Tag Archives: learning cities

Learning through movement: Physical education and lifelong learning in European learning cities

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Made Júnior Miranda, Professor of Physical Education at the State University of Goiás (UEG), Brazil, reflects on his experience as a visiting researcher at the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) in January 2026. Drawing on his work with UIL’s UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC) team, he explains how physical education, sport and urban spaces can support lifelong learning across the lifespan.

© Made Júnior Miranda

I have dedicated my research to understanding human development through cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), inspired by researchers such as Lev S. Vygotsky, Aleksei N. Leontiev and Vasil V. Davydov. This theoretical framework understands human development not as a linear accumulation of knowledge, but as a social, historical and cultural process that unfolds through human interaction across the lifespan. This understanding aligns closely with the principles that guide the work of UIL and its concept of learning cities, which mobilize resources across sectors to promote inclusive and continuous learning opportunities for all.

My training in physical education, together with my experience as a teacher and researcher, has allowed me to observe how embodied practices, sport and physical activity can become meaningful learning experiences when deliberately organized. During my stay in Hamburg, Germany, a member of the UNESCO GNLC, this insight deepened. There, lifelong learning is not merely a guiding concept but a principle reflected in public policy, the use of urban spaces and everyday cultural practices.

This lifelong learning approach recognizes that people develop knowledge and competences in multiple contexts: at school, at work, in the community, in cultural spaces and through physical and sporting practices. This broader perspective expands the notion of education beyond formal settings and emphasizes experiences that foster personal, social and cultural development throughout life. During my time at UIL, this perspective was further enriched by my work with the GNLC team and by learning about several promising practices in selected European learning cities.

For example, in the municipality of Fundão, Portugal, the Memo Move project illustrates how lifelong learning can integrate movement, cognition and social participation, especially among older adults. The initiative is grounded in the understanding that human development neither ends in youth nor is confined to formal education. By promoting physical activities linked to cognitive stimulation and community engagement, the project creates non-formal learning opportunities that support autonomy, social inclusion and well-being, while using urban spaces as educational environments.

In Reșița, Romania, the strategy of becoming a learning city is closely linked to the transformation of urban space. The integration of sports infrastructure, green spaces and leisure facilities turns the territory into a mediator of social practices. Walking, running and cycling become part of everyday life as culturally valued activities associated with health, social involvement and continuous learning. In this context, urban space ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes an active element in processes of human development.

In Valmiera, Latvia, sport plays a central role in community life. The city hosts a wide network of sports organizations, schools and clubs, offering more than 30 sports disciplines and regularly hosting events such as marathons and local competitions. In this setting, sport is not seen only as performance or competition but as a cultural practice that fosters learning, socialization, identity formation and intergenerational participation. This experience shows how non-formal practices can complement and enhance formal education goals, promoting health, social interaction and community cohesion.

These examples point to a significant convergence between cultural-historical activity theory and the holistic vision of lifelong learning advocated by UIL. In all cases, lifelong learning is understood as a social, situated and continuous process involving body, cognition, culture and participation. Learning cities demonstrate that urban policies can create the conditions for learning to become part of daily life, contributing to more inclusive, resilient and sustainable cities.

For countries such as Brazil, my home country, these experiences raise fundamental questions. One central challenge is how to shape urban environments as effective spaces for lifelong learning that also provide diverse opportunities for physical education and sport – not only for the privileged, but for all citizens. Addressing this challenge requires connecting resources and institutions, from schools, cultural centres and libraries to public spaces, leisure areas and sports facilities, so that they function as active components of an inclusive and continuous educational ecosystem. In such a system, learning is not reduced to physical fitness or competition, but instead supports broader lifelong learning outcomes, such as social interaction and inclusion, personal development and better mental well-being.

The challenge is not that sport is reserved for the wealthy, but that access to many opportunities remains unequal. Low-income families often face financial constraints, long working hours and limited leisure time, while many sporting opportunities are offered through private gyms, clubs and coaching services that cost money. Although public policies continue to play an essential role, they often lack the capacity to ensure equitable access. Inequalities are further reinforced by the uneven distribution of facilities, transportation costs, equipment expenses and regional disparities.

