Conference Program

Learning Communities and Educating Cities share a foundational promise: to promote inclusion and participation as conditions for democratic education (IAEC, 2020; UNESCO, 2014a; Zorde & Lapidot-Lefler, 2025). However, although inclusion is widely framed as a global challenge and a declared policy objective (UN, 2006; EC, 2021), in real territorial contexts it often takes heterogeneous and sometimes ambivalent forms, oscillating between normative discourse and concrete implementation (Gillovic & McIntosh, 2020; Liasidou & Stylianou, 2024).
Starting from this tension, the paper interprets the Educating City as a networked socio-educational system that can be understood within an ecosystemic framework of learning (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Vélez et al., 2024), and thus as an extended territorial Learning Community. In this perspective, the city is not conceived as an administrative boundary, but as a distributed learning environment in which institutions, cultural organizations, and urban practices co-produce knowledge and redefine forms of participation. Accessibility therefore becomes an indicator of the quality of relationships between microsystems, mesosystems, and governance levels, making it possible to assess whether inter-institutional cooperation generates transformative outcomes.
The paper presents a case study conducted in Palma de Mallorca, a city belonging to the International Association of Educating Cities, examined as an urban context with a strong cultural-tourism orientation and a commitment to policies promoting accessibility and participation (Ajuntament de Palma de Mallorca, 2014). The study investigates whether and how inclusive historical-cultural tourism practices – understood as heritage mediation devices accessible to people with disabilities and to diverse audiences – produce educational effects on the local community. Such practices may configure the city as a learning community capable of integrating residents and visitors within shared processes of awareness and participation.
From a methodological perspective, the study adopts an embedded single-case design (Yin, 2005), articulated through sub-units of analysis related to practices and devices, and based on multiple sources of evidence: document analysis, direct observation, and interviews (Eisenhardt, 1989). The analysis distinguishes episodic interventions from systemic configurations, emphasizing the documentability of practices, the plurality of experiences, and their pedagogical relevance.
The inclusive quality of historical-cultural tourism practices represents a significant indicator of a territory’s transformative capacity (Bellato & Cheer, 2021). Inclusion thus acquires pedagogical value when it supports competencies that are essential for democratic participation and the development of agency: critical and systemic thinking, collaboration, and flexibility (Nyanjom et al., 2018; UNESCO, 2014b). Only within such a framework can the Educating City be interpreted as a territorial Learning Community capable of activating processes of collective learning and civic co-responsibility, critically engaging with the global challenge of inclusive equity.