation and decline in social capital, high unemployment, and overall more individualistic societies.
These challenges provide the context for the PASCAL International Exchanges (PIE), initiated by the PASCAL Observatory (which has its European base at the University of Glasgow) in January 2011 to provide for online exchanges of ideas and experience between cities around the world. At present 16 cities across 5 continents participate in PIE. These include Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cork, Bielefeld and a number of African cities (Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Dakar, Gaborone, Addis Ababa). Summary stimulus papers for all cities may be read on the PIE web site (http://pie.pascalobservatory.org)
Although PIE was initiated with a traditional view of a learning city, the need for cross-sectoral integration soon became evident from the situation in some African and East Asian cities such as Taipei. This led to a PIE clarifying report titled Living and Learning in Sustainable Opportunity Cities which was given the brand name EcCoWell and which can be read on the PIE website or downloaded here: <EcCoWell Working Paper>. Discussion of EcCoWell ideas will be held in a number of PIE cities during 2013, starting during the Cork Learning Festival in March 2013, and leading up to the 11th PASCAL conference in Hong Kong in November 2013.
The EcCoWell paper notes the common interests shared by sectoral initiatives such as Green Cities, Healthy Cities, Learning Cities, and Safe Cities and poses the question of how such sectoral initiatives can best be integrated in more holistic approaches to good city development.
The PASCAL Hong Kong conference in November (probably 18-20 November) will take up these issues in addressing the selected theme Local communities in sustainable healthy cities. The conference will include environmental, health and well being, social and civic, and economic strands. The selection of the local community/city theme owed much to the experience of Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Taipei where strategies are adopted to flow the aspirations of learning city frameworks down to local communities and neighbourhoods, and even streets. It is difficult to find comparable developments in the West.
Questions for brainstorming:
- In what ways can cross-sectoral perspectives and research be brought to bear on the development of sustainable opportunity cities?
- How can initiatives in local communities benefit from insights from cross-sectoral research?
- What are the priority issues for research in addressing the big issues confronting cities?
- In what ways might insights from cross-sectoral research contribute to the themes of the PASCAL Hong Kong conference?
Dr Peter Kearns
Peter has had careers as a teacher, Australian public servant, and consultant. He is currently Co-director of the PASCAL International Exchanges involving online exchanges between cities around the world. As Director of International Relations in the Australian Department of Education and Science he acquired a lifelong interest in educational and cultural relations between countries. He served in Paris for three years as a member of the Australian Delegation to OECD and in 1990 was a member of a government mission that examined developments in industry training in seven countries. After leaving the public service he was a director of Global Learning Services from 1996 to 2011 and undertook consultancies in a range of sectors with publications resulting from this work.
He has been involved in learning community development in Australia since 1999 and has served as a member of the Advisory Board of the innovative Hume Global Learning Village in Melbourne since 2003. These interests carried over in his role in the founding of the PASCAL International Exchanges He is a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators and was the inaugural Visiting Research Fellow of Adult Learning Australia. Peter was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2006 for his service to education and training.