Conference Program

In contemporary debates, the term transition describes shifts toward new technological, social, economic, and ecological models. In this contribution, however, transition is understood not as a linear trajectory but as a condition of structural indeterminacy in which consolidated territorial systems must redefine their balances. The infrastructures that supported the habitability of the twentieth century, such as public services, no longer coincide with the social geographies for which they were conceived. Transition thus emerges as a crisis of meaning and governance, rather than simply a matter of sectoral adjustment.

Within this framework, schools become a privileged field of observation. Widely distributed across settlements and composed of recurring urban elements, schools intercept a network of actors operating at different decision-making scales and therefore offer a sensitive observatory for investigating contemporary conditions of habitability. Therefore, when the relationship between this everyday-life infrastructure and its inhabitants becomes unbalanced, its spaces and imaginaries require reconsideration.

In this scenario, the OECD explores four possible evolutions of education systems in response to ongoing socio-educational transition: Schooling Extended, which imagines the expansion of formal education and broader access; Education Outsourced, which foresees fragmented educational provision through digital platforms and homeschooling; Schools as Learning Hubs, which interprets schools as community-based educational centers connected to territorial learning networks; Learn-as-You-Go, which envisions continuous forms of learning supported by digital ,and non, environment. Translating these scenarios into practice requires a process of territorialization, capable of examining how such hypotheses take shape within specific material and relational conditions.

The research addresses this process of territorialization through a methodological device inspired by the cinematic technique of shot-reverse shot, used to explore the relationship between school and territory. This approach frames schools both as educational infrastructures and as territorial hubs where spaces, actors, and practices interact.

The shot is constructed through the analysis of three action-research processes developed in Sardinia, in which the school acts as a territorial actor. In the first case, the school opens to the territory by welcoming associations and local enterprises and integrating teaching with field-based learning practices. In the second case, it participates in the identification and reactivation of an unused space, experimenting with different degrees of transformation in nearby areas. In the third case, the school extends into the neighborhood and engages with the professional world through mapping activities and dissemination tools, both digital and spatial, through which the knowledge produced is shared.

The reverse shot shifts attention from the school to the territorial conditions that enable distributed educational practices. Here, the territory itself can be interpreted as an educational infrastructure within a broader territorial learning ecosystem.

Through the interplay between shot and reverse shot, the research constructs a collection of spatial elements, actions, and actors involved in these processes. This perspective highlights schools not only as educational institutions but as civic public hubs within territories in transition where learning practices, spatial transformation, and collective action intersect, enabling communities to experiment with different ways of learning and collectively re-imagining the urban space as a shared lifelong learning ecosystem.