vi congresso internacional das cidades … · vice-chancellor of lisbon university, josé barata...

VI INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATING CITIES Lisbon, 21 - 24 November 2000

Centro Cultural de Belém

FINAL DOCUMENTS “The city, an educational space in the new millennium”

VI INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATING CITIES Lisbon, 21 a 24 November 2000

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INDEX

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 3 Committees

Non-Executive Board ................................................................................................ 4 Scientific Committee ................................................................................................. 5 Organising Committee ...............................................................................................6 AICE Executive Committee....................................................................................... 7

Opening Ceremony......................................................................................................... 9 Video Conference ......................................................................................................... 23 “The city, an educational space in the new millennium” Plenary Session “The educating dimension of the city” ....................................................................... 46 Closing Ceremony “Viewing the educating city in the new millennium”................................................ 73

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Introduction The Lisbon City Hall represents one of the 221 cities that are members of the IAEC, The International Association of Educating Cities. This international association and each of its member cities aim at working together on projects and activities, covering different scopes, that are proposed to all of the inhabitants and developed by different groups but which all have an educating proposal, according to the principles laid out in the Charter approved in 1990 – the Declaration of Barcelona. Since that date biannual congresses have taken place. These congresses constitute an important moment of reflection on the educational policies of the cities - presentation, analysis and debate of educational experiences carried out or in progress in the different member cities – as well as of other participants in the Congress. The VI Congress which this year took place in Lisbon, between the 21st and the 24th of November 2000, was developed in continuation of and with the same aims as the previous meetings which took place in Barcelona (1990), Gothenburg (1992), Bologna (1994), Chicago (1996) and Jerusalem (1999). The main theme of this congress was: “The city, an educational space in the new millennium” This theme was the object of an initial plenary session – video conference – in which participated various personalities who reflect this theme of current interest, from the Centro Cultural de Belém to the various parts of the world. The theme was divided up into five simultaneous panels addressing the following issues: Panel 1 – Appropriation of the space by the people: planning and practices; Panel 2 – The city’s memory and identity; Panel 3 – Local development, solidarity and interdependence; Panel 4 – Diversity as an educational resource for the city and for the school: new models of participation and of citizenship; Panel 5 – Education, training, employment and leisure: the strategic role of the city. 204 proposals for oral communications were submitted, of which the Scientific Committee selected 93, producing roughly 19 interventions per panel. These communications refer to projects developed by 54 different cities in 20 different countries: Argentina (1), Belgium (1), Brazil (4), Chile (1), Colombia (1), Spain (12), United States of America (1), Finland (2), France (2), Guinea-Bissau (1), Hungary (1), Israel (1), Italy (7), Mexico (1), Portugal (12), Senegal (1), Sweden (1), Switzerland (1), Togo (1), Uruguay (1). 5 theme visits were carried out, visiting projects in progress in Lisbon (3) and in two of the municipalities within the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The plenary session on the 24th of November, during which the themes addressed in the five panels (presentations and debates) were commented, as well as the final conference on “The educational dimension of the cities in the new millennium” concluded the work of the Congress, giving continuity to the themes in the daily life of the cities. Various meetings took place during the conference: The International Executive Committee (3 meetings), City meetings (IAEC members networks, non member cities and the General Assembly of the IAEC), as well as other informal meetings. The International Document Data Bank of the Educating Cities (IDBEC) and the Lisbon Educational Experiences Data Bank (LEEDB) were presented and made available to the members. Exhibition spaces were set up with placards, stands and videos. The communications that were presented at the Congress, as well as the comments made by invited analysts were published both on a CD and in brochures. 802 participants from 215 cities and 50 countries participated in the Congress.

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Committees Non-Executive Board His Excellency the President of the Republic, Jorge Sampaio Minister of Education, Augusto Santos Silva Mayor of Lisbon, João Soares Director General of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura President of the Portuguese Committee of UNICEF, Manuel Campos Pina Chairman of the International Association of Educating Cities, Joan Clos Lisbon City Councillor, Deputy Chairman of the Europa Forum for Urban Safety, Deputy Chairman of the Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities, Vasco Franco Lisbon City Councillor, Rita Magrinho Lisbon City Councillor, Maria Calado Lisbon City Councillor, Manuel Figueiredo Chairman of the National Association of Portuguese Towns and Cities, Mário de Almeida Chairman of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Vítor Sá Machado Citizens’ Regulator of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, Maria do Carmo Romão Chairman of the Co-ordinating Committee for the Region of Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, António Fonseca Ferreira Vice-Chancellor of Lisbon University, José Barata Moura Vice-Chancellor of the Lisbon Technical University, José Lopes da Silva Vice-Chancellor of Lisbon New University, Luís Fernando Gomes de Sousa Lobo Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, Maria José Ferro Tavares Vice-Chancellor of Lisbon Catholic University, Manuel Braga da Cruz Chairman of the Further Institute for Labour and Emplyment Studies, João Ferreira de Almeida Director of the National Archives, Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa Director of the National Library, Carlos Reis Chairman of the Camões Institute, Jorge Couto Director of the Portuguese Institute of Museums, Raquel Henriques da Silva Chairwoman of the Child Support Agency, Manuela Eanes Chairwoman of the Portuguese League for Motor Deficiency, Maria Guida Faria General Secretary of FENPROF and Chairman of the Greater Lisbon Teachers’ Union, Paulo Sucena Chairman of the Directorate for the National Youth Council, Paulo Afonso Chairman of the Portuguese Federation for Culture and Recreation, Alfredo Flores Chairman of the Lisbon Academic Association, Nuno Félix Chairman of the National Union of Jornalists, Alfredo Maia

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Scientific Committee Alberto Melo, Lecturer at the University of the Algarve Ana Carita, Lecturer and Moral Tutor in the Services of Psychology and Guindance António Firmino da Costa, Lecturer at the Further Institute for Labour and Emplyment Studies Appio Sottomayor, Journalist, specialist in the Lisbon-related topics and member of the History of Lisbon Place Names Committee on the Lisbon City Council Francisco Silva Dias, Lecturer at the School of Architecture in the Lisbon Technical University Geneviève Domenach-Chich, Head of the UNESCO City and Human Habitat Unit. Representative of the Director General of UNESCO Isabel Oliveira, Deputy Director of the Lisbon Regional Directorate of Education Isabel Guerra, Associate Lecturer at the Further Institute for Labour João Barroso, Lecturer at the Lisbon Faculty of Psychology and Education, Chairman of the Portuguese Forun of Educational Administration João Reis, Member of GEPOLIS – Portuguese Catholic University Luís Jorge Bruno Soares, Architect Maria da Graça Guedes, Divisional Head in the Lisbon City Council Youth and Education Departement Maria de Lurdes Neto, Lecturer at the Lisbon Higher School of Education Maria de Lurdes Moreira dos Santos Rabaça Gaspar, Director of the Youth and Edcation Departement (DEJ), Lisbon City Council Maria de Lurdes Silva, Teacher at the Lisbon Faculty of Psychology and Education Maria Emília Brederode Santos, Chairwoman of the Institute of Educational Innovation Maria de Almeida Figueirinhas, Director of the Municipal Civil Protection Service Mário Ruivo, Portuguese representative on a number on international organisations UNESCO and FAO Rogério Fernandes, Lecturer at the Lisbon Faculty of Psychologie and Education and Chairman of the Irene Lisboa Institute Rogério Roque Amaro, Lecturer at the Lisbon Faculty of Psychology and Education and Consultant to the United Nations Development Programme for Africa Sérgio Niza, Director of the On-going Training Centre for the Escola Moderna, advisor and consultant to various governmental organisations Sérgio Ribeiro, Guest Lecturer at the Higher Institute of Economics and Management Teresa Barata Salgueiro, Lecturer at the Lisbon University Faculty of Humanities Vítor Serrão, Lecturer at the Lisbon University Faculty of Humanities

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Organising Committee Congress Organization /Lisbon City Council Maria de Lurdes Moreira S. Rabaça Gaspar Director of the Youth and Education Department Alexandra Aníbal DEJ* Specialist in Youth and Education Affairs Alexandra Fonseca Assistant to the Councillor for the Lisbon Council / Education Álvaro Fernandes DEJ Specialist in Youth and Education Affairs Anete Luz Divisional Head of Building Works, DEJ Carmo Mota Advisor to the Councillor for the Lisbon Council / Education Cristina Ferreira DEJ Specialist in Youth and Education Affairs Graça Guedes Divisional Head of DEJ Socio-Educational Support João Afonso DEJ Specialist in Youth and Education Affairs Lídia Branco DEJ Specialist in Youth and Education Affairs Maria de Lurdes Silva Advisor to the Councillior for the Lisbon City Council / Educ Paula Fernandes DEJ Specialist in Youth and Education Affairs Pedro Nereu Advisor to the Councillor for the Lisbon City Council / Educa * Youth and Education Department

Congress Organization /AMBELIS Branca Neves Project Director Elizabete Marques Assistant to the Projector Director Esmeralda Silva Financial Assistant Isabel d’Orey Assistant Isabel Almeida Fernandes Assistant

ation

tion

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AIEC EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

BARCELONA

Joan Clos – Mayor of AICE and Mayor of Barcelona

Marina Subirats – Councillior of Education and Culture

Pilar Figueras – General Secretary of AICE

BUDAPESTE

Gábor Demszky – Mayor of Budapest

Antal Pálinszki – President of the Education Committee

DAKAR

Mamadou Diop – Mayor of Dakar

Abdel Kader Sabara – Assistant to the Mayor Chief Education Officer

GENEBRA

Manuel Tornare – Administrative Councillor

Philippe Aegerter – Director of the Municipal Department of Social Affairs for Schools and

the Environment

JERUSALÉM

Edhud Olmert – Mayor of Jerusalem

Nissim Salomon – Deputy Director General

LISBOA

António Abreu – Vice-President of Lisbon City Councill and Chief Education Officer

Maria de Lurdes Rabaça Gaspar – Director of the Youth and Education Department

MÉXICO

Rosario Robles Berlenga – Mayor of Mexico City

Clara Jusidman – Secretary for Social Development

RENNES

Edmond Hervé – Mayor of Rennes

Hubert Chardonnet – Assistant to the Mayor and Chief Youth and Education Officer

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ROSÁRIO

Hermes Binner – Mayor of Rosario

Alicia Cabezudo – Director of the AIEC Delegation for Latin America

TAMPERE

Jarmo Rantanen – Mayor of Tampere

Ulla Lijestom – Chief Education Officer

TURIM

Valentino Castellani – Mayor of Turin

Paola Pozzi – Advisor on Education

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Opening Ceremony

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LISBON CITY COUNCIL Maria de Lurdes Rabaça Gaspar

Director of the Youth and Education Department

Good afternoon.

On behalf of the Minister of Education, Mr Augusto Santos Silva, I declare this session open.

The Councilman responsible for the Education Area in the City Hall of Lisbon, Mr António

Abreu; the Mayor of Lisbon, Mr João Soares; the President of the International Association

of Educating Cities and Alcaide of Barcelona, Mr. Joan Clos and the Minister of Education,

Mr Augusto Santos Silva will subsequently have the floor.

António Abreu

Councillor of Education, Lisbon City Council

Minister of Education, Mayor of Lisbon, Alcaide of Barcelona and President of the

International Association of Educating Cities, ladies and gentlemen and invited participants.

The City Educative Space of the New Millennium, the theme of this congress, shows the

willingness of the municipality of Lisbon to step into a new phase of its responsibilities within

the educational area. The development of this willingness occurs at the same time as two

movements registered throughout the recent past, the decentralization of the central

services of the Ministry, with the establishment of 5 regional directorates and 22 educational

centres and another one for the progressive transfer of competences within this area to the

local authorities. This double movement was developed starting from a centralised model,

which existed in our education system that has been the object of several contradictions.

Regardless of the fact, the municipality has developed sensitivity towards education and has

endeavoured, through a multidimensional approach, to ensure, for all, the right to a normal

and successful schooling.

We have integrated this objective within the purposes, that have been outlined ten years

ago, for this area envisaging the progress of the city, namely the reinforcement of supports

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and social opportunities within a framework of cohesion and solidarity, the continued

increase of education and training levels of the population and the support provided to the

integration of immigrants and minorities and their children. These are the reasons why we

have established a specific municipal structure for education, which has developed its action

based upon some fundamental pillars: building and repairing schools, equipping schools and

ensuring the running-costs, the social action, the implementation of social-educational

programmes, supporting educational projects within schools and supporting the training of

teachers and cooperation with the purpose to integrate schools in their respective

communities and the decentralisation of the competences to the local government.

I would like to congratulate the managers, the technical staff and all the workers of this

department. We owe them the organisation of this congress. We are concerned with the

educational coherence of all the activities developed by the municipality and we promote the

coordination of efforts with other bodies that participate, whether formally or informally, in

education and training. The economic model which determines the expansion of the city and

life standards, forces us to make additional efforts in order to achieve the permanent social-

urban balance, to growingly think the city with more and more resources and favourable

places for a happy childhood with a human dimension and a permanent education process.