Schools remain one of the most important spaces for ensuring access, particularly for children. However, in many contexts, reduced curriculum time for physical education and cuts to school sports programmes risk weakening one of the few universal opportunities for young people to develop active lifestyles. Promoting lifelong learning through physical education therefore requires not only strong schools, but also communities and public policies that make participation accessible throughout life.

I hope these reflections will enrich the debate and foster new connections between research, practice and public policy in the field of physical education, helping Brazilian and other cities to develop into dynamic learning environments for all.

Learning cities as civic ecosystems: Culture, creativity and the conditions for lifelong learning

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Professor Rhiannon Jones, Chair of the UK Learning Cities Network and Head of Civic and Communities at the University of Derby, outlines how learning cities should be understood as civic ecosystems where learning happens everywhere – in culture, communities and everyday civic life – enabling more inclusive and meaningful lifelong learning beyond formal education.

© Designing Dialogue CIC, 2019

Across the UK and internationally, interest in learning cities continues to grow. Yet discussions about lifelong learning often remain tethered to formal education systems, institutions, qualifications, pathways and participation rates. While these matter, they only tell part of the story. Insights from a recent UK Learning Cities Network webinar on Civic, Culture and Lifelong Learning point to a broader understanding: learning cities as civic ecosystems, where learning is embedded in culture, community life and democratic participation rather than confined to classrooms.

For many people, learning does not begin or end in school. It unfolds through everyday participation in neighbourhoods, cultural spaces, community organizations and civic processes. These forms of learning build confidence, capability, voice and belonging, often creating the conditions for people to reconnect with learning on their own terms.

When learning cities are viewed as ecosystems, learning is recognized as something that can happen everywhere. It occurs in libraries, theatres, museums and cultural venues; through volunteering, mutual aid and grassroots organizing; and within civic practices such as citizens’ assemblies, festivals, participatory budgeting and public consultation. These forms of learning are often overlooked because they rarely lead to formal qualifications. Yet they are essential in helping people develop skills, relationships and civic agency grounded in lived experience.

Culture and civic practice are not add-ons to lifelong learning; they are foundational. This perspective is especially important for adults and communities least well served by traditional education systems. Cultural activity provides accessible, participatory routes into learning, while civic engagement offers real-world contexts where learning is applied and owned. In Belfast, a UNESCO Learning City, initiatives such as the Bank of Ideas illustrate this approach. By inviting residents to contribute ideas for the city’s future, the process becomes a learning experience, developing skills in dialogue, collaboration, imagination and democratic participation.

Similarly, Derby’s UNESCO Learning City agenda includes the Derby Promise and Dream Fest, demonstrating how cultural activity can be embedded in civic learning infrastructures. These initiatives bring creative opportunities to children and young people, including performances and exposure to careers in the arts. Learning emerges through experience, storytelling and participation rather than instruction alone.

Across these examples, creativity plays a distinctive role, not simply as an outcome of learning, but as a method. When embedded intentionally, creativity enables experimentation, supports collaboration across sectors and builds shared ownership among civic, cultural and educational partners. Designing Dialogue CIC, through the Social Higher Education Depot (S.H.E.D.), co-designs place-based projects using arts-based methods to connect communities and civic partners, fostering agency and creativity. Likewise, the University of Derby’s CivicLAB and the Civic Hub create environments for collaborative thinking about place and change, shaping strategy and public engagement through active learning approaches.

The Centre for Cultural Ecologies in Art, Design and Architecture (CEADA) at the University of Huddersfield further exemplifies this ecosystem approach. Focusing on Kirklees, a UNESCO Learning City in West Yorkshire, CEADA explores how cultural ecologies shape place through community engagement, public pedagogy and creative methods. Its work emphasizes that culture and lifelong learning function as infrastructure rather than optional extras: they shape how people live, connect and learn.

