Conference Program

TThe bidirectional relationship between “Learning for Democracy” and “Democracy for Learning” highlights a virtuous circle in which democracy emerges not only as an object of learning, but also as a structural and cultural condition enabling meaningful learning. From this perspective, the design of educational environments acquires both political and pedagogical value: spaces, temporalities, mediating devices, and social relations actively support participation, dialogue, and shared responsibility. Conceiving the learning environment as a democratic act means acknowledging it as a site of deliberation, where heterogeneous subjectivities can speak, negotiate interests, and construct collective meaning, thus positioning the school as a deliberative ecosystem in which democracy is simultaneously an educational aim, a material condition, and a daily practice of learning (Biesta & Lawy, 2006; Fielding, 2011).

Within this framework, the co-design of school spaces by the school community plays a strategic role, as it rethinks the material, spatial, and organizational conditions of schooling while redistributing decision-making power among students, teachers, families, designers, and territorial actors (Chianese & Bocchi, 2023; Castoldi, 2020). Democracy, in this sense, is not merely a curricular content or institutional framing, but an everyday practice embedded in didactic and design choices: from spatial configurations to the use of educational technologies, from organizational flexibility to teaching practices.

Engaging learners from early ages in the co-design of school and urban environments as distributed and decentered learning spaces fosters sustainable, inclusive, and intergenerational practices that interconnect formal education with the urban milieu, enabling educational uses of public space and meaningful links between learning, citizenship, and lived environments (OECD, 2021; Chipa, Cannella & Mangione, 2023). Spatial co-design thus becomes a democratic act in which values, needs, and priorities are collectively negotiated, transforming space into a device for agency, participation, and belonging (Gehl, 2010). The contribution illustrates how collaborative design practices - from educational placemaking to integrated school-neighbourhood and school-city planning - can strengthen inclusion, wellbeing, community resilience, and active citizenship (Latham & Layton, 2019). In this perspective, the school becomes a civic and democratic laboratory capable of intertwining education, territorial welfare, and urbanity, making visible the circular relationship between democracy and learning (UNESCO, 2015)