Good conditions must be ensured in these spaces. To bring back to school all those who

should be there, to ensure schooling periods as long as possible and to ensure several

extra-schooling and leisure activities, to render feasible life-long education. The process

according to which families build up their family income confirms the vital role-played by

qualifications and schooling in determining the salaries, so, education plays a growing role in

breaking up the vicious circle of poverty. Therefore, we identify ourselves with the educating

cities charter when the educating city was defined as a city that recognises, explores and

develops, beyond its traditional functions, an educating function, i.e., when it assumes this

function with a purpose and responsibility. The knowledge society thus demands this

reasoning and claims the adoption of education as a strategic development vector. But we

know, we all know, that municipalities cannot, alone, provide a full answer to this demand.

The cities must obtain from central power, on one hand, the legal provisions, the vital

financial support and partnerships that are not restricted to the transfer of financial burdens,

enabling them to play a relevant role in the decision making process regarding objectives

and strategies. The cities must grant, themselves, another weight to the specific education

municipal resources and they must render profitable the existing resources, increase the

possibilities and opportunities that the city itself must provide. The cities must, after all,

provide coherence and credibility to the participation structures of the several participants in

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the educational process that have the capacity to define and implement educational projects

with a more far reaching scope, i.e., not restricted to the school.

These are quantitative and qualitative leaps that must be prepared with responsibility. In

different phases, in different ways this is something that all our cities must face. Therefore,

we have suggested this theme for our 6th congress, we trust the results given the chosen

theme, the foreseen presentations and the expected debate by the 802 participants, coming

from 215 cities, 50 countries from the different continents. We regret the delays, which have

occurred regarding some organization aspects, and we wish you all a very fruitful work.

João Soares

Mayor of Lisbon

Minister of Education, Mr Augusto Santos Silva, esteemed Alcaide of Barcelona, dear Joan

Clos, President of the International Association of Educating Cities, dear Deputy-Mayor of

the City Hall of Lisbon and organizer of this 6th Congress of the Educating Cities, Ms Maria

de Lurdes Rabaça, distinguished Director of the Education and Youth Department of the City

Hall of Lisbon, ladies and gentlemen.

I will be very brief, before anything else I would like to underline how happy the city of Lisbon

and its municipality are to assume the organization of this 6th Congress of the Educating

Cities within an affirmation framework, nationally and internationally, of the city of Lisbon as

a city of education.

It is thus important to express our gratitude towards the commitment of the municipal

services of the City Hall of Lisbon and the commitment of the person, the political

responsible person, for this area, the Deputy-Mayor António Abreu, who, since the first

minute, even before the application was submitted, enabled the city of Lisbon and its

municipality to organize this congress. Having been deeply committed so that Lisbon, also

under this scope, would assume something that is particularly emblematic as an educating

capital.

I would also like to express our gratitude and admiration to the Alcaide of the city of

Barcelona, our friend Joan Clos for his dynamism and commitment in presiding the

International Association of Educating Cities. This is for us an example and an incentive so

that we always try to do more and better regarding our own responsibilities in the capital city

of our country. So, once again, on the very same day that we have just inaugurated in the

city of Lisbon the Barcelona Street, we would like to express out deep gratitude and our

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fraternal solidarity towards the President of the International Association of Educating Cities

and also Alcaide of Barcelona, Joan Clos.

I would also like to express our deep gratitude for the presence, in this opening session, of

the Minister of Education. This is also for us a very important encouragement and it is

something that grants prestige to this congress that honours us all and gives us a feeling of

deep satisfaction. Our relationship of cooperation with the government has always been

intense and dynamic with progresses and drawbacks like all processes of this nature, but

within a logic: to try and meet the interests of a capital city like our own, the best we know

and can and up to the limit of our strength. Hence, we would also like to express our

gratitude to the Minister of Education and his honourable presence in this opening session of

the 6th Congress of the International Association of Educating Cities.

I would also like to express our gratitude and welcome, although I am repeating what has

already been said by the Deputy-Mayor of the City Hall of Lisbon, Mr António Abreu, to our

colleagues representatives of the local power, to all the delegates from 53 countries that

wanted to honour us and giving us the pleasure of being present in this 6th Congress of the

International Association of Educating Cities. It is something that fills us with pride, because

it clearly represents a success in terms of the international affirmation of this congress,

ensuring that the debates can be and will be particularly rich and fruitful for our cities, for our

educational structures.

I would like to reinstate, on behalf of the City Hall of Lisbon, what has already been said by

the Deputy-Mayor António Abreu, who, over more than six years, has been the responsible

person for the education and youth area in the City Hall of Lisbon, an executive that I have

the honour to preside.

We deeply believe that the city of Lisbon will continue to growingly and always affirm itself as

a city of education, as a city of schools, of students, of teachers, of all those who are

involved in the educational process, but we want that the affirmation of the city of Lisbon, as

an educating city, to grow beyond the strict and restricted borders of the school system of

the city itself, beyond the borders of the educational premises themselves of a capital city

like Lisbon. And we want that the specific definition of the major strategic objectives of the

city, within the framework of what is a planning of its development and a planning of the

definition of its strategic objectives to be also done within a logic of participation which is

obviously the framework of affirmation of what are the main features of a city that wants to

be a city of education, as an educating city.

We will attentively follow the work developed in this congress, and certainly the exchanges

of experiences will take place and new ways will emerge encouraging us even further to

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continue affirming a Europe that we want to be a Europe of peace, affirming a progress

based upon culture and education, the values of culture, civics and education, after all, a

Europe of future in which we all believe in, in a disturbed world in which we live in where it is

more and more important to affirm what are the traditional values of respect towards human

rights, the values of culture and education.

Thank you, for your presence here in Lisbon. I wish you a fruitful work, certainly this a

pleonasm and this will most certainly be a fruitful work.

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INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF EDUCATING CITIES

Joan Clos

Chairman of IAEC, Mayor of Barcelona

Distinguished Minister of Education, Mr Augusto Santos Silva, dear Mayor of Lisbon, João

Soares, Deputy-Mayor, Mr António Abreu, dear Ms Maria de Lurdes Rabaça, my dear

friends who came from so many different cities who belong to the educating cities network,

50 countries, 215 cities. And as far as I could gather it seems that there are also present

other cities, although they do not belong to the network, they want to be here with us on this

debate and maybe, in the future, to participate, to become members of this extraordinary

project, the educating cities project.

When we started in Barcelona, more than a decade ago, we never had the feeling that such

a level of fine-tuning would be reached among so many cities from all continents. The

underlying idea of this magnificent project is the dialogue, which must be established

between the city and the education system so that the city itself becomes an educating

element. In a world where we see that the messages that reach the young citizens, youth,

children, little boys and girls, are messages usually conveyed by the media, basically,

television, where the prevailing values, more often, are the values of violence, competition,

victory in every type of confrontation including sports. As a matter of fact we know that these

are the values, which are not the most necessary for our society. Nor are they going to be

the most useful, the most convenient to develop civic citizens, who interact socially, who are

committed towards their own society and their own culture. We clearly feel and hear the

voice of the educators from all our societies when they say: families, parents, politicians, do

not fully and solely delegate on the school the educating function. The educating function,

cannot, should not be a mere function, responsibility of the school. It is too important, it goes

beyond the school. And it is here that this new vocation emerges to build a city, to erect a

city like an essential component of the development of new citizens.

In many cultures, including the traditional family, that is facing a certain crisis, the way to

culturally convey the values is also facing some difficulties. Obviously, there are elements

that can play a crucial role in the democratic city, in the civic city, in the communal city:

social interaction between neighbours, the community, what the Americans now

sometimes call village, in summary, this territory where we actively interact socially. We truly

interact socially, without that many laws, without that many written principles, but rather the

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daily practice, in the street, in the neighbourhood, in the district or in the city. We are

exercising, day after day, the right of social interaction. And it is with this right of social

interaction, if we exercise this right with dignity, with civic respect, our youth, our little boys

and girls, can learn values of cohesion, solidarity and civics.

Maybe this is the only place for many of them where they can be reached, not necessarily

through words, but rather the image how those who are older, both of them, respect the

public space. We respect the right of pedestrians to walk without problems, we have

managed to have orderly traffic, respecting on its turn the pedestrians’ right. Where we can

teach and tell people not to dirty the streets in a concrete way, we can tell people to respect

the other citizens, even if they are different, in every way, culturally, racially, from what each

one of us is. The city is the plant of social interaction. Social interaction is always a speech

until it is not implemented, in our daily life, on the field, usually, in the city, in the community,

in the village.

Probably in this new society, which is rather determined by globalisation, by new

technologies, by the power of the media message, we have difficulties in conveying the

collective values, the values of social interaction. We are witnessing and suffering it in the

already existing behaviours in school, where, all around us, in our cultures, we already see

children who did not have a real contact with civic and community values, with values of

social interaction and children who have real difficulties in relating with their own school

colleagues, sometimes, the only thing that they have really learned is confrontation and

violence.

So, which is the risk we are running? How dramatic is this situation? If we are not able to

reverse it in order to finally achieve a situation in which the values of solidarity and civics,

friendship and fellowship prevail.

This also reminds me of some sentences said once by John Young, a Northern Ireland MP,

Peace Nobel Prize awarded, when he was talking about the Northern Ireland conflict. He

was saying, during a presentation, how difficult and hard it is to learn that victory is not a

condition of peace. He was saying this in English, almost poetically he said “It’s agreement

not victory what makes peace”.

He was saying this applying it, of course, to the very difficult problem, as you all know, that is

Northern Ireland. And it is with dialogue, social interaction, talking, relating with each other

that we can build collective values, that we can eradicate violence and individualism from our

society and, also, of course, from our schools. And, we know, families and politicians, that

we cannot rely alone on the education system to carry out this extremely important task, nor

can we burden in it with too many problems that we all will have to share and it is exactly

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here where this value of the educating city is born, this willingness to transform everything

that happens in the city into something that has a value of conveying values, being by itself a

sample of the values we want to teach to new generations.

I would also like to thank all those who in many cities of the world immediately seized this

message and have worked unselfishness to attain this reality: a group of cities in the world,

who strongly, loudly and clearly, talk about the need to reconstruct the democratic values of

civic live and precisely about the value these values have in being conveyed to our youth

who, nowadays, is receiving many other messages, probably, most of them are very far

apart from the social interaction values. We know that in many occasions and in the media,

this is a rather unequal fight, very unequal, but we also know that there are many cities in the

world that are building their places like cities, acquiring prestige, that are being recognised

as social interaction territories. There was a headline on The Economist, about five or six

years ago, saying “Help the American city”, just after the end of the racial conflicts, that

ended with fires in the neighbourhoods of Los Angeles and in some other American cities, or

when the same problems occurred in England, or in the outskirts of the large French cities.

Faced with the new realities of the inter-racial and inter-cultural dialogue, in shock, this drew

the attention of the developed world regarding what was being done at the level of the

education system, above all in those areas of the modern cities that have more needs. This

was an emergency call, however we do not want to approach this type of situations. We

want to approach and we want to fill our own cities with that cross-sectional culture that

affects the whole city, that shares it and establishes the spirit and pride of city, the pride of

the city in the sense of the pride of social interaction, solidarity, tolerance and friendship. We

know that this class of city is better than other cities, and that these cities stand more

chances in terms of economic growth, to better distribute wealth, to help its population.

And in order to achieve these goals, we need to recover and to uphold with strong attitudes

these collective values, although, there are times in which such values are not fashionable.

Here lies the greatness of our commitment, here lays also the difficulty of our task. However,

it is reconforting to see 215 cities represented here, 50 countries and a countless number of

persons, teachers, representatives of the local power, neighbours’ associations, citizens who

uninterestedly are working towards this goal.

I would like to thank you all for your devotion, I obviously would also like to thank a lot the

city of Lisbon and the Mayor of Lisbon for the excellent organisation of the Assembly here in

Lisbon. Since Barcelona we have been in Chicago, Bologna, Jerusalem and I don’t know

where else, and, we ended up meeting each other now here in Lisbon. The next time we will

go to Tampere, further north, we will meet with our friends from the north of Europe. In 2004,

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I will submit my application to the Executive Committee so that we will return to Barcelona at

the same time as the Universal Forum of Cultures in the year 2004, where we want, as a

matter of fact, to talk about the following question: can cultures, through their dialogue,

generate conditions of peace? This is the question we would like to suggest for the 2004

meeting.

Lastly, I hope this congress will be a success, that our ideas prosper, that we are, in fact,

able to establish a link between school, citizenship and city. City, citizenship and school and

to create cities that are in fact educating cities. If we are able to achieve this, when we are

able to achieve this, when this is achieved, we will become better cities.

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MINISTÉRIO DA EDUCAÇÃO

Augusto Santos Silva

Minister of Education

Alcaide of Barcelona, Mayor and Deputy-Mayor of the Town Hall of Lisbon, Director of the

Education Department, dear participants attending this conference.

I would like to greet the fact that the 6th International Congress of the Educating Cities is

being held in Lisbon, congratulating also the International Association of Educating Cities for

its activities and the fortunate decision made by the City of Lisbon to belong to this

association and the fact that it was possible to submit the proposal and, after the approval, to

hold this congress here in Lisbon.