Learning cities can challenge hierarchical ideas of expertise by valuing lived experience, emotion and imagination alongside formal knowledge. Learning flourishes where civic and cultural infrastructures are recognized as essential assets, where partnerships span sectors, and where creativity sits at the heart of inclusive systems.

These insights align with UNESCO’s learning cities framework. Rather than prescribing models, UK Learning Cities offer transferable lessons. Cities globally are encouraged to broaden their understanding of where learning happens, to value civic and cultural practice as vital infrastructures, and to support lifelong learning as something people live, not simply access.

The opportunity now is to reimagine learning as a shared civic practice, one that recognizes, resources and champions the spaces where people learn every day.

Playful learning and joint action: New methods in climate education in Hamburg

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In the second of our series of posts on lifelong learning and climate action, published to coincide with the Sixth International Conference on Learning Cities, Jürgen Forkel-Schubert explains how the learning city of Hamburg is rising to the climate-change challenge

© Markus Scholz, City of Hamburg

As a major port city in the north of Germany, Hamburg is confronted with the harsh realities of climate change. Rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events have prompted Hamburg to take administrative and technical measures to mitigate the effects of climate change and support greater climate adaptation.

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Climate assemblies – the fastest road towards climate action?

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In the first of a series of posts to mark the Sixth International Conference on Learning Cities, which focuses on the role of learning cities in promoting climate action, Bjørn Bedsted, International Director at Democracy X, reflects on the potential of climate assemblies in facilitating a green transition

© Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com

The gap between what needs to be done to live up to the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) on 12 December 2015, and what is being done is growing. This gap leads to increased polarization between those calling for faster implementation of mitigation measures and those affected by and resisting such measures.

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Behind the scenes: How UIL’s female staff promote its mandate

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To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, UIL’s gender focal point, Samah Shalaby, highlights how her colleagues progress gender equality in their work

© Olga Kuzmina/Shutterstock.com

The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), located in Hamburg, Germany, is one of UNESCO’s eight education institutes. As its name suggests, UIL’s area of specialization is lifelong learning. Through its capacity-building activities, knowledge sharing and dissemination of data, the Institute provides support to UNESCO Member States in the field of lifelong learning with a focus on learning ecosystems, skills for life and work, and inclusive learning. UIL operates at regional, national and local levels to facilitate learning across sectors. Through its partnerships, it works towards helping the global community achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on inclusive, equitable and quality education for all.

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Fostering joyful learning in Espoo

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Espoo, in Finland, was one of 12 cities to receive the UNESCO Learning City Award at the second International Conference on Learning Cities in Mexico in 2015. Annica Isacsson and Annika Forstén explain what makes Espoo special

© Jussi Helimäki/Espoo
Espoo cultural centre and tower in Tapiola

In 2015, UNESCO recognized the Finnish city of Espoo for the outstanding progress it had made in implementing the ‘Key Features of Learning Cities’ since the first International Conference on Learning Cities in 2013. The Key Features describe a learning city as one that effectively mobilizes, creates and reinforces individual empowerment and social cohesion, and economic and cultural prosperity, in addition to sustainable development. In fact, the United Nations has invited Espoo to become a pioneer of sustainable development by attaining the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2025, five years ahead of schedule.

Espoo aims to ensure that all citizens can fulfill their potential, succeed in the uncertain world of the future and participate in the development of their local communities. Learning, creativity and innovation are fostered from an early age. For example, in 2019, Tapiola Sinfonietta, the city’s orchestra, invited all expectant parents in the city to its regular concerts so that their children could experience the positive influence of music while still in the womb. And Espoo’s systematic approach to collaboration between artists and schools has been extended to early education centres, giving all children the opportunity to interact with professional artists and foster creative minds. Continue reading →

Make the right to education a reality for all

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As we mark International Day of Education, David Atchoarena urges countries to redouble their efforts to ensure no one’s right to education is denied

Today is International Day of Education, a moment not only to celebrate education’s powerful contribution to sustainable human prosperity, progress and peace, but also to assert its wider value – as a human right and as an important public good.

