Glasgow as a Learning City Past and Present

Lynette Jordan and Stephane Young have produced a very useful paper on Glasgow as a learning city past and present. This paper supplements an earlier paper by Lynette and Robert Campbell which provided an overview of the United Kingdom experience with learning cities and which included comment on the apparent decline in UK learning cities from a high point in the late 1990s.

This new paper shows that although some momentum has been lost along the way, much of the past investment in learning remains. In this treatment of the historical evolution of the learning city ideal in Glasgow, the paper is able to benefit from the active involvement of Stephanie Young in the innovative REAL project which was a highlight of the development of the Glasgow learning city.

The initial paper on Glasgow in the PIE collection, by Janice Lane, had a focus on cultural aspects of development and the role of museums. While this remains a strength of Glasgow with lessons for other cities, the new paper by Lynette and Stephanie adds much to the important question of understanding the UK experience in the development of learning cities. With the current rapid growth of learning cities in East Asia, much is to gained from a deeper understanding of the historical experience of learning cities in the West, particularly in the UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia which were leaders in the quest to build better cities driven by learning strategies. Such an understanding may be seen as a platform, along with the overall PIE experience during 2011 to 2013, to drive the new PASCAL initiative on Learning Cities 2020.