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THE CITY AS A SOCIAL LEARNING SYSTEM Ian Bentley, Joint Centre for Urban Design, Oxford Brookes University <ibentley@brookes.ac.uk>

The key problems of our day, from climate change to the “broken society” (Figure 1), can only effectively be addressed through widespread behaviour change. Attempts to impose this from above would be both undesirable and ineffective: widespread behaviour change requires the active consent of at least a substantial majority of the people concerned. For this consent to be gained before inescapable crisis forces people to accept it – by which time it will probably come too late – many people will have to see the change concerned as positively attractive, from the perspective of their pre-existing culture.

FIGURE 1

This need for “attraction” is not always acknowledged by those who argue the need to change behaviour in order to address today’s “big problems”. Discussing the issue of environmental sustainability, for example, the sociologist Andrew Ross points out that much of the sustainability debate is carried on in an ascetic and puritanical mode, whose self-denying implications are deeply unappealing to many people. This is emphatically not the way to build the broad support which is needed to achieve real-world change – “the ecologically impaired need to be persuaded that ecology can be sexy, and not self-denying” as Ross puts it (1994, 15) (Figure 2).

FIGURE 2

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This means that in-depth “academic” knowledge and research, which is undoubtedly essential for addressing “big problems”, will have to mesh effectively with popular culture(s): this happens at present only in exceptional situations, rather than constituting a normal “default setting”. This meshing process will have to work in two directions. On the one hand, academics will have to open up to ideas from popular culture, and keep abreast of what is cool and sexy, in order to be able to develop culturally-relevant academic knowledge and shape it into widely attractive forms. On the other hand, non-academics will have to learn to take academe seriously, as somehow relevant to their own everyday lives. It is hard to see how this two-way meshing could happen in practice except through some type of social learning process. How do current ideas about social learning match up to this dual task? That is the overall question this paper addresses.

The term “social learning” has an expansive ring to it, but much of the current thinking about it has developed in the context of the rather narrowly-focused social settings of formal learning institutions such as Universities which, by their current nature, often have rather limited links with wider, more “popular” socio-cultural milieux. As Chris Rust explains, the current interest in social learning has been sparked off by the view “that students need the stimulus of interaction with each other, in social groups, to construct their learning. Consequently, their contact with each other outside the classroom is often where they learn the most, and the importance of this type of learning is increasingly being recognised.” (Rust, 2007, np) (Figure 3). Though this recognition is exciting in itself, it seems clear that the “students” who “need the stimulus of interaction with each other” are here defined primarily as members of the university, rather than any wider constituency.

FIGURE 3

The importance of the physical, spatial settings within which this social learning takes place is clearly acknowledged in current thinking, with the recent conceptualisation of the “social learning space”. This is defined by Oldenburg (1991, cited in Williamson and Nodder, 2002) as “a physical and/or virtual area that is not predominantly identified with either social or work/study perspectives but transcends both and facilitates both formal and informal student centred collaborative learning”. Within universities, recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the need for spaces that are specifically intended to foster social learning. This increased awareness has led, for example, to the creation of social learning spaces such as the “reinvention centres” at Oxford Brookes and Warwick universities (Figure 4).

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FIGURE 4

There has been considerable recent discussion of how social learning spaces themselves might best be designed (AMA 2006, Bickford and Chism 2002, Oblinger 2007). Less interest, however, has so far been shown in the question of how they should relate to the larger spatial networks of the universities within which they are embedded. In practice, they seem often to have been conceived as discrete destinations, to which students might go specifically to engage in a social learning experience. It has rarely been a top priority to site them in positions where they might benefit from the “passing trade” of students moving around the institution for other reasons; as we can see, for example, from the location of the Brookes reinvention centre.

FIGURE 5

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This type of location seems to work perfectly well for social learning within the university. Certainly Becky Kiddle’s research at Brookes shows a high level of student satisfaction with the reinvention centre there, amongst those students who use it (Kiddle, forthcoming). But how well does this type of location work in terms of widening the scope of social learning beyond the bounds of the university, to foster the meshing between academe and the wider society which seems necessary for addressing today’s “big problems” in effective ways?