I would like to give some food for thought, two very simple reflections: one about what

education can bring forward to the city and citizenship and another one about what

education needs from the city.

In fact, in order to understand how, towards which direction and up to which point education

can add value to the organisation of our cities and to their structuring in civic life. I do believe

that we just have to remember three essential elements that lie within the act of education.

The first element is the following: to educate is to learn, there isn’t education unless we learn

and we learn with each other and, therefore, as far as we believe we have skills, we have

attitudes, that we are the bearers of values, capacities, attitudes and values that we can

develop, i.e., to consider, i.e., to improve considering that such development involves work,

organisation, orientation, reciprocal communication among us.

The second element is the following: to educate is to prepare someone to be an individual,

to act, to develop skills, i.e., to become capable of acting, to become part of his / her life, the

schools he / she must attend and the communities to which he / she belongs, aware of his /

her rights and aware of his / her responsibilities. Knowing, most certainly, that rights without

duties is something that does not exist nor rights without responsibilities. And there is still a

third element, which is essential in the education and learning act that is the relationship

element, because, as a matter of fact, to educate is also to establish a tie, to establish a

link, to a establish a bridge between our past, our present and our future. It is to mobilise

knowledges that were conveyed to us, it is to mobilise attitudes and values that form our

cultures and our civilisations and at the same time being able to design these values in the

future, these knowledges and these attitudes knowing that it is up to each one of us, under

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the present circumstances, but reinventing the present circumstances to create this future.

And it is this link, this continuity, this relationship which the act of educating presupposes

between a past and a future, it is, somehow, doubled by the fact that the act of educating is

also a meeting point, crossing, exchange, of communication between people who are

different, who have different ages, different conditions, different social backgrounds, different

cultures that they bear, but they are persons because they are different and are the bearers

of wealth that they can share and based upon it they can build a common future. And these

three elements that define the act of educating are, in my opinion, for this very reason, three

contributions that education can bring and brings to life in our cities, because our cities, the

economies that shape them, the social fabrics that form them, growingly need knowledge,

the capacity to learn, the capacity to update ourselves, the capacity to process, to create, to

interpret information, the capacity to mobilise values and knowledges. And, therefore, the

more educated the populations are the stronger our cities become. Because our cities also

need the citizens’ civic participation and, therefore, what education prepares us to be, to

become individuals, is essential for life in our cities, because our cities are not dead spaces,

are not inhabited territories, to be cities they need to be living spaces, inhabited territories by

people who are individuals of the collective future, are members of the community to which

they belong. And, because our cities cannot erase the memory that determines them, they

cannot erase the identity, which is their own identity, quite on the contrary, they must

mobilise the memory, they must mobilise the identity, they must mobilise what has formed

them, both in their physical space as well as their heritage, culture and soul of its inhabitants,

all this must be mobilised as resources, resources that the cities need for their future. And on

the other hand, cities that are growingly characterised by social diversity, by the fact that in

these cities there is social interaction, there are different people with different regional

origins, different social backgrounds, different political, ideological or religious beliefs,

different ethnic or national origins. These cities, growingly diversified, need and they

urgently need to orient learning towards relationship, the recognition of the other, and the

constant dialogue with the other as one of the essential pillars of their organisation.

And, therefore, there are several plans, according to which it is possible to clearly say: yes,

education has a lot to bring forward to cities. Cities need education. But education also

needs the cities. This is the second and last reflection I would like to present. Education

needs the cities, the cities perceived as common spaces, as communities, as territories,

organised by life and by the relationship between people, because education is a matter that

concerns everybody and therefore everybody should be mobilised, all institutions and all

agents should be mobilised towards the education programme. Because education is not an

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island, nor the institutions where formal education is developed are circuits isolated from the

social milieu in which they are integrated. It is quite the other way around, these are services

provided to the social milieu in which they are integrated and thus, the better the more

democratic, the more civil the social environment surrounding them, the better can schools

work and the better will education work. But education also needs the cities, their

inhabitants, their institutions and those who are responsible for the decision making process

in three other ways that I would like to recall. Firstly, in order to organise formal education,

the Deputy-Mayor has already had the opportunity to recall that it isn’t nowadays possible to

imagine and to build modern and democratic educational systems without an extremely

strong decentralisation and without an extremely strong and committed involvement of a

variety of partners that do education in the territories that form a country. Thus, we still have

a lot to do in this decentralisation process and this convergence process of the different

partners and, in particular, with the authorities, the local powers and the national state in the

construction of educational systems, systems that are adequate to the population they are

supposed to serve. Secondly, considering the meaning of non-formal education, this is,

education for adults, the growing use and rendering profitable the community space and the

community movements of the cities. This is where education loses its differences in

comparison with policies that are so close to it, such as youth policies or cultural policies or

vocational training policies or even the active employment policies. Because there is, as a

matter of fact, a platform where intervention, action, from various perspectives, but within a

convergence perspective, is indispensable, this is the platform where, as a matter of fact

educators, politicians, cultural agents meet, those who are the protagonists in various

community movements, whether these are defined or built by neighbourhood associations or

by age groups or by generational conditions. Thirdly and last meaning, according to which

education means our own basic choice of a given path of development valuing more than

the products that we reach at each different moment in such a path, we value the processes

that we put in practice in achieving such products, because the processes are transferable to

other paths, to other projects. The products are transitional, reversible; the products are

determined by the situation in which they are obtained. But the processes, the methods, the

strategies, these are applicable in other situations, these are applicable to other paths, these

are resources that we can transfer and mobilise in other circumstances. And a better

process to build na urban social cycle characterised by civility, by civics and democracy

does not exist rather than the development process of personal and group skills, i.e.,

education, skills, knowledge development process, entrepreneurship, accountability, love

towards our fellow citizens, love towards common interest that define the best of itself:

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education. And, therefore, it is this double meeting, reflecting from the education

perspective; that I can say that education has something to add to the life of our cities. But I

should and I also want to say that education needs our cities; it is under this double

perspective that I believe that a reflection and working platform can be established like the

one that you, ladies and gentlemen, will most certainly have the opportunity to develop

throughout this congress.

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Video Conference “The city, an educational space in the new

millennium”

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Moderador: António Abreu

Councillor for Education at the Lisbon City Council

We shall start the first plenary session. As you know, it is going to be conducted in the

following way: some people, a few present in this room and the others absent but present by

means of the videoconference, will be asked to explore the theme proposed – The city as an educational place for the new millennium – since you were all informed that, among

other approaches, we thought of five sub-themes to be discussed. On one hand, we shall

refer to “The appropriation of the City by the People”: the way planning is made and how is it

practised. On the other, we will hear points of view on “The City’s Memory and Identity”. The

third feature to be explored would be “The Local Development”, in what way is that

development interpreted, Solidarity and Interdependencies. A fourth subject would be

“Diversity as an Educational Resource for the City and for the School”, to reflect upon the

New Participation and Citizenship Models and, finally, upon “Education, Training,

Employment and Leisure: the strategic role of the city” in any of these areas, all of them part

of what we may call, generically, the Educational Process.

Anne-Grete Strom-Erichsen – Bergen, Norway

Chief Commissioner of Bergen

Leader of the Municipal Government of Bergen

As you know, I’m sitting in Bergen. Bergen is a city in the west cost of Norway. Our city is

traditionally considered as being an international oriented and open-minded. Our challenge

is now to transform this tradition so we can met the new challenges. Some of the new

challenges are the difference or the change in how to learn.

We are going from a time where we had a preparation for the lifetime profession to a time

where we are preparing ourselves for an unknown profession and a long lifetime for learning.

Before we were busy measuring knowledge and now we are focusing on the process of

learning. Of course in the city we have different challenges, also with how to succeed in

reducing social exclusion. In Norway, we have the philosophy that is to provide equal

opportunities for everyone independently from sex, social or religion backgrounds. The state

education is free in all their levels.

It is also a challenge, in our time, to deal with mobility. We have people coming to our city,

like refugees, even if we are a small city, we are teaching in 50 modern languages in our

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schools, so that the people coming to our city can deal better with the Norwegian school

system.

Another thing I want to focus is the electronic Norwegian plan. This plan has been launched

with the focus to provide a ‘wide band’ access to all the houses in the next four years. This is

quite a challenge and an ambitious goal.

In Norway many people have already access to Internet, more than half of the Norwegians,

2.3 Million, have Internet access. We really want to give everyone the opportunity, within

schools, libraries and Internet Cafes to have access to it.

I think I will stop here and give the word to another speaker in another city and maybe I can

comeback later.

José Saramago – Lisbon

Writer and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature

Good morning and thank you very much.

I will try to question some issues concerning the general theme of the congress as well as

the very definition or designation of Educational City. It seems to me that I should not pose

such a question, since this is the VI Congress already and so, I assume that not only the

concept of Educational City is perfectly clear but also that, during the past twelve years, that

concept as well as its actual practice have been developed.

My main doubt, what really troubles me, resides in one single question. We are talking about

Educational City and my question is: Who educates the City?

On one hand, it looks like the City has the proper conditions to educate (or is going to create

them) but if we consider the current state of the major gigantic cities and of the minor ones

as well, we can see that the educational problem of the city, the educational problem of

everyone living in cities, either of those who have always lived there or of the ones who

arrive all the time, is too much serious to be forgotten.

Even not considering questions based on structure, the operation of the city’s structure, I do

not think, for instance (and only as an example) that we may believe in an educational city in

a wider sense than what we can find, that we can define when speaking of education, if we

cannot solve a problem such as that of the traffic of the city. I mean, there is no education

possible if it is so hard to come to anything resembling the citizen’s education, the citizen

who lives in the city, without first solving the infinite problems there existing, such as the

traffic.

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This doubt of mine, which may disappear during this videoconference, is a result of the

simple experience of living in the city. I do not see it, I truly say that the way cities are

designed, as they work, they may provide, in fact, an educational function. And I do not

see it because if basic problems are not solved (in the majority of the cases), such as

sewage and housing conditions, you know it better than me, everything a city needs. The

previous solution of all those problems dealing with every-day life is imperative and not just

what concerns the cultural or educational planning, which is but superficial. It does not touch

the bottom line of the city and its citizens or what is really important for living in a city.

Generally, not much of these superficial disturbances linger.

I recall, for instance, the case of the institution of cultural cities, the European Cultural Cities.

After a year puzzling over the virtues of those cities, which I do not have the right to

question, what matters is every aspect of its daily operation including the cultural aspect, of

course, and not the result of a mass investment that transforms each city into the scenery of

a show where everyone desperately tries to prove to be more intellectual than the others,

causing nothing but exhaustion that takes over its daily routine.

I also wanted to add something, which has to do with that kind of modern superstition called

the Internet. Everybody promises the Internet everywhere. Recently, a European Prime

Minister said that, till the year 2005 or something alike, each family, in each household of

that country would be connected to the Internet. I am not saying this is not extremely

interesting, useful and practical but what surprises me is that no one, no Prime Minister or

even Minister has ever said that his political and cultural plan included creating a good

library in each home of his country. No one has thought of that, and this is obvious to me,

the information in a well-planned, studied library in whatever country or household. The

question, I suppose to be very much related to creating a library in each house or in each

home, is not highly lucrative but the Internet is. If we do not consider the questions which go

way beyond the simple technological development of each of us, of our families, of society in

general and if we do not think of the education, the questions associated with our

conscience, reflection, civic debate, etc., I believe we will be able to build not only an

educated city, but also a city capable of educating. Once again, I fear we are troubling the

surface without getting to the bottom of the issues.

Thank you very much.

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Saskia Sassen – Chicago, USA

Urban Affairs Sociologist and Professor at the University of Chicago

It is an enormous pleasure to participate in this event.

I believe in education and I believe in cities, and I believe that, in fact, cities are a crucial site

where some of the challenges this conference is interested in.

Overcoming the fragmentation that rules the world, that rules our experience of life in cities.

This is a challenging goal and it is not easy to attain.

I hope to contribute with a few elements to the discussion, elements that inevitably come out

of my own narrow research experience, enhance capture only a little part of the picture.

Inevitably they are partial and I already apology for that.

I now that together, as a collective effort, we will cover much more terrain than I can cover

here.

First let me say that one of the challenges comes out of the fact that, whether you look to the

world of economy, whether you look to the world of politics, whether you look to the world of

technology, and even whether you look to the world of NGOs, and certain forms of activism

in civil society, what you see, in a way, is the growth of highly specialised circuits where

these activities take place, where this development is materialised in actual outcomes.

These circuits are increasingly cross border circuits. But that does not make them any less

fragmentary, specialised and separated from each other.

One thing about the city, is that the city, specially our large cities, is a place where a lot of

these circuits come together, there is an amalgam dating in the space of the city. A cross

border circuits that have to do with economic issues, with technological issues, with cultural

issues, with political issues, with human rights activism, with environmental activism, with all

kind of issues that on the wide scale world we experience as separated and fragmented, that

in the space of the city they begin to become together, this is something that I like to

describe as agglutination. I don’t know why I like this word, but I think it captures something,

about the potential that lays in the space of the city to addresses all variety of issues.

