PASCAL Briefing Paper 18 - Learning and Place: Profiling Places

The relationship between learning and place extends the understanding of the learning city to a more local level, recognising that just as learning is fundamental to city and regional development, so it is to the character and opportunities that influence the quality of life in neighbourhoods and communities.

This paper is concerned with the complex links between learning and successful neighbourhoods. It summarises some well-known tools for mapping the strengths and weaknesses of communities in terms of both its socio-economic position, the social and cultural facilities it possesses and the feelings of identity and quality of life experienced by community members.  It highlights attempts to measure place quality and place value.  It stresses the importance of community involvement in assessing place quality. The paper goes on to raise a number of issues about the reliability and validity of the measures employed and the availability of suitable data at local level, and about the processes through which quality assessments are often made.

The paper concludes with the observation that variables concerned with learning are rarely included in these profiling techniques.