The educating city: the power of learning in participatory design

Inhabiting a territory means being included in its semiotic space, being culturally formed by it but also being part of its configuration and, thus, of its evolution. This presupposes and requires an educational process of social involvement of each person as active citizenship, aware of his own living space. To foster this awareness, the participation of different social groups in designing shared spaces can do a lot, so that learning would take place in the field by getting to know the inhabited territory and exploit the potential and functionality of common places. So, the city becomes an open-air laboratory educating its inhabitants to proactively share the territory in a regenerative planning that involves both the places of common life and the social aspect involving them. The city as training environment and laboratory for learning active participation encourages the encounters and exchanges between different social forms that talk to each other and are involved in planning and regenerating the common urban spaces. The territory, therefore, as product of the society and privileged field of education, is generated and transformed over time. It is good to remember this above all in the era of the knowledge society, where the digital knowledge seems to be far from the inhabited territory, which appears increasingly disordered, frayed, characterised by marginality and degradation that do not only reflect physical parameters, but are present in social and material suburbs. In such scenario, rethinking the education of citizens also means rethinking the territory and its social configuration. This is in line with the EU perspective of learning cities as organized networks of synergistic stakeholders for continuous and ubiquitous learning, communities as nuclei of social learning, with the concept of an educating city which is at the same time a widespread place of all-ages lifelong learning, generated by democratic and deliberative participation, and an educational dimension for a knowledgeable society which acts as ferryman in this transition towards sustainability and inclusiveness. In this view, learning is the principle of the educating city, a territorializing strategy of a society that reifies, gives meaning, and makes functional its spaces.