What does the city really give us, as a space where education can be advanced in the sense

of the organisers of this meeting hope for?

The city gives us, first, these coming together of all this circuits that I was just describing.

Second, the city is a place where we are close to the power. The city is a place with forms of

global corporate power. Those are increasingly not as legible as they used to be; can

actually be engaged. This, to me, is an enormous important issue, it comes out of the lot of

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the work that I have done on the global city and I think, we cannot minimise its importance,

even for the project about education, that this conference purpose us to address.

The fact that so much of economic power is today invisible, non-materialised, globalized and

not legible in the way that the economy used to be legible, when so much of it happened in

the street, in the market places in the cities, the possibility of engaging, even if it is one

moment of this enormous important conditions that we all live with, which is the new form of

global corporate power.

I repeat, the possibility of engaging that, in the space of the city, specially, I would say,

global cities of course, but also other kind of cities, is an enormous important condition to

advance the project to overcoming the fragmentation and inequalities through the use of the

city as an educational space. That is the second very important issue, I think, that the space

of the city offer us.

Third, the space of the city makes clearer, than perhaps any other institutional around, the

new types of inequalities, polarisation, fragmentation and segmentation. Cities had always

had many inequalities, cities had always enormous different types of spaces, spaces for

elite, spaces for pour, spaces for women, spaces for men, spaces for slaves, spaces for

those who were free. What we see today, are new types of inequalities, new types of

polarisations. The space of the city succeeds in making this visible in making this legible and

in that sense making them accessible, it allow the average citizen walking through the city to

see what is happening and to begin to engage the issue of addressing it, overcoming it, and

might also be some who like what is going on and they can then enjoy what they see. But

there are going to be many citizens, which I know from talking to many people from around

the world, who will want to address and engage this issue.

Fourth, this now moves directly into the king of gathering that we are here. In order to make

it possible to citizens, to the average citizen, to feel that he or she can act on these new

conditions of inequalities, of polarisation. That average citizen, needs not only understand,

but also needs to be persuaded, that what is legible on the space of the city is actually one

moment of this process system that is being produced, that we can call the new global

economic system, the new global poverty, the new global elites, whatever the name suit us

best. To persuade that average citizen that, this is what is being seen in the city, that is one

instantiation, one materialisation, of that set of dynamics that have to do with this

contemporary period. It will take work, it will take to telling the story, it will take telling many

different stories, that enrich the content, that can be told and heard as narratives, rather than

simply empirical analysis of the whole of this conditions and I think that is the notion the

marriage of education and cities, is an interesting thought, is an interesting project that will

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have to go beyond of this conference. It cannot stay within the space, including this digital

space within which some of us are locate right now. How to transmit it, how to make it

circulate through the variety of spaces that makes the city? This would be, yet another point,

I would say, the notion of the city that educates, has to be really developed, we have to push

the meaning of that statement, because what it really means is to locate, in the structures of

the city, and that means, streets, parks and the lobby of public buildings, and the lobbies of

private buildings, and what ever the opportunities that the city offers, whatever the variety of

public spaces, whether a significant public spaces or a very minor public spaces, whatever

the people, in the city will find themselves in a bus, a train, should also be actually part of

this. Those are the spaces which some of this project of educating and, I would say,

explaining how inequalities are evident on the city, are evident from one neighbourhood to

the other, that are evident in so many other parts that makes the visible and legible

experience of the city. In all of those places, this project of explanation, this project of

educating, of saying, this what you are seeing here in its very concrete forms, in its very

specific instantiation, is actually part of a much broad dynamics, it is one moment where

what we thing as a global, the digital world, which goes way beyond the space of the city is

actually located and happens within the city.

Finally, I would say that in terms of this project of cities and education, the question of public

space is crucial, and I do think that we need to rethink the category public space, because,

in one hand our cities had become, at least many of them, enormous. They are marked by

degrees of diversity, whether it is good or bad thing, whether are handled well or not well

and are very difficult issues. But let me say that, the degrees of diversity that do not facilitate

the constituting of public spaces in these dense zones where difference interacts. Many of

the differences, which make up our cities today, are too far of any possibilities to interact with

other differences. So, we need to re-thing the notion of public spaces, and I emphasise this,

because the public space is going to have to be the one through which this project of

education is going to take place. So, this does mean, that we have to recover the notion of

the public inside a bus, inside a train, inside the lobby of a bank, inside a shopping mob.

These are the multiplicity of spaces where the project of educating can take place. I only

hope that my participation was of some worth, and be looking forward for the rest of the

presentation.

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Boutros Boutros Ghali – Paris

President of the International Organisation of French-speaking Countries

I am very pleased to participate in this conference about Large Cities. First, I would like to

thank the organising committee for having invited me. I followed a part of the debate and

noticed that you are mostly interested in the domestic policy of the states or of the cities. I

would start by approaching the subject in a slightly different way, i. e., the external policy of

the cities. What role do the cities have in external politics? That is: Could cities contribute to

the way of handling international affairs?

I shall remind you that the Organization I preside to, the French-Speaking International

Organization, is constituted by operators. One of those operating agency is the International

Association of the French-Speaking City Councillors that joins 99 capitals and cities from 45

countries.

The City Councillors and their staff meet regularly to promote, above all, local democracy

and improve municipal management: creating computer systems for budget and personal

wages accountancy, modernising the services provided by the Civil State and providing

training to develop the services offered to the citizens. This is only a single aspect but there

is another that I would also like to point out, which is: What role do cities play at international

level?

I think the City Councillors and the large cities themselves have a greater responsibility than

the way of managing them. When I was Secretary General to the United Nations, I struggled

hard to be able to grant a special status to the large City Councillors, and why was that?

I am convinced that facing globalization (the globalization of finance, economy, mob, and

environmental problems), the power of the Nation-State will lessen and the power of large

cities is also going to be reduced. The environmental problem and the problem of mass

immigration can hardly be managed at local level.

Therefore, the city or the large city shall be able to participate in international pleas. This is

what I call the democratization of international relations. As we caused the globalization of

economy, environment and finance, we should also have the globalization of democracy.

This is where the city role becomes crucial. It is necessary that the city and the large City

Councillors may take part, direct or indirectly, in elaborating the rules by which globalization

is going to be managed, through the Association of Twin Cities or through the various

Associations of the City Councillors.

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I think large cities should not be stuck to the problems resulting from domestic policy but also

worry about global problems.

This obviously causes trouble because the Councillor of a large city or his representative is

but a governmental representative and collides with the representative of external matters,

the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I believe it is necessary to integrate the representatives of

large cities in international organizations, it is necessary to find that integration formula. It

should be carried out as the integration of other non-state agents, such as the Non-

Governmental Organizations, Universities and great Religious Movements. It is important

that the representatives of large cities can intervene in the creation of international standards

for ruling global issues and the other problems the city is not ready to solve by itself. It

needs co-operation either with international organizations or with other states.

You will probably tell me that the globalization of democracy is utopian. I, on the other hand,

shall reply that it is not so; I will quote the example of an organization, the Labour

International Organization, with three representatives, i. e., of the employees, the employers

and the state. We shall then face the future with a representation of large cities in the core of

international organizations, because they actually have something to contribute with, since

they represent new entities and new powers.

The participation of large cities in creating international standards is a way of democratising

international relations. I have contacted the large City Councillors and they have the

following technical point of view: nowadays, there are two players in International

Organizations - the State or the Nation-State and the Non-Governmental Organizations. We

have sui generis situations, such as parliament members, City Councillors and the

representatives of Universities.

This is all I had to say: dealing with Cities or Large Cities, it is important to ponder on the

external action of the cities and their role at international level.


Raul Pont – Lisbon

Mayor of Porto Alegre - Brazil

I would like to greet Mr. Councilman António Abreu, the other members sitting at the table,

all the participant members in this congress and start by backtracking to the question asked

by José Saramago: Who educates the city?

I will try to convey the idea that a city educates for citizenship. It may seem that my

statement aims at the impossible, that hinders us from breaking this cycle – if a city does not

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prepare and stimulate the citizens, does not foster and create the spaces and opportunities

for the formation of citizenship, it is not an educated city and, therefore, will reflect the non-

participation and separation of its inhabitants.

I think that if we intervene in that process, the product and consequence of our relations, the

possibility of us being at the same time product and producers of history allows us to break

that cycle and effectively establish the conditions needed for the City to be a training

instrument of citizenship, though not spontaneously, not in order to a simple reflection of the

knowledge conveying process, the social exclusion or the participation or not in political life,

can be faced.

Our experience shows that it is possible, through participatory democracy, to establish new

ways of building a city: spaces, knowledge possibility either of the city’s operation or of the

citizen’s power to create their own purposes and to decide upon the services needed. It is

obvious that, when the population has the possibility of deciding upon this equipment, the

issues related to education, culture, city’s memories come up and turn the city into an

educating entity, resulting in a full citizenship.

In our country, I am sure that it is not very different from the reality of many other countries.

We are living a great crisis related to the legitimacy of the representative democracy, not

only in what concerns international matters, as suggested by other speakers, but also in the

way that the common citizen cannot vote in the Trade International Organization, does not

take part in the International Monetary Fund, becoming more and more unaware of the

world-wide mechanisms that control economy through major corporations in some of the

countries.

The great majority of citizens is limited and may only take some action at local level, in the

local autonomy and there to assert their sovereignty effectively.

This is the point we have been trying to prove for over a decade, for 12 years that the

Political Front governing the City of Porto Alegre has been trying to unfold. It is our main

concern that this participatory democracy may effectively create the proper conditions for

people to have the opportunity of knowing the State operating mechanisms, be aware of the

public budget and be able to decide upon it. To create the conditions for people to be in

charge of their daily life promoting, therefore, a new way of participation and a set of new

mechanisms.

It is clear that this conference is not about us developing those mechanisms or speaking

about how do these processes work; one of the most well-known processes is our

experience with the Participatory Budget, i. e., the city’s budget is prepared democratically

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by its regions and directly by all the citizens, when major plenary sessions on subjects

involving the open participation of the people take place.

We would like to share with you, in order to universalise our experience, the method we

consider important in relation to the Participatory Budget, so that we may evolve respecting

the historical reality of each city, each country. For that, we must respect the particular

features of each social group, the historical experience of the agents, the different ways of

organization in political parties, unions, citizens associations, religious beliefs, etc., a whole

set of mechanisms that the population has historically developed everywhere.

But the main question we propose is that all our research is based on recovering something

that challenges populations for over 200 years: How to establish governing methods and

participation ways to allow the citizen to control the state without having to transfer or

delegate that power?

Or, perhaps in a less utopian way: How to reduce to the minimum the delegation of power?

We think this is the issue which educators and political militants should worry about,

because they act directly in the formation of an educating city that creates citizens. To return

to the subject of power delegation, it means to surpass the growing lack of legitimacy in

representative democracies and to create mechanisms for the participatory democracy

where citizens may effectively build up their present at every moment, as well as their future.

The elements you should think about are mainly three: first, the effective popular

participation need; it is impossible to build a city that produces citizenship without the

existence of an effective popular participation. The citizens must have a place where they

can discuss on the budget. For instance, our rich experience after a few years of discussing

the Participatory Budget of the city was the transfer to the school, through the School

Counselling involving the students’ parents, the community, the teachers, and the school

employees and as a consequence of everything the city already produced, that experience

was established in the school. When the resources destined for maintenance and small

repairments managed by the school start to be discussed by the teachers, the students, the

parents and the community, so that they can be integrated in school management, the

consequence of this experience can also be applied to social security policies as well as to

other mechanisms in which popular participation is decisive and essential like in any

transformation process of a simple city into an educational city producing good citizens.

This is why we say that the second feature or element is practice: people have to be

involved in the process; it is impossible to train citizens if they will not fulfil their rights. To

speak to an audience, use the microphone, for instance, most citizens have never done this,

they have never had the experience of organising a community meeting, never had the

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chance to decide democratically nor to create mechanisms for their decisions to be collective

and democratic. This is a unique learning process. It is not up to the City Council, the

Government or the Parties to accomplish that process; the people have to be stimulated by

these institutions to create themselves the mechanisms and the possibility to benefit from

that right.

It is moving how the people, the common citizen, when given the chance, know how to

defend their interests, express their needs, use the microphone, attend the public meetings,

be sympathetic with others, be able to make decisions for the benefit of the community. This

process makes people mature and understanding about the complexity of modern life. I will

quote an example of other experience of ours: when we discussed the City’s Urban

Development Directing Plan in community, not only with the technicians and experts, but

also with the population. For that, we altered much of the existing law about the City’s

Directing Plan, which was then approved by the municipality’s representative of the

legislative power that added a new element unknown till then: integration, people’s right (in

neighbourhoods and in regions) to participate directly at the City Council through regional

forums. These forums allowed the people to express their specific demands in relation to the

planning of the neighbourhood, region or city they lived in.

Practice has proved to be possible and effective in a democratic process.