Some light is thrown on this question by our own experience of working in the Brookes reinvention centre with a group of young people, from disadvantaged areas of Oxford, to help them develop ideas for a young people’s development centre, which I shall discuss further below. This programme of work was initially set up, to run on Saturdays, in community spaces in the Blackbird Leys estate: a venue chosen because we thought it would foster the young participants’ confidence to be operating on their own home ground. Because of a timetabling clash with other activities using these spaces, however, one Saturday’s session had to be moved to the Brookes reinvention centre. Somewhat to our surprise, the young people loved the new venue. They were not at all overawed by the idea of working within the university, and took full advantage of the reinvention centre’s flexible design to engage in a wide range of learning activities (Figure 6), from computer graphics through dance rehearsals to convivial lunches. We found this reaction extremely encouraging in terms of the potential meshing of academic and popular cultures.

FIGURE 6

Limiting factors, however, did arise from the centre’s spatial location in relation to the wider world beyond the university; particularly when the project came to the point of wanting to interface with that wider world through a public exhibition. The reinvention centre’s flexibility enabled it to accommodate, without strain, a multi-media exhibition which included graphic panels, film, powerpoint presentations, dance and rap performances. The centre’s location, however, now proved problematic because of the sheer illegibility of the visitor’s experience of the short walk from the university’s main entrance – key interface with the city as a whole – to the reinvention centre where the exhibition was held.

This is not to say that the reinvention centre is “in the wrong place” for its most common, “internal” university purposes. From our experience, it also seems that the location works satisfactorily for those “outsiders” who, like our specially invited group of young people, have guaranteed “insider” help to find it. The experience of the exhibition, however, suggests rather strongly that social learning spaces in this type of location are too loosely connected into the wider spatial structure of the city to be helpful in fostering the more radical meshing of cultures which we need for addressing today’s big problems.

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There seems to be an endemic problem here: since social learning spaces have been set up primarily to foster learning within the particular bounds of their own institutions, they typically offer no “natural” spatial interfaces to foster links with the wider social world within which their institutions are embedded. We see here a tendency towards spatial introversion that runs right through the spectrum of UK educational institutions, from nursery schools to universities; now sanctioned by tradition and more recently reinforced, for example, by bureaucratised perceptions of security and “health and safety” regulations (Gill, 2007) (Figure 7).

FIGURE 7

This institutionalised introversion raises two kinds of problems for effective social learning. Viewed from outside the institution, spatial segregation makes it difficult for wider publics to participate in the creation or dissemination of social learning. Viewed from inside and outside alike, it fosters the perception that formally acquired knowledge is somehow disconnected from the informal but nonetheless widespread and pervasive social learning processes of everyday life (Sennett,1971), taking place in public spaces such as streets and parks, and settings such as cafes and pubs which are related to them (Figure 8). Possible connections between academic and popular systems of social learning become (literally) difficult to see.

FIGURE 8

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Taken together, the cumulative impacts of these two-way segregating effects seem potentially disastrous to those of us who believe that today’s key problems can only be addressed in effective ways through communal effort. By their very nature, these are not problems that can be left to experts. To tackle them effectively, very many people will have to learn new ideas, with sufficient conviction to decide to change their everyday behaviour in quite radical ways. It is therefore essential that participation in the social learning process, which is needed to construct new holistic knowledge, is made as broad as possible. It needs to become a natural, unremarkable part of everyday life, rather than calling for the special effort that is required to “go out of one’s way” to cross institutional boundaries.

This does not, of course, diminish the importance that institutions of formal learning themselves would have in this broader participation process. Though we have to improve the meshing of academic and popular cultures if we are to develop processes of social learning that can address today’s big problems fast, it seems likely that in practice it will still be the formal learning institutions that we shall have to rely upon as prime movers in both research and dissemination. In working towards cities as social learning systems, therefore, we face the key question of how institutions such as universities, further education colleges and schools might best be linked into the wider urban settings within which most people’s everyday lives are lived.

There is much to be learned, I think, from trailblazing attempts that have been made to create structures of social learning beyond the university, in the wider arena of environmental management; involving multiple actors, many of whom are decidedly non-academic in culture. Claudia Pahl–Wostl (2006), for example, develops a useful conceptual framework for understanding how social learning can take place in this wider arena. This framework is constructed around twin “relational practices”: on the one hand the “processing of information about a problem” (which Pahl-Wostl terms “content management”), and on the other hand “social involvement”; as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9Source: Pahl-Wostl, 2006.

