Conference Program

European policies often frame urban public spaces as key sites for political and social development (European Commission, 2025). Space – and cities more specifically – it is argued, have become increasingly important to how we live, how economies work and how power functions. Furthermore, recent policy and theory-based frameworks on Adult Learning and Education (ALE) recognise citizenship education and civic participation as core dimensions of lifelong learning (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2022; UNESCO, 2021). Urban space thus emerges as an environment for informal learning that is practical, embodied, and relational (Grummell, 2010; Livingstone, 2001, 1999). From this perspective, learning takes place, that means it always happens “in location” (Colley, Hodkinson, & Malcolm, 2003; Lave & Wenger, 1991), even beyond formal educational circuits and settings. Participatory-oriented theories in adult education further suggest that informal learning is inseparable from a sense of belonging. To learn entails being part of, becoming a legitimate participant and member, while belonging itself requires to learn norms, values, identities related to the context to which we belong (Lave & Wenger, 1991). However, according to a critical perspective space is never neutral, but rather an entagled network of historical, cultural and social relationships (Massey, 2005): understanding space therefore requires critically questioning how it is represented, who has access to it, and who holds the power to construct discourses and thus to construct knowledge about it.

Urban regeneration processes provide a particularly revealing key case in which to examine these dynamics, as they actively reshape the material, symbolic and normative conditions of (public) space. The contemporary phenomenon of regeneration is frequently framed in policy discourses as a participatory and inclusive process of spatial transformation, involving various actors in a multilevel engagement, fostering civic and democratic education. Yet experiences of belonging and legitimacy are unevenly distributed, and inclusion and participation often remain rhetorical (Barron, 2022; Trawalter et al., 2021; Fincher et al., 2014). My research aims to investigate the conditions under which belonging, or a sense of distance or alienation, is learnt and reconfigured in public spaces undergoing urban regeneration, and how this shapes perceptions to be part of, or marginal to, collective urban life.

The research is based on an in-depth interpretative case study (Yin, 2018; Merriam, 1989) combining ethnographic observation, walking interviews and focus groups with differently positioned participants involved in a regeneration process in a medium-sized city in northern Italy. Initial findings highlight a number of tensions: between the perceived openness of the space and its actual accessibility, between civic imaginaries of public space and forms of private management, and between rhetoric and effective participation in public affairs, resulting in the perception of limited influence and disengagement.

By analysing belonging as a form of informal learning embedded in spatial experience and transformation, this research contributes to rethinking urban regeneration as a public pedagogy (Biesta, 2012). In this sense, it becomes a formative setting in which to develop a language of critique and possibility and where dispositions towards participation and civic agency can be encouraged-learnt or discouraged-taught.