The third element is the respect for people’s self-organization: this mechanism, in our point

of view, strengthens self-organization. To respect it is to stimulate the community to fight for

the right of decision and action. Our programmes to teach adults how to read and write, for

people who have not had the opportunity to attend school or our other follow-up

programmes, assure them the right to basic learning independently from their age, taking

into consideration the claim and the decision of the interested people and not the thought or

ideas of their government leader. From the moment we have taught people to express

themselves, we have given them the power to decide. In the free time of their schedules, our

schools started to include the teaching courses for children and adults, just because during

the debate, they knew for the first time their right to claim this sort of service from the public

power.

This form of self-organization and granting powers to the people (allowing them to discuss

the budget, decide on public policies, establish sectional city counsels for issues like

education, health, traffic, children and adolescent’s rights) create strong socially based

organizations independent from political parties, terribly pressurising the government to

reorient the resources and public budget on behalf of the population.

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This experience cheers us up, stimulates us, and most important, proves that it is possible to

implement a process like this, as long as we continue to believe in participation, i. e., in the

participatory democracy, which allows the citizen to simply delegate every 4 or 5 years

(depending on the electoral system of each country) in the Local Government Leader,

Governor, President or Senator the power of deciding what they think they can do for the

population’s benefit. Yet, in our country, Brazil, it is harder, more complicated, because the

legitimacy is none, the political parties’ structure is very frail, the parties have nothing to do

with what they practise, and so, it is a fraud because the population believes in television

shows, in electoral programmes, and the Government just does the opposite of what it had

promised. Being able to vote every 4 or 5 years is insufficient for citizenship to be

implemented and fostered to have permanent mechanisms of power.

This is our challenge, our experience: to create a city able to make the educational

dimension to go way beyond the school perimeter, way beyond the ruling system. The

objective results, the figures, show that today we have a large city with 1 300 000 inhabitants

that is Porto Alegre, capable of challenging all its problems. Its social indicators (quality of

life, basic and further learning for children and adults, who are still entitled to it by

constitution) have significantly improved the city, which became more alphabetised, more

participatory, showing that this way of governing is effective. The school has also suffered a

transformation process debated by the community, by teachers, by neighbours, becoming a

place of reference for this process, for having encouraged such participation.

These are all the elements we brought to the debate on the challenge of an educational city,

a city that produces citizens and obviously on the role each of us must perform in the

process.

Thank you.

Geneviève Domenach-Chich – Lisbon

Head of rhe UNESCO City and Human Habitat

Representative of the Director General of UNESCO

I shall also try to take the alarming challenge of answering to Mr. Saramago.

Mr. Saramago questioned something which I think is imperative: How do cities, in their

present situation, perform an educating function in daily life, not in the stratosphere but in the

real every-day life?

And, in fact, what brought us here was: the city as an educational place.

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Well, I totally agree with Saskia Sassen’s answers concerning the public space issue. All of

us admired the work carried out in Porto Alegre by Raul Pont, he is the pope of participatory

democracy. And I would like to modestly try to demonstrate to José Saramago how, because

the crucial question is how, all of us can worry about general and generous purposes but

how is it possible to fulfil the relation between city and educational space?

I will quote a real example of a city in a particularly poor country: the city is Port au Prince,

the country is Haiti and the neighbourhood is called Jalousie. It is a place assisted by

UNESCO, of which I am the Head of the City Unit, where we have a supporting programme

for the inhabitants’ initiatives in order to improve their living conditions. I shall now try to

rapidly explain how has this action been developed aiming at enlightening the uncertainty left

by José Saramago.

Let me describe the scenario: Haiti (country named by the United Nations as BUDC,

belonging to the Under Developed Countries) is poor, radically poor, oppressed, victim of a

dramatic political chaos after the Duvalliers’ dictatorship, it is not only living an embargo but

mostly a political wreckage with daily violence and a terrible social gap between the elite

classes and the people.

I said it was poor, just to have an idea, 4% of the population possesses 70% of the total

resources of the country. In this kind of context or situation, as well as in many other places,

particularly in poor countries, the rural exodus is huge, the oppressed rural population flee to

the cities and, of course, wind up living in slums, coyly called irregular neighbourhoods. Not

having a property title, and as Haiti is Haiti and Port au Prince is Port au Prince, these slums

are suspended on the hills, without water, electricity, bathrooms or a public sewage system.

People live in an extraordinary promiscuousness, with many health problems as you can

well imagine. Therefore, it is frequent in the most dramatic situations to have some sort of

survival instinct. I shall briefly mention some actions carried out in this slum to conclude or to

make my point: how can Jalousie, this slum, be an educational place?

In the context already described, the inhabitants’ survival strategies - with no participatory

budget, no participation fostering and no concept of participatory democracy - led

the people to roll up their sleeves and take action. Without State, without any municipal

services and without infrastructures, these people, however, started to organise themselves,

to collect the garbage, to fight with the water system company for the right to have a fountain

and to manage it themselves. The fountain is now a public place where everyone has

access to water and, as Raul Pont said, the people have expressed their needs. Well, their

needs were obviously the access to water and other basic services as well as the creation of

a public place, which was very, very hard. I see a relation here with something Saskia said

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earlier: an educational place, a place to play, a meeting place, a football field – imagine that

in a slum, where the mortality rate is terrible, where people do not have water nor electricity,

the population has expressed itself to demand a football field for children to play.

Afterwards, there was another delightful request in this place amongst all misery. Haiti is a

country of naïve paintings, a country where its inhabitants express their art in daily life. There

was a supporting wall, to keep the slum from falling apart, where the people joined Patrick

Cidader, painter and sculptor, to paint a mural fresco, making their slum more beautiful.

Now, this mural fresco is an element of great pride.

What does this have to do with education and with the relation between city and education,

then? In fact, this project turned the Jalousie slum into an educational place through six

guidelines. The project consists of learning and understanding the living conditions, so that

living in community can be possible. Let me remind you what is written in the Association of

Educational Cities presentation leaflet and what António or Joan Clos have said yesterday:

your concept of Educational City is not strictly related to ‘city equal to school’, it is a wider

concept. It meets the concept of education Jacques Delors developed after the Edgar Faure

report, which inspired your concept of Educational City. Jacques Delors says, and he is right

– you all know it – that “Education is learning how to learn. It is to learn how to be. It is to

learn how to do and it is to learn how to live in community”.

The project I mentioned earlier constitutes a learning place and Raul Pont has also spoken

of a learning concept, i. e., a place to acknowledge the conditions of living in community.

How and why is it?

My example dealt with rural populations who, in the countryside had their own way of living

and customs related to the rural environment. For instance, the waste management, which is

a specific problem in poor cities, was done in an open space, without harming the

environment. When living in slums, in urban surroundings, the space is much thicker and if

the garbage is thrown on the street, the consequences are completely different from the

ones of the rural environment.

So, the waste management represents a guideline for living in community and an

educational guideline. In other words, these people had to acknowledge the fact of living in

the city, what presupposed a relation with the environment and so the capacity to learn a

very different environmental management method.

Secondly, after creating the public squares I have mentioned, the neighbourhood now has

public spaces, which are meeting places, talking places, conflict places for young people,

young people and other generations. Saskia said that the public space issue resided in the

core of the relation between City and Education, I would like to add that in Jalousie, as in

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many other slums, the issue concerns mostly the people away from their roots, who come

from the countryside, a shared space to a place where they must fight, where they must say:

‘I do not agree’ – these places are crucial for the institution of dialogue and the creation of an

educational logics for the citizens. Saskia also said that we need to define the notion of what

is public, in a bus; in Jalousie, there are no buses, as you may know, so I will just displace

the concept of public to citizenship. It is the second guideline that makes Jalousie be an

educational place, a meeting place, a space for citizenship and participation as well.

I would like you to understand how did the existence of a football field in the slums change

the relation between people among themselves, because it needed to be taken care of. It is

necessary to manage its occupation by whatever teams, it is necessary to discuss, to make

arrangements, to negotiate and to participate in what is not called as common asset but is a

common asset, indeed, as I will now describe. It is necessary that the sense of a common

interest is grasped, it is a common asset shared, managed and negotiated by them.

The experience was a meeting point with the institutions. I think this is very important, mostly

in countries where the State has failed, where the institutions are absent, because it is

important that this kind of educational projects come from below, based on the actual

capacity, on the social capital, on the capacity for self-organization of the people, it is crucial

that they meet the institutions on their own.

From the moment the people gather to solve the problems described as the lack of water,

etc., they met the institutions, either the water company that provides enough water to run

through the taps not at 5 a.m. but between 6 and 9, or the entities that manage the football

field. To accomplish this, these popular initiatives will have to meet the institutions, the water

supplying company or even the municipality. Speaking about municipalities, you are

representing cities that respect the local democracy, you were elected to meet and discuss

the concept of democracy and citizens’ participation but it is obvious that this is not the case

of many, many other cities of different countries.

Therefore, this kind of projects constitutes, for the inhabitants, a negotiation capacity with the

municipalities, in such a way that a city that yesterday oppressed the people living in slums

firstly because they could not vote and most of all because there were no elections, and then

because the purpose of the city was to make those people leave. After the inhabitants’ self-

organization, institutions are obliged to recognise them, proving that this project has also an

educational function for the municipalities and their leaders.

And finally, it is a place for creation, as I have already had the opportunity to mention in

relation to the mural fresco.

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I believe, as José Saramago said, IAEC will have to prove right, through descriptions and

experiences: What makes the city an educational place? this is, in fact, a sublime concept

worth of being cleared to be totally recognised.

I will terminate my communication saying that cities are, simultaneously, places facing actual

problems for which they must make solutions up in daily life. This fabricating capacity, this

capacity to make a commitment, develop synergies, make arrangements, break

arrangements and make arrangements again, turns the city into an educational place, and

into a space for citizens. For all this, the city is useful.

Backtracking to one of the aspects mentioned by Boutros Ghali when speaking about

democratising international relations, I think he is right about this: to democratize

international relations is to implement interchange between cities, exchange of experiences.

This is not a democratization at stratospheric level but at a real level. One of the obligations

of IAEC is precisely this (in fact, this is going to be discussed by the groups we are to form),

to establish interchange of experiences participating in the democratization of international

relations. This is the reason why your Association is fundamental. The purpose of the

International Association of the Educational Cities is very important if experiences are

shared, if the concept of Educational Cities is defined and claimed day after day.

Thank you.

Anne-Grete Strom-Erichsen

Yes, I notice that the speakers had different points of view to this theme and I want to

comment some of the things that Mr. Saramago and also Professor Sassen said.

Mr. Saramago talked about the European Cultural Year in the city. I wanted to tell that

Bergen is, this year, the European City of Culture and explain what we have done to make

this event, an event for all people of the city, to provide a very broad spectre of activities and

cultural events. The mission of the city is to reach as many as possible the inhabitants and

everyone should get something out of this year.

What have we done to make this happen and to make this a success?

For instance we have transform traffic places into cultural arenas, places have been emptied

from traffic and make cultural arenas of them. We have used train stations for concerts we

have used airports for ballet and we have really tried to make cultural events where people

lives.

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FINAL COMMENTS José Saramago

Very quickly, because time is short.

Well, once in a while good ideas come to the world – some come from Porto Alegre, others

from Port au Prince, better yet, from a bidonville named Jalousie – setting an example, it

does not mean that they are role models, but mostly bringing hope.

I would be pleased to add two comments - the issue is inextinguishable, and for that, so

many of us are gathered here, and for a few days many plenary sessions and specific

sessions will take place. My first comment deals with the question of public space - all of us

know that - in cities, in large cities and I repeat, not only in large cities, public spaces have

successively diminished for all sorts of reasons, as be it the desertification of certain areas of

the city, certain neighbourhoods. For instance, the tendency to leave the city centre and to

go live in the surroundings, but there is a modern, recent, relatively recent public space,

probably the public space per excellence, the shopping centre. The shopping centre is,

nowadays, the mentality raising place. I will not analyse the pros and cons of that training

right now, I would simply like you to ponder on this matter: whether or not is the shopping

centre the public space nowadays?

And the consequences resulting from that phenomenon.

The other question lies, if I am allowed, in the dangerous illusion that cities may contribute to

the democratization of international relations. I heard that speech by Pascoal Maragal a few

weeks ago on the Island where I live, Lanzarote, and I heard it again by Boutros-Boutros

Ghali, but it seems to me that we returned to the stratosphere. I say this because: how is it

possible to democratize international relations in large cities if the countries themselves are

not capable of democratising their relations with other countries? If cities are but parts of

those countries, how is it that they will be able to contribute to that democratization? Mostly

because of another aspect - all of us know that – the power of the Nation-State is diluted, is

less and less in every 24 hours, and still because of other purpose, a set of decided and

deliberated powers that lead even more to this situation.

The Nation-State, as a possible part of democracy has been exerting a weak democratic

function. When I say ‘democratic function’ is because, in some way, the State has converted

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itself in a simple commissioner, representing more or less ashamed a real power, which is

the economic power, the multinationals (that do not operate democratically, they do not use

democratic methods). There is a serious contradiction here, which makes us believe that

when we speak of democracy, we are speaking of something real. On the contrary, we are

lurking in the domain of ghosts, ever more unreal, more diaphanous, less touchable while

the real situation in the world is the economic globalization that, as we also know, does not

have much to do with democracy.