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Social involvement here is clearly conceived in terms of bringing together people from differing cultural backgrounds through various media, in order to overcome the institutional dimension of the introversion discussed above.

The linked problem of physical spatial introversion, however, is not addressed at all. Pahl-Wostl stresses the idea that “(i)nformation and communication technology tools may play a decisive role in supporting and shaping relational practices that link social involvement and content management”, but she seems to ignore the spatial frameworks within which at least some of these relational practices almost inevitably take place. Given the importance ascribed to the physical settings of social learning at the smaller scale of the Brookes and Warwick reinvention centres, it seems strange to ignore the roles these spatial settings might play in supporting and shaping relational practices at the larger scale of her work beyond the university’s walls.

We have long known that spatial structure has a powerful impact in shaping patterns of human movement and encounter in general (Hillier and Hanson 1984) though of course it never determines these patterns. Further, in relation to opportunities for social learning in particular, Peter Ferguson’s work strongly suggests that the overall layout of the public space network within an urban area affects the likelihood of particular streets forming the settings of active conversation and discussion (Ferguson 2007). Given the importance ascribed to spatial layout in designing the university “social learning spaces” discussed above, the medium of communication constituted by public space, with its valuable “face to face” potential (Figure 10), should surely also be regarded as an important dimension of the “information and communication technology tools” which Pahl-Wostl sees as playing decisive roles in her crucial “relational practices” at scales beyond the university.

FIGURE 10:

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This public space medium has a particular importance for social learning because, as the sociologist Scott Lash explains, The city signifies not as representations signify as we sit in the cinema, reading a book, listening to a concert or watching television. The city only signifies as we move through it, along its paths and thoroughfares, it is not a representation but total environment. In the city and the spatial field we are more active than the “active audience”, more interactive than World Wide Web and CD-ROM users. Beyond and more interactive than interactivity is inhabiting. And we inhabit or “live” the fields of urban space. (Figure 11). In order to foster the wide spread of positive “relational practices” that we need to develop if we are to face up effectively to today’s big problems, we have to think how best to link this extensive “lived” system of everyday learning spaces with the more intensive system of more formal learning institutions; to create a more holistic overall social learning system.

FIGURE 11

In principle, linkage of this kind can be experienced at the levels of both use and meaning. At the level of use, linkage is affected by the permeability of the physical, spatial access connections between everyday and formal social learning systems. At the level of meaning, it is affected by the extent to which the formal learning institution appears “closed” or “open” in popular culture terms. In practice, of course, this distinction between use and meaning is merely an analytical convenience: to foster the development of the city as a holistic social learning system, we should pay careful attention to creating linkages at both these levels.

There are also, in principle, a number of different physical scales at which this dual linkage could be forged. For example, at the largest scale, the desire to achieve the best balance between “internal” social learning connections and links with the wider everyday world might have major implications in terms of whether the overall structure of a large institution of formal learning should form a single “campus” as at Warwick, or whether it should be more “dispersed” within the city as are those of the older universities of Oxford and Cambridge (Figure 12).

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FIGURE 12

At a smaller scale, the sense of formal/informal connection is strongly affected by the extent to which the spatial structures of the city mesh in detail with those of the formal learning institution. The Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam, for example, shows how well a close mesh can work in practice. Here the famous second-hand book market of Oudemanshuispoort – a well-known tourist attraction lining a covered thoroughfare often used as a short-cut – links directly to the faculty’s courtyard, where a great deal of relaxation and discussion takes place (Figure 13).

FIGURE 13

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In contrast, the Free University of Berlin, designed around an extremely well-integrated internal street system, has many outside doors but relatively little sense of welcoming access from the everyday world around it: it would never be used as a convenient short-cut to other parts of the city (Figure 14).

FIGURE 14

The Oxford colleges, in contrast again, are tightly meshed into the street structure of the city centre. However, they still turn their backs to the street in a way that excludes the everyday world, by having their various facilities accessed only from internal quads, each with only a single street entrance (Figure 15).

FIGURE 15

Perhaps the most radical and imaginative meshing of the formal and informal systems, at the whole-university scale, is to be found in China; in the layout of Shenyang Architectural University, recently designed by Turenscape of Beijing (Yu and Mantua 2006). Here the buildings of the university are embedded in functioning rice-fields, whose temporal working rhythms are acknowledged in the university’s semester structure: an almost seamless interweaving of the formal and everyday learning systems (Figures 16, 17).

