Conference Program

Exploring the contemporary meaning of a learning city through the case of the metropolitan area of Rome means interpreting it not as a simple metaphor, but as a political‑institutional space in which lifelong learning becomes an urban governance factor for societal and territorial transformation. The Metropolitan City of Rome Capital already possesses many of the characteristics identified by UNESCO for learning cities, but the true transformation lies in making learning a guiding principle of public policies and a transversal axis within strategies for innovation, sustainability, and inclusion. From this perspective, lifelong learning is not an additional service but a device capable of generating meaning, direction, and coherence in institutional decision‑making.

The learning city thus emerges as a democratic knowledge ecosystem, a place where experiences, distributed knowledge, social practices, and civic networks are connected, valued, and brought into dialogue. This network—understood as a “knowledge ecosystem”—integrates schools, universities, libraries, associations, enterprises, and citizens, recognizing the centrality of adults not only as beneficiaries but as protagonists of learning and as holders of educational rights across the life course. The establishment of the “Metropolitan Network of Lifelong Learning” signals a model of cooperative governance that broadens the range of actors and activates stable participatory processes.

At the same time, the learning city is a tool for countering inequalities and mending the urban fabric, reducing distances between central and peripheral areas, between generations, and between those who have access to knowledge and those who are excluded from it. Widespread learning acts as a connective tissue that helps individuals and communities to orient themselves within a society perceived as uncertain, providing competencies to face everyday challenges and to exercise conscious, active citizenship.

This approach becomes particularly relevant in the context of digital, ecological, and demographic transitions, which require anticipatory capacities at the territorial level. The learning city operates as a platform for collective preparedness for change: it promotes digital literacy, supports practices of social and environmental resilience, and offers public spaces where new ways of understanding the future can be experimented. The image of young people engaged in civil service, perhaps in a library, supporting disadvantaged individuals in the use of digital services while learning themselves through practice, conveys the tangible nature of the local learning ecosystem as a generative space of reciprocity and shared futures.

In this framework, the learning city shows conceptual affinities with deep democracy, understood as the plural and profound involvement of communities in decisions affecting them. The production of distributed knowledge, the centrality of adults as active subjects, and multilayered governance based on networks and participatory processes constitute elements that connect lifelong learning to a form of democracy that is rooted, dialogic, and capable of including the diversity, needs, and visions of citizens.