I would even dare to say that I think that the economic globalization is the new form of

totalitarianism. Pardon me, if I have offended anyone.

Raul Pont

I think the examples brought to us about Haiti convey the idea that it is possible, at local

level, to establish a set of participating mechanisms, which will not solve all the country’s

problems or the extremely important international issues that must be dealt with. They also

show that it is possible to work with what the population has already defined as organization

forms and so, as educational forms. Our work at the Sports Municipal Secretariat regarded

this aspect already evoked in relation to Jalousie in Port au Prince in terms of the creation of

a football field. When we set out to Government, it was not our idea to accomplish this, but

the city, independent from us, possessed about 50 amateur sporting leagues, each of them

having 8 to 10 or 12 clubs, each club having a team for children, other for adults, and

another for veterans; if we multiply the leagues by the number of clubs and each club by two

or three categories and ages, we can see that we are speaking of thousands of people

practising only one sport. There is a whole community organised due to this sport, creating a

space, a relationship based on dialogue and sharing public power. This community that

insists on knowing its priorities, its needs, and how can it be integrated in the claims of their

neighbourhoods. A group of claims was born there, as well as programmes for children, for

instance, in each football field, in each várzea (the football fields located at the periphery of

the poor neighbourhoods of the city are called várzeas in Brazil) was created a learning

programme that started in football and jumped into a direct relation with what people already

practised – dialogue. This organises the community, organises people who are agents in

other forms of direct participation, such as in sports, joining to claim the problems of the field

– that is how participatory budgets started to include the need for quality in the football fields.

Various neighbourhoods began to request lighting for their fields in order to play at night,

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mainly because adults did not have a place to practise football. I am sure that a Councillor

would never be concerned with placing lights in a várzea but it became important for the

community; after the community decided have lighting, it could also claim for better health

conditions, social security conditions, and educational conditions.

The experience of the school budget I mentioned before created an extremely interesting

mechanism, causing two or three communities of near schools to carry out joint projects

beneficial for children, the pupils of our municipal network as well as adults and proper

community spaces, thus having involved and still involving the parents. When the citizen

acknowledges this kind of participation level, he has already walked half the way, and can

start to arrange community meetings, union meetings or join a political party, and his vision

of the neighbourhood, the school and the city changes.

Of course these elements do not delete or solve international matters, which shall be more

important for us, members of government, of political parties, political leaders of our

countries. The fact that we resist and create the conditions for a citizen not to lose at least

this sense of popular sovereignty - that is his own city, his neighbourhood, his space to act -

makes us assume the idea that this resistance is necessary, crucial for us to establish other

forms of resistance in the mechanisms we cannot take part, we are not entitled to or are not

for us to decide upon, though undoubtedly they have so much weight in our daily lives.

Nowadays, Brazil is governed more by the International Monetary Fund than it is governed

by Congress or by the President of the Republic. It is not the Congress that decides on the

currency policies and it is not the government that establishes those policies; these are great

international decisions that rule Latin America. It is not only Brazil, it is also Uruguay and

Argentina, and all non-sovereign countries, that do not have a national sovereignty, which

allows them to express what the population has decided on a certain programme and then

fulfilled it. This way, when people realise they can decide on the municipal budget and

decide on the public policies, they are really learning that, to change social security, national

policies related to health or educational policies, they must face their government, change

those policies in order to have another political reality in their country. As the Educational

Cities network that brings cities together, the Miercole Cities network we have created in

South America, with the participation of European cities (a sort of international observatory

for the exchange of experiences of participatory democracy that our cities live isolated) is a

highly important mechanism.

In our point of view, in case of our central or national government cannot support the nation’s

popular interests, the cities shall take that challenge and establish initiatives to learn from

other experiences and realities. A group of different experiences that have a certain relation

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of a learning direct consequence, sometimes a little bit of publicity for the future but makes

us linger and resist or, in many cases, to go forward making these experiences positive.

This seems to be the way. Today, it is obvious that globalization is a farce created by neo-

liberalism because there is no method alike for all the countries, all the peoples, all the

nations. It is a brutally unequal process, in which the countries suffering with these policies

coexist with unemployment rates, social gaps, exclusion and violence, the direct result of a

bad social organization. We need resistance mechanisms to prove that there are other ways,

that it is possible to follow other paths, that it is possible to establish a new relation starting

from local power, autonomy, to possess and fight for that autonomy, assuring that cities may

increase their participation, controlling the public resources. At least in the countries of Latin

America I know best, the process of tributary concentration and the process of centralising

public resources is in the hands of the central government and make the municipalities, with

very weak local power and high burdens and claims, always unsatisfied. The political dispute

over the municipal space, the tributary competence and the resources available is positively

starting to be controlled by the citizens, independent from the society built and the utopias

defended. I am certain that these are elements that should be present in a new society,

based on plain citizenship, on a direct participation from the citizens who should be in control

of public power and the direct agent of their destiny and history.

This is our contribution, what we try to practise daily in our governments.

Thank you.

Boutros Boutros Ghali

I would like to apologise if my intervention is not perhaps in conformity with the debate, but I

had some difficulties in following it because sound is not clear.

It would please me, however, to try and explain what I said before. You have overrated

national democracy and local democracy in the core of cities or large cities. I will return to

your idea that implies it is hard to promote a local or national democracy if, at international

level, there is not a trace of democracy or dialogue.

Why do I insist so much in getting the large cities’ support, as well as the support of the local

authorities in international matters? The States or the Nation-State seems to care less and

less for international affairs, the State and public opinion are only interested in local or

merely internal matters. This is what we call identity protection – the average citizen protects

himself from globalization in his village or city and does not want to know what happens

outside it. So, if we want the democratization of international relations, we must, in first

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place, get the support from the civilian society in large cities. Only after making the city care

not only for the city problems but also for the problems of the international community and

for globalization that indirectly concerns them, can the State or the Nation-State (the main

agent for this century and probably for the next) be interested in international affairs.

The city’s participation in the elaboration of standards, which will rule the relations between

nations, is important: firstly, because these standards will affect the way local democracy is

managed and, secondly, this participation is going to encourage the states to become

interested in international matters.

The real problem we deal with currently is that, in the core of the city there are identity

protections in each neighbourhood. The city is fragmented in setbacks and the average

citizen is not interested in international affairs, he fears what is foreign, fears what he sees

on television - a genocide in Rwanda or massacres in Palestine. He is afraid and turn to

himself; the Government or the Nation-State cares less for international issues because it is

a democratic government that tries to correspond to what public opinion wants.

If we want to democratize, if we want the city to participate in ruling the globalization, it is

necessary to encourage the city, encourage local power not to take care only of the city

problems but also of international problems. To quote some examples, the environmental

problem cannot be solved at a nation-wide nor city-wide scale. Environment may paralyse a

whole city - the eminent mass immigration problem, the international crime problem that

threatens the cities, the mob issue in certain cities, laundering money in foreign countries

- none of these problems will ever be solved at a city-scale. They need an international

organization or the co-operation of cities or states to find a proper solution. It is exactly here

that the role of the city becomes crucial.

My message, and pardon me if I keep repeating myself, is the following: it is necessary that

the city is not be satisfied with promoting local democracy, it cannot worry only about its own

problems; it belongs to the world by definition, so it must also care for other cities and then

for the global issues that dominate the planet.

Geneviève Domenach-Chich

It is not difficult for Mr. Boutros Ghali to convince us all of the complexity of the problems,

namely of the cities and of the relation between city and education. Plus that there is not one

single answer and not only one model to solve things and, anyway, the democratization

problems shall be approached in different scales. All of you, specially Raul Pont, have

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shown that democracy is a process, not an asset - democracy is not only about elections or

registering the institution –, it is a dialogue and negotiation culture.

We are convinced that democracy is only possible through the practice of democracy. It is

not a speech. It is not a scope. Democracy is lived - lived in conflict, lived in practice. The

experience of the Participatory Budget is very revealing about the need to implement

democracy in reality. Mr. Boutros Ghali is right when mentioning different scales – no one

opposes to democracy at neighbourghood-scale, at city-scale, at national-scale or at

global-scale. We have all been conscious for a few years, long before Castioradis or

Edgar Morin’s books, on the complexity of democracy because life is complex. We must

work at different scales, and these scales feed each other; consequently, democracy is a

daily need, an invention never taken for granted.

When Raul Pont mentioned the football fields, spoke of the way other agents had been

requested to act in the game, I thought that this example is relatively close to what I said

before about the Jalousie football field. I would like to finish conveying that it is not enough to

say that acting at different levels is necessary, it is not enough to say that scales must meet.

It is actually necessary, recall the Rio de Janeiro Conference and the concept of sustainable

development, it is necessary to think global and act global. Things only happen if we think

global. But thinking global without acting global is just sticking to theory and having no

practice. It seems to have been what everyone tried to say.

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Plenary session “The educating dimension of the city”

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João Barroso

I am a Professor at the Lisbon University Faculty for Psychology and Educational Sciences

and a Member of the Scientific Committee for this congress. It was with great pleasure I

accepted the invitation to chair this last panel.

This panel is represented by elements of this Congress’s Scientific Committee, who will

present a summary of their points of view on the issues dealt with in the various sessions.

I would like to begin by greeting my colleagues on the panel as well as the participants.

Once more I would like to thank the invitation addressed to me by the Lisbon City Hall and

nearing the end of this congress I would like to express my recognition towards the person in

charge of Education, Eng. António Abreu, for the initiative he had in promoting, with such

commitment and quality, this VI Congress on Educating Cities.

Furthermore, I would like to seize the opportunity I have been given to intervene at this

stage, to greet and praise the magnificent and strenuous work carried out by the Organising

Committee, which enabled this congress to have the success we all acknowledge,

regardless of the lack of understanding and reduced support by some entities, namely, the

media and other governmental entities linked to education and science, and from which one

would expect greater support.

My first intervention is just to let you know how this panel is organised.

I had foreseen a small initial introduction to the panel, but due to the fact that Professor

Richard Faulk, who was supposed to address the final comments, will not be able to be

present, I will alter that introduction to a sort of postfacio of my colleagues’ presentations.

Therefore, the panel is constituted by these five elements present here, who integrate the

congress’s Scientific Committee, and who accompanied the various workshops on the

theme sessions which took place on the 22nd and 23rd. The interventions are not aimed at

summarising or concluding on the richness and diversity of the experiences and initiatives

presented during this congress. In fact, it would be extremely diminishing to do so, apart

from eventually manipulating the critical appreciation each person drew from the sessions

they attended.

Therefore, the objective is very simple. It is to express a personal point of view on the

contribution the various experiences and initiatives gave towards clarifying each session’s

theme. And, as a French sociologist says: “A point of view is always the view from a point”,

which means that if there were others looking, then there would certainly be other views.

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I will now present to you the panel, beginning in order of intervention, with panel 1 named:

City Space Overtaken by People: Planning and Practices, with the intervention of Prof.

Francisco Silva Dias, Municipal Deputy and Professor at the Lisbon Technical University

Faculty of Architecture.

Panel 2: City Memory and Identity, will be presented by Prof. António Firmino da Costa, a

Sociology Professor and Researcher at the Higher Institute for Labour and Business

Sciences of Lisbon City. Next, Panel 3: Local Development, Solidarity and

Interdependencies, presented by Dr. Ana Carita, Trade Union Leader and Counselling

Professor at the Psychology and Guidance Services and at the Lisbon Higher Institute for

Applied Psychology.

Panel 4 is entitled: Diversity as an Educational Resource for the City and for the School:

New Models of Participation and Citizenship, which will be presented by Dr. Sérgio Niza,

founder of the Modern School Movement and current Director of the Continuous Training

Centre, and also Assessor at the Social Services Department of the Ministry of Labour and

Solidarity.

Finally, panel 5: Education, Training, Employment and Leisure, the City’s Strategic Role,

described by Dr. Maria de Lurdes Silva, Trade Union Leader and Professor at the Faculty for

Psychology and Educational Sciences of the Lisbon University.

Each presentation will last around 20 minutes. We are practically an hour behind schedule

and, therefore, I would like your attention because following Digital Lisbon we will now go

back to Real Lisbon with the first panel.

Workshop 1

“How people appropriate space in the city: planning and practices”

Francisco Silva Dias

Thank you Mr Chairman, ladies and gentleman.

I have no doubt cities are mankind’s biggest invention. The decision to live in groups, to

exchange rights and duties, to share emotions, to formulate utopias, is the wonderful

story. We thank the Mediterranean peoples for having for having given birth to the urban

civilisation and, also, our Iberian ancestors who spread it around the world. It is through

cities we share the feeling of being citizens of the world.

This could very well sum up the analysis of what went on in panel 1, but to avoid being

frustrating I will continue.

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In March 1992 the European Council’s Permanent Conference for Local Authority, along with

the participation of Portuguese authorities, approved the European Declaration of the Right

to a City. This is a moment to reflect on the long voyage, which began during the sedentary

revolution, at the break of humanity, when Man chose a place, planted a seed, waited for it

to sprout and multiply.

This document is scarcely disseminated, almost unknown, but of which the concepts were

always present in all the interventions in the panel I attended.

