Are We At A Turning Point? PASCAL and the Pandemic | Josef Konvitz

Everybody wants to do something. Op-Ed pieces arrive daily, written by young and old alike, people who are world-famous and people you never heard of, embracing the pandemic for the opportunity it provides to bring about radical change. I have not made a list, but I would bet that most put global climate change and social justice as the most urgent priorities, ahead of the resolution of local crises in Africa or the Middle East with the potential to cause a world war. Some of us are more concerned to prevent bad things from happening – power grabs by authoritarians would be the top of my list, followed by another round of austerity cuts to education and health  – rather than to make good things happen; perhaps I can be forgiven, being an historian.

History does tell us that popular assumptions and ideas change dramatically in a crisis like this one, but also that memories fade in the decade following. Isn’t it already difficult to recall what happened in the financial crisis of 2007/08 and why? What about 1990-92 when the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles left many dead, and unemployment in the OECD countries reached nearly 40 million people?

But as I often say, we are where we are. Where do we go from here?   Let’s start with what PASCAL is doing.

International travel is out of the question for months to come. Nevertheless, we have confirmed dates from Jari Stenvall in Tampere, Finland for 8-10 June 2021 for the first of what we hope will be two conferences next year. The second conference would have been held in Taiwan in November 2020, were it not for the pandemic. Assuming that the authorities lift their restrictions on international meetings, it will happen, organized by Eugenia Chang from 11 to 14 November 2021. The conference has the full support of the Chancellor of the Taiwan University of Education (and former Minister of Education), Professor Wu Ching-ji.  Dates and themes will be confirmed at the earliest possible opportunity.

We are collaborating in a series of 5 webinars with UNESCO-UIL on “Learning Cities: COVID-19 recovery, from research to practice.” The first, on 17 June at 1300CET, builds on the work of the 4^th International Conference on Learning Cities to focus on the challenge of inclusion in learning cities. All details on this and subsequent webinars are found at the UNESCO UIL website. Pre-registration is essential; up to 500 people can participate in each one.  PASCAL will lead on the production of a Briefing Paper after each webinar. I intend to draft a synthesis note at the end of the four webinars.

As many as 200 cities are participating in the Global Network of Learning Cities. The number of cities in these networks is always a small percentage of the number of cities that could and should do so. The example of sustainable cities is at once inspiring in this regard, but also cautionary: most cities are not “in the game”. This is why pioneering initiatives are so important: those places that want to do more should not be held back by the rest.

PASCAL’s Learning Cities Networks (LCN) is advancing on several fronts. Four networks are being reinvigorated with revised objectives, and two are continuing as they have been. We now have a Heritage, Museums and Education network led by Henrik Zipsane in collaboration with the European Museums Network, and Maggie Jago of the University of Glasgow.

Other networks focus on remote and rural communities (led by Leone Wheeler and Robbie Guevara in Australia), social inclusion (led by Roberta Piazza, Idowu Biao, Yuan Dayong and Mike Osborne, from Catania, Glasgow, Benin, and Beijing), faith and spirituality (led by Maria Liu Wong in New York and Margaret Sutherland in Glasgow ), and local economic development and entrepreneurship (led by Judith James, Chris Shepherd and Marius Vener in Swansea, London and Johannesburg). Thanks to the leaders and to all the participants!

Under the visionary guidance of Peter Kearns, EcCoWell II has momentum and a report is anticipated by the end of 2020.  Peter rightly raises issues about age-friendly cities, mental health, a sense of belonging to communities, the invisible but vital elements of our humanity that do not get factored into GDP. Our networks and projects should have a lot of synergies, each bringing something unique to make up the big picture.

We are impatient to start making change happen. There will be millions whose education has been compromised, who have become unemployed, who sense the injustice that they did not get the preventive care they needed years ago; thousands are bereaved.  I read some essays calling for us to turn away from growth, but without growth, there is despair. Nothing is simple: income disparities are a problem, but the people who want to tax the rich don’t write about the millions who are under-employed or have stopped looking for work.

Because PASCAL is focused on place to bring about environmental and social sustainability, we have the opportunity to take a coherent, holistic approach as eloquently and cogently described by Peter Kearns in his EcCoWell papers. The concept of learning goes to the heart of this – unlearning, as Jarl Bengtsson and I wrote in our OECD work of 20 years ago (yes!), to clear out the useless or obsolete notions that limit our sense of the possible, and learning, often by listening to what others are saying and looking at what others are doing. Our focus then was on the consequences of dramatic economic restructuring – deindustrialization and the costs of environmental damage, the end of the Cold War, European integration. Regeneration, innovation, skills, a role for universities, leadership by people who care about getting it right – the list has not changed much. This is a collective task and a community responsibility, calling for trust, which may be in short supply. The post-pandemic world will need learning cities – more resilient, more responsive, more robust - more than ever.

The practitioner – academic partnership that has been the core of PASCAL is as relevant as ever. I see no reason to change that model.  We are in a unique position to span the generations and the continents, to make existing knowledge available where and when it can be used.  We can do a lot with the internet, even if it leaves us with the desire to meet, see, talk, and learn together. Jean Gottmann, the French geographer who worked for years in the US and taught in Paris and Oxford who was one of the first to study telecommunications in cities, was fond of saying that half the phone calls were to ask someone to lunch. Let’s talk more often.

Josef