It is an opportune time to consider both what we have achieved in realizing the right to education and how far we have to go to ensure this right is realized for every woman, man and child, wherever they live in the world, whatever their background or personal circumstances.

The global challenges we face are enormous. Some 258 million children and youth still do not attend school, four million children and youth refugees are out of school, and 773 million adults around the world cannot read or write, most of them women. In too many cases, disadvantaged and marginalized groups remain excluded from participation in adult learning and education, as the new UNESCO Global Report on Adult Learning and Education points out. Their right to education is being denied. This is unacceptable. Continue reading →

Leave no one behind: Fighting poverty through lifelong learning

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Konstantinos Pagratis reflects on how education can support the global struggle to end poverty

© UNESCO/Iason Athanasiadis

Last week, the world marked the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 – to end poverty in all its forms everywhere – and to highlight the complex, multidimensional nature of the challenges we face in achieving it.

Education is not a silver bullet when it comes to ending poverty, but it has a crucial role to play, both in securing SDG 1 and in fulfilling the commitment made by Member States in signing up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: to leave no one behind.

UNESCO believes that the fight against poverty demands the strengthening of individuals’ capacities through education, which represents a source not only of employment but also of pride, dignity and agency. As Audrey Azoulay, the Director General of UNESCO, observes, ‘for each year a girl spends in the classroom, her future income will increase by 10 to 20 per cent’. Continue reading →

Acting together for refugees and migrants

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World Refugee Day 2019 is an opportunity to reject the language of hate and express our solidarity with those living in exile – it is also a chance to think about how education can support migrants and refugees in making better lives for themselves, writes Konstantinos Pagratis

Two Burmese refugee boys at a temporary shelter in Thailand © Seipoe/Shutterstock

World Refugee Day, which falls every year on 20 June, promotes awareness of the plight of refugees and reminds us of our common humanity, of the commitments we have made and of the urgent need to keep them. At UIL, it prompts us to reflect on the kinds of educational opportunities available to refugees and migrants and the best approaches we can take in helping them integrate and flourish in their host societies.

The 2018 Global Compact on Refugees and the 2019 Global Education Monitoring Report, Building Bridges, Not Walls, highlight relevant international efforts to integrate migrants and refugees into the formal education system. But there has been too little action, at the local, national or international level, to address the educational needs of migrating, displaced and hosting populations, or to coordinate actions to ensure education supports people in entering the world of work and participating fully in their host communities. Continue reading →

Realizing the potential of lifelong learning

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Lifelong learning has a major contribution to make to helping countries such as Greece rise to the development challenges they face. But, far too often, it is overlooked, writes Christiana Nikolitsa-Winter

A Syrian man and his daughter at a refugee camp in Idomeni in northern Greece.
© Giannis Papanikos/Shutterstock

In Greece, my native country, high unemployment and the ongoing financial crisis are combining with mass population movements of migrants and refugees to create huge development challenges for the country. Greece is also undergoing major demographic changes, with its ageing population reducing the number of young people entering the labour market and obliging those already in the workforce to work for longer and move between jobs more often.

These facts point to an urgent need for a much stronger investment in lifelong learning, and particularly in adult education. By supporting adult education and adopting lifelong learning as the key educational paradigm for inclusive and sustainable learning societies, nation states can build populations that are resilient, adaptable, creative and highly skilled. Yet, in far too many cases, lifelong learning and adult education continue to be neglected.

A recent report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Getting skills right: Future-ready adult learning systems, shows that Greece’s adult learning system performs poorly across several dimensions of the Priorities of Adult Learning (PAL) dashboard. The PAL dashboard indicates that my country has the weakest overall performance in terms of coverage of job-related adult learning. In addition, according to Eurostat, only a few adults re-skill through adult education courses in Greece. In 2017, less than 5 per cent of 25 to 64 years olds participated in such courses. Where these courses are offered, often they are often under-resourced and ill-equipped to address the challenges faced by these students. Continue reading →