Concepts which goal-post the daily-routine of the Citizens of Europe, where 80% of the

population lives in cities and the remainder in an urbanised country-side. In Portuguese

urbanised means treated, looked-after, amiable, in contrast with rural: primitive and

aggressive. But, in Europe, a large number of the population still lives in suburban

conditions, which means it still does not have access to full citizenship.

Therefore, I dare to abuse your patience and steal yet another few minutes of your attention

and remind you of the 20 rights which constitute the Declaration:

The inhabitants of European cities, and why not of the entire world, have the right to:

- Safety, to a peaceful and peril-free city, protected within the limits the social context

allows against crime, delinquency and aggressions.

- Employment, with job perspectives that enable each person, according to his or her

professional qualifications, to participate in the creation of wealth and profit from the

benefits which result from it.

- Housing: the right to choose a healthy housing environment from a sufficiently ample

supply at a reasonable price, a house that ensures tranquillity and respect for personal

and family privacy.

- Mobility, to have the freedom to move around comfortably and freely. A consequence of

a harmonious balance between the different users of public space: public and private

transportation, motor vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.

- Health, to an environment and to a set of equipment that guarantee physical and

psychological well-being, to a sane and clean surrounding, free of air, water, soil, sound

and visual pollution.

- Sport and leisure, to access without discrimination towards age, capacity or economic

status an adequate range of entertaining equipment.

- Culture, to the possibility to select, access and participate in creative cultural activities.

And further,

- Multicultural integration or to an ensured peaceful coexistence of communities with

different cultural ethical and religious origins.

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A right which, and apologise my corporative inclination, is very dear to me.

- A constructed, pleasant and stimulating surrounding, a consequence of either

contemporary quality architecture, or careful preservation and rehabilitation of

constructed heritage. It is the right we all share to beauty.

- Individual well being resulting from the creation of an urban environment appropriate for

personal fulfilment as well as social, cultural and spiritual development.

And, finally:

- Solidarity, with a guaranty from local authorities that these rights will be extended to all

citizens regardless of gender, age, origin, social, economic and political situation, or

physical and mental incapacity.

So says the Declaration.

And, here we can conclude that the city is still a stepmother for many of us.

In order for a human establishment to be classified as a city, in its broad sense, regardless

of its size, which may be either a village or a town, it will have to simultaneously present four

conditions: that it has a physical structure in which the various elements, the houses, the

factories, the equipment is topologically related, forming a coherent whole. With the

spontaneous growth phase behind us, this whole is today object of an organised planning,

which transforms, or should transform the city we have, in the city we wish for.

And, that is why we discussed here in Panel 1 the role the population could have in the

process. We also stressed the regret at frequently seeing the plans and instruments for that

transformation reach the public knowledge when they are already rigid and inflexible. That is

why we have claimed for more interactive dialoguing methods adjusted to the population’s

aspirations.

For a human establishment to become a city it requires a physical structure housing its living

content, the social tissue, which must be diversified and socialising with harmonious

relationships between the classical distinction of Urba and Civitas. So, the physical structure

is the stage of urban life. And, here in Panel 1 we mentioned the role of children, of the

elderly, of those who paint walls or choose the trees to plant in their streets, of all those who

walk in the streets, the role each one plays in this great opera, which is city life, and of the

role of architecture and of the quality it is required in the conception of the city. Those who

are denied or have difficulty with the dynamics that daily city life demands, were also

mentioned.

Apart from the physical structure and its living content, the city is required to generate from

its living content the capacity to decide on the future, and to manage public things: the

Republic.

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The living city content, on a larger or smaller scale, is required to execute the right to a

subsidiary perspective, which means that civil parish decisions should not be made at a

municipal level, nor municipal decisions at a central government level, nor central

government decisions on a European level, in our case.

And, therefore, within the principle of the subsidiary perspective, the city appears to us as a

political education instrument. A reference was made to this power, or the power generated

by neighbours, which may in fact go as far as control the public resources made available to

the population.

Finally, for each human establishment to become a city it is required to have an identified,

attractive and necessarily beautiful image, which fits into the memory of its inhabitants and

those who visit it.

The city should be, apart from an instrument for ethical education, equally an instrument of

esthetical education.

Workshop 2

“Memory and identity of the city”

António Firmino da Costa

Greetings to all those present. I would like to begin by thanking the organisers of this

congress and particularly Mr. António Abreu for the invitation I received to participate in it. It

was a pleasure for me to have been a part of this congress and attend the very interesting

sessions and presentations, namely those of the Panel: “City Memory and Identity” which I

will comment on.

Participating in this VI International Congress on Educating Cities was a pleasure, and it is

opportune to say that it was also a learning process.

All those present had the opportunity to share a very important concentrated learning

process, if one can say so.

Holding an international meeting on educating cities is, in itself, the best illustration of what

was constantly analysed during the event, which means, the educational character of

contemporary societies, and very particularly, of the present cities.

An educational character, looked at in a non-trivial manner, but with a deep and broad

sense, appropriate for the present, with a growing universal character, at the turn of the

millennium.

Looking at it in more detail, it is worth highlighting a small number of points.

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Some of them are linked, from the very beginning, to the concept of educating city, with the

attribute “educator”, which we find pertinent to call our cities.

It is possible to understand it in various manners, or at various levels – and that is one of the

balancing elements to register.

In fact, during the works in the panel on the theme “City Memory and Identity”, those various

understandings seem to be overlapped. It is a sign of the state the analysis and the

reflection on experiences have led us to, at the moment.

One of those understandings of an educating city is centred on the idea of municipal

intervention. It is the conception that, in current cities the educational dimension has

become, or should become a fundamental action sphere of municipal governance.

Therefore, understanding municipal governance as a local policy, of City Hall leaders, is

fundamental, but in a broader manner, it is as a leading process of common destinies led by

the various social actors involved, interactively, in the lives of cities.

This is the case, of the civil parishes, schools, of multiple types of cultural units, of teams of

technicians and animators for different bodies and equipment, from the most diverse

associations, of various initiative groups, of a multitude of population segments.

A second understanding of educating city is placed, at least implicitly, within a broader

temporal, or historical perspective, and is related to the cities’ social specificity.

Or, in other words, it has to do with the specificity of that amazing human invention, the

cities.

Cities are relatively recent in the history of humanity. They are a people’s invention, a social

creation, which began not many millenniums ago.

In this sense, within the general concept of educating cities and the specific theme of the

panel on “City Memory and Identity”, it would be interesting to underline the following

aspects.

Cities, a human invention and one of the most important social innovations, are a partly

voluntary, partly intentional product, depending on planned policies and interventions, but

are also, in great part, a non-intentional result, or the emerging result of an infinity of daily

actions and living strategies of populations – which were well illustrated in various

interventions.

Cities are, on the other hand, excellency contexts for the denseness of social relationships,

and simultaneously, social differentiation contexts. They are meeting and convergence

spaces. But they are also spaces of anonymity, privacy and autonomy, at least partially.

These complementary aspects constitute two master bars, two essential pillars, of the

freedom possibilities for cities as historical horizons.

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Cities are also a social invention, which appeared simultaneously with many others, which I

will not go over entirely, not even approximately, but which include agriculture, technologies

linked to the wheel, to ceramics, to textiles and metals, commercial activities, armies,

churches and states. And, which also include, within this analysis, writing and calculus, and

all they represented in terms of new intellectual possibilities and new ways of thinking,

communicating, creating memories, of new processes of discovery and imagination,

production and transmission of knowledge and emotions, of new ways of learning and

teaching – after all, of developing educational processes.

This means that cities, ever since they appeared on the various continents – firstly in Lower

Asia and on the Mediterranean coasts, in the Indo valley, in the Far East and in Central

America – represent various things: a social product, a relational denseness and collective

action space, a context of differentiations and autonomies, a technological device, a

communicational media, a cultural product and an educational system.

An educational system, where multiple learning processes find unique conditions to

generate, accumulate and unfold in time, permanently reinventing themselves.

A third understanding of educating city, such as shown in some presentations, emphasises

the contemporary, or even most of all, the near future – as is suggested by the congress’s

general theme: ”the city as an educational space in the new millennium”.

It is an understanding, which is directly linked with the very current problematic of the

information society, or even better, with the problematic of the knowledge society.

All human societies were, in a certain way, knowledge societies, and cities even more so, as

was referred. But today there is an exponential sense towards concept. Knowledge has

become a central, enlarged, deeply impregnating and decisively motor ingredient of current

societies. For good and bad.

Formalised knowledge, literacy competencies and technological, cultural and civic

competencies, systematic learning processes, namely academic and professional, the

importance of highly coded scientific research, technical innovation and artistic

experimentation – all of this has become central in economy, in daily life, in the access to

culture, in social and political leadership.

Educating cities are in this sense, knowledge societies cities, in which education has passed

from a specific dimension, and from a specialised institution, to a transversal and

omnipresent element of social relationships and ways of living in society.

The approaches of the almost 20 interventions in the panel on “City Memory and Identity”,

express these three understandings.

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The conceptions of educating city: a) as a “municipal educational policy and an enlarged

civic identity”, b) as a “plural context of culture and cultures”, c) as “the knowledge society’s

central platform”, were present in the various interventions, sometimes only one of them,

other times several in very interesting articulations.

To be more precise, the cities of Carcaraña and Rosário, Barcelona and Córdoba, Melilla

and Santiago de Compostela, Pilar and Setúbal, Goteborg and Badalona, Jerusalem,

Évora and Varese, and of course Lisbon, in their whole or in parishes, namely the Lumiar –

presented very interesting interventions, in which issues such as the following, appeared

frequently:

• the active up-grading of historic and heritage city references, in various aspects and

with various promoting entities, namely museums, schools, associations and

municipal departments linked to education, culture and urban requalification;

• the active up-grading of social memories and cultural identities, particularly regarding

social categories or disfavoured, devalued or usually invisible groups, regardless of

their effective and decisive leadership in the life of cities (cases like those of workers,

women, immigrants, etc.);

• how, in terms of the memories and identities, cities are the scenario and stage for

social diversity, heterogeneity and various inequalities, and the contrasts,

segregations, protests, movements and transformations which result from that and

reconfigure cities whilst social tissues;

• environmental awareness, cultural dynamics and entertaining activities, namely for

youngsters;

• relationships between generations and the enriching educational processes which

may derive;

• the complex processes of social integration generation and mutually respecting

identity generation, or even shared identity reinvention;

• cultural communication in an internationalisation and cosmopolitan context.

Various action strategies for the accomplishment of projects with these concerns, were

presented.

Those action strategies, although diverse, generally privilege recoveries, trajectories,

material conceptions and other activities involving the receiver social groups themselves.

On another level, but very often simultaneously, such strategies also privilege interactive

contacts between different generations or different social categories.

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Which means that in this domain of accomplishing the concept of educating cities, one

verifies the enactment, frequently a combined and complemented one, of what could be

called “active leadership strategies” and “diversity interlinking strategies”.

They represent the best that can be expected from the new millennium, in the context of

educating cities.

Workshop 3

“Local development, solidarity and interdependencies”

Ana Carita

Good-afternoon Congressmen and Congresswomen.

We were requested to give you an insight into the development of works in Panel 3 - «Local

Development, Solidarity and Interdependencies». As mentioned previously, this image has a

subjective dimension with the limitations we recognise. It is about telling you how we listen to

narrated experiences, or even better, in the light of what interrogations do we listen to

narrated experiences and what new interrogations have they been creating. We will give you

an account of our view from a set of 7 issues. These issues derive from our curiosity over

projects, and the perplexities or concerns they arise. Others were partly determined by

conceptual references, in which community work is included, and that seem to gather

sufficient agreement. Let us see, without being exhaustive, some of these issues and also

how this or that project is an example in one or another of its dimensions of the possible

answers to the concerns or questions we raised. First of all, let us begin by paying attention

to the panel’s own title: “Local Development, Solidarity and Interdependencies”. See how in

itself it conveys the idea that local development is not possible in the various levels in which

we may conceive local territoriality, without the institution of an essential conviviality

dimension, the dimension of solidarity, assistance. However, following Solidarity we have the

reference to Interdependencies, an association we subscribe to entirely.

In fact, Solidarity and Interdependency are, or should be, two aspects inseparably linked in

the relationships we maintain with others, whilst individuals, and whilst group members.

Solidarity, on one hand, and on the other, reciprocity, exchange, mutual dependency, and

interdependency lead, or should lead to social relationship aspects, which we want close to

one another. There is no truly dignifying solidarity of the human being without incentive and

support towards reciprocity, without receiving and contributing, without the possibility for

interdependency and finally without everyone’s possibility for leadership, whether it is in the

interpersonal relationships sphere, whether it is in the social relationships sphere.

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It is within this conception framework that solidarity presents itself as an open door for

autonomy and as a rejection of the incentive towards subjection relationships.

It is also important to note that the development of solidarity and leadership or social

participation is assumed a an important mark of the citizenship, the Educating Cities are

proposing to develop in their Charter for Principles. That is why, underlying our view on

narrated projects, this question has consistently come up:

Has this experience contributed towards the development of solidarity?