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FIGURE 17

A similar level of interweaving, this time at the smaller scale of a school, is found in many Dutch examples: perhaps the need to foster the “polder mentality” from an early age, as a central cultural plank in the never-ending attempt to keep the country above water, helps to explain why the intermeshing of formal learning and everyday life is so common there.

FIGURE 16

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Asch van Wyck Basisschool, in the Oude West district of Rotterdam, is one among many possible examples. Here the school is built on the back of the pavement, with large windows so that passers-by can have very direct visual contact with the life of the school; whilst the pupils have an equally direct sense that “school” is an integral part of everyday life, rather than a special box into which one goes for a number of hours each weekday to “be educated” (Figure 18).

FIGURE 18

This sense of intermeshing between learning institution and everyday life is further fostered by the fact that the school assembly hall is the local community clubhouse outside school hours, and the library performs a similar dual function, so that adults too have the experience that the school is useful for them, not “just for kids”. At lunch times, the local café also benefits from the young people’s custom.

Further, each of the three outdoor recreational spaces of the school form integral parts of the public space structure of the Oude West, extremely well surveilled by housing fronting onto them all (Figures 19, 20). Accordingly, they all have normal street names and are indicated as public spaces on street maps: for example, the largest play area, used by the whole community when not required by the school, is called Gerrit Sterkman Plein.

FIGURE 19

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FIGURE 20

Finally, at the level of meaning, the appearance of the building also does not convey the impression of “school as a separate institution”. A sense of visual integration is achieved, at a level beyond the merely stylistic, by building two floors of housing on top of the single storey mass of the school itself; so that the school is seamlessly integrated into the visual structure of the neighbourhood as a whole. This is not, of course, just a matter of visual integration: it also makes – and is seen to make – excellent sustainable use of scarce land, and it also effectively makes the school site as a whole into a far more sustainable economic unit. That, no doubt, is a further reason why this multiple use of Dutch school sites is relatively common (Figure 21).

FIGURE 21

An even more radical example of the potential for physical integration between a school and its wider urban setting is demonstrated in Discovery 1, in Christchurch, New Zealand. As Andrew Harrison explains, “It’s a primary school located in redundant space within a department store. To get there you go through the shop, up in the elevator, past the shop floors and you arrive in the entrance hall of the school which is a kitchen. This is a space where parents, children and teachers spend time together, whatever time they come in and out – a space for the learning community.”.

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Further, “The school doesn’t have any facilities beyond its own space, so it makes use of the city’s resources to promote different ways of learning, using city parks for sport, and the city libraries and so on….. The groups travel around the city by themselves and the older children are encouraged to use the city itself as a learning space. So far, the academic results of this type of learning have proved just as good as those in Christchurch’s more formal schools.” (Harrison, 2006, np)

The cultures of New Zealand, Holland and Britain have many similarities; but surely nothing could differ more from these integrated examples than the introverted enclaves within which we in Britain corral our own children during school hours. To implement such ideas here would mean overcoming rigid structures of bureaucratised paranoia, which currently keep the formal learning institutions of impressionable young people firmly away from the supposed dangers of everyday life, and thereby block the development of a culture of sexy sustainability just at the age when its results might have the most impact on tomorrow’s world.

Nothing ventured nothing gained, however; so it seems appropriate to conclude by enlarging a little on the brief reference I have already made to the Joint Centre’s own ongoing “work in progress” in this area. Funded by the UrbanBuzz programme, we have been working with Green and Templeton College, a not-for-profit community company called Mayim and a core group of young people from some of the most deprived Oxford wards, to develop ideas for a Youth Development Centre called Pulse in Cowley. The young people themselves have been prime movers in developing Pulse’s emerging ethos and physical design (Figures 22, 23), which are intended to integrate university-level education with the social learning which can be stimulated through arts, leisure and business-development opportunities.

FIGURE 22

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FIGURE 23

In terms of physical design, the intention is that the arts, leisure and business spaces will take the form of back-of-pavement facilities, intended to integrate as closely as possible with the everyday life of the site’s busy surroundings. The upper floors will contain housing, some of which will be lived in by Brookes students who, as part of their courses, will be responsible through community service learning for helping the young people themselves manage and further develop the Pulse programme. We are encouraged by the support in principle that this project has so far received: one more tiny step towards reconfiguring the city as a social learning system.

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References

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