And, has it done so within the perspective of a solidarity based on the recognition of the

dignifying character of the receiving and contributing interdependencies institution?

This question brings us back to the experience of the Time Bank from Guinardó, Barcelona.

Touching in the simplicity of its methodology and objectives, it aims at instilling amongst

women of a neighbourhood, exchange and mutual support relationships, enabling them to

use free time for leisure activities, which the frequent accumulation of professional and

house work does not facilitate. Learning to ask. Learning to receive. Learning to exchange.

Are a few of the aspects, which drove this project.

Another example of solidarity could be that of the Rua project developed in the city of

Lisbon. It began based on the will to help with the recovery and family and social integration

of children in risk situations, and doing so with the co-operation of young people in street

animation.

A second reference points to the fact that it is an important concern of the local development

work to capacitate community members enabling them to face the problems and challenges

life presents. Therefore, the emphasis is given to a community strategy with a developmental

objective and an educational nature. The aim is to incentive and support the development,

by individuals, of competency groups and organisations that will enable them to face with

greater leadership and autonomy, the problems and challenges on the various levels of

social intervention. It is a strategy which, in view of its developmental objectives and

educational nature, can only be associated to long term processes.

This idea is reflected in the majority of the projects presented here. In fact, several projects

assume as one of their main concerns, the development of competencies, namely,

participation competencies. As na example, look at the experience about the European

Charter for Human Rights in the City, presented by Barcelona. Furthermore, other ways of

viewing capacity-building, and also the support given to the building of individual and group

identities, seem to constitute good examples of the emphasis on the development of

population competencies. In this respect, it seems appropriate to mention the Mexico City

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Community Theatre, developed within the context of the broader SECOIS programmes, and

which was presented to us through a wonderful video: “Exploding with life”.

It represents an extremely touching intervention, due to the respect and care shown towards

the populations and their history, for the investment carried out in self-rediscovery and

memory preservation, for the intelligence and sensitivity, telling us that: “Nothing is built on

the void, no plant or fruit remains rootless”. These are the kind of roots that this type of

intervention aims to restore amongst the populations of various age segments, which have

just arrived at the big, hostile city from a variety of origins.

On the other hand, due to its methodology, it is an experience that apart from going back to

the archaic individual and group roots, also challenges them to question their daily life

through drama, to question the present, to draw-up complaints and revindications.

In another record, we have the experiences of the Lóios Neighbourhood in Lisbon or the

Quelélé Neighbourhood in Bissau, which aim towards the acquisition of civic competencies

by the population, namely those learning associative skills, a fundamental condition for the

sustainability of a continued population participation.

On yet another record, the development of competencies regarding environmental issues,

was a central focus of the four interventions presented in the panel.

A third concern relates to the added value community work gives, or what we feel is

important for it to give, the simultaneously resolutive and preventive dimension of the

intervention. The preventive dimension should always be present even in the a framework of

outlining or execution of an intervention in a crisis situation, or one of giving an answer to

acute problems.

In truth, even during these last resolutive or intentionally resolutive interventions the

introduction of an advantage is required, within the spheres of material, individual or

organisational enriching of the contexts, in order to prevent problems occurring and help in

the confrontation with others.

In fact, it does not seem possible to underestimate the need to respond to the problems and

concrete necessities of the local communities. It actually seems unbearably perverse to pass

over the problems felt by the populations, some of which result from the dissatisfactions of

the most elementary life necessities and centre the work on an after-life separated from what

the communities feel here and now. Only the challenge, which does not ignore the living

experiences populations have in reality, can be internally managed by them and can find

fertile soil to sprout.

In summary, it is necessary to visibly respond to the concrete problems felt by the

populations, and it is equally necessary that through that same response, the community

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may give a step forward in its capacity to critically identify other needs, eventually less local

ones with interventions favouring their resolution. This is what I meant by the conciliation

between the resolutive and preventive dimensions of community work.

But whilst I listened to the presentations and took my notes, I continuously asked myself:

What are the populations’ problems?

The left hand-side of my generation, my own generation, thought they knew which were the

problems of a wide range of population sectors: bread, peace, housing, health, education,

more or less along the words of our poet-singer Sérgio Godinho.

I believe that in many places these are still serious problems to be solved.

But do the large majority of the populations suffering from these problems see them as

clearly as they seem to be to me?

Are they problems for the populations because they are inscribed in their critical social, civic,

political, active and participatory conscience?

And, how does community work handle this issue?

With what methodologies? With what resources? With what objectives?

And, how does it deal with other types of problems, or needs, or rights we have been

creating with growing strength: the right for free-time, the right to play, to socialise, to travel,

to read, to create art, to entertain, the pleasure for all?

And, how does community work deal with this too?

The Kelélé Neighbourhood experience in Bissau is probably one of those which is clearly

centred on the basic needs of an entire community: the Kelélé Neighbourhood. By focusing

on the energies of the populations themselves, and by seeking incentive and supporting their

organisational capacities and resorting to exterior financial help, the populations have

managed to solve a significant part of their basic problems.

Some projects also focus on the concerns in the employment sector, whether it is through

some professional qualification initiatives, whether through guidance and follow-up of the re-

entrance into the employment market, whether it is through the creation of new jobs. This is

the case, for example, of the Carnide and Campolide projects.

In the meantime, other experiences invoke a entire work focussed on the right to a

successful education and present us the work developed towards educational success for

children and young people. This is the case of the Bela Vista and Campanhã experiences in

the Porto, amongst others.

The response towards the satisfaction of cultural and leisure needs seem to us to be an

intervention front used in many projects: it deals with identifying needs in order to set up

work more easily. Gladly. I was not indifferent when contemplating a group of elderly people

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practising gymnastics or children exercising their physical and vocal abilities, as we had the

opportunity to witness during my panel’s theme visit to two neighbourhoods in the Carnide

parish.

A fourth question we would place equates a central element of the community intervention

strategy, related to its non directive dimension, in other words, it aims at adding value to

community work with a developmental objective and educational nature, the option for a

strategy favouring the resource to team work and to the negotiation during the various

phases of project development. These requirements for a partnership work between, more

or less, institutionalised social actors, and for more horizontal relationships between the

partners involved in the projects, constitute dimensions of the community work strategy,

based on the recognition of diversity and its value.

However, we can only evaluate in each project the partnership and training range for

participation if we ask two questions, which are associated to it. On one hand, the question

regarding the moments during which the presence or absence of the actors is processed

within the various project development phases and, on the other hand, the participation

status the various actors have during the various project development phases.

I would also like to underline that the partnership is not determined from the outside. The

partnership is built and, in reality, it will have to build itself with those who are used to years

and hundreds of years of hierarchic power relationships and with those who are used to

years and hundreds of years of passive and subjected relationships.

Nearly all the presentations come from initiatives of participants from outside the community.

However, they clearly show concern for an ensured participation of local community people

and, or organisations in project development.

The work carried out at the Padre Cruz and Horta Nova Neighbourhoods in the Carnide

parish, is an example of a wide and integrated partnership work, in which locally based

institutions, local groups and associations – which the project itself helped to grow – as well

as the Municipal Administration and Parish, co-operated in.

This is work in which a large part of the initiative also has itself a local root, quite

understandably, whether due to the weight carried by some of the local institutions, namely

the Misericórdia, whether due to the support given as a partner by a higher education

institution, the ISCTE.

In terms of the partnership I would like to reinforce the integration effort developed by some

of the Higher Education Institutions in their communities, carrying out a precious role in

helping local development, gathering in that same place, the precious substance of its own

revitalisation.

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In this regard we heard the community service experience presented by the Haute École

Francis Ferrer from Brussels, as well as the ISCTE’s collaboration in the Carnide

neighbourhood community work.

A fifth question, still within the intervention strategies, has to do with the much talked about

holistic, or more or less integrated nature of the community projects, a dimension which it

seems, may include a multitude of meanings.

In a first sense, we are trying to look at how the community projects handle a new

development concept, which puts straightens out the separated consideration of economic,

social, cultural, or political developments. We find here once more, under a different angle,

the idea of interdependency. So, an integrated conception of development and the

interventions capable of promoting it, are based on the recognition of the interdependency

between the various aspects of reality and the problems that emerge from it. Therefore, we

are faced with the question of knowing to what extent the projects presented, translate

concerns of this nature.

In another sense, we could underline the issues of the integrated nature of interventions,

relating to the contribution itself given by various subjects, and to the interdisciplinary or

undisciplined nature, as Professor Roque Amaro said, of these projects.

Another meaning for integration could be related to issues of multi and intergenerational

intervention, or to the integration of the attention, not only on groups and associations, but

also on people and the individuals themselves. Yet another integration dimension, could

point towards the need to consider the way in which the contributions of the various

departments, or of the various institutions present in this partnership work, are co-ordinated

and integrated in the projects themselves.

The kind of contact we had with the majority of the projects did not enable us, therefore, to

give a reply to this kind of issues, which are, nevertheless pertinent. It seems that the

majority of the projects respond to one or another of the integration requirements mentioned,

and rarely to all of them, which is quite understandable.

On the other hand, we get the idea that some of the projects constituted specific sections of

broader local development programmes, with more encompassing and integrating general

guidelines, which were not made explicit here. We feel that way, for example, regarding the

presentation on the Campanhã community work.

The presentation focuses on one of the development dimensions: education. In any case, by

focusing on education it diversifies receivers and protagonists, as well as objectives,

activities and intervention resources.

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In the meantime, according to what we have heard, it seems that the work developed in the

Kelélé neighbourhood, in Bissau, constitutes a good example of an intervention focused on

this integrated development, which takes into account the economic, social, cultural and

political development dimensions. And, other experiences such as the Barcelona

Metropolitan Region experience, which focused on the need to integrate the various region’s

departments, in view of joining efforts towards a concerted intervention in the educational

field.

A sixth view, has to do with the social visibility of the projects, an aspect wish seems to me

to be very important and which carries various effects in the manner in which it is dealt with,

an aspect also referred to in some of the projects presented.

I would now pass on to the seventh issue. To finish, we asked ourselves a series of

questions which are related to the presentations and the attention focused on the difficulties

found in project development, and also the fact that some, not many, presentations actually

explicitly addressed those questions.

We questioned ourselves on how one equates, within a local development focused

community work, several difficulties, namely those which lead to resistance towards change,

the difficulties which result form the announced will for partnership and co-ordination

between the various project actors, with the loss of power implied for some of the actors.

Another difficulty has to do with:

How does one motivate towards participation and hope, when the hardships of life push the

opposite way?

How does one equate the difficulties associated with managing the conflicts, which are likely

to emerge?

How does one think and solve the confrontation with the old standardisation temptation, with

the levelling out of differences and diversities?

How does one think the tensions between the globalising and standardising models dictated

by economic power, as well as the speeches and appeals towards what is local, towards

local accountability and participation?

How does one deal with the real loss of power of politicians and of the representative and

national political power, regardless of the apparent placid situation of affairs?

How does one conciliate the powers, the logic of a moving participatory democracy creates,

with the powers derived from delegation, representation and voting, on which our political

system is based?

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Well, these are just some of the difficulties I presume come up explicitly or concealed in

much of the community work. I mentioned them not because I have the answer for them, but

because I felt I had to share my thoughts with you.

In fact, I do not believe that feeling our way through will help to improve work. I imagine that

it would be very useful, in terms of the growth of the local development political dimension,

for a critical conscience of those tensions to become visible. But this is not a conscience or

knowledge that may be constructed up-stream of a community action, quite on the contrary,

it is by enacting community action that it is possible to construct and deepen knowledge of

itself and of its relationships and tensions with the political organisation, and economic

development models reigning nowadays, and which seem to be quite distant from the

announced intentions of the majority of the presentations on my panel.

Workshop 4

“Diversity as na educational resource for the city and the school: new models for

participation and citizenship”

Sérgio Niza

I would like to begin by thanking the City Hall, the Lisbon City Hall, for having allowed me to

participate in this wonderful and broad meeting about Education and the City.

I would also like to congratulate the Association of City Governments for Education for the

value added to democracy.

And finally, thank all the participants of Panel 4 for having enabled me such knowledge

within its 19 presentations.

But I would like, beforehand, to remind you of a part of the text of the Barcelona work group,

of Jordi Bayor and of the other notable Catalans. You have this text with you but I will go

over it because for me it seems to be fundamental: “In a plural society like our own, the

defence of diversity is fundamental, but the defence of equality is also fundamental. Diversity

can be understood as difference or as inequality. If it means difference it should be

applauded and appreciated because it helps to distinguish and personalise citizens, but if it

means inequality in the treatment or social opportunities they are entitled to, then it should

be refused. Respect, as an ethical value pursues a double objective: the acceptance of

others’ differences and the fight against inequality imposed in an absurd manner. Respect

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towards others leads us to also include within the development of cities, the sustainability

value, as an exercise of responsibility towards future generations”.

In my opinion, the diversity of our cities’ citizens, was presented here in Panel 4, as a rich

lesson for all. And that variety of those who live and identify themselves with the city also

constitutes a non-estimable educational resource for all its citizens, not only when learning at

school, but always, and in any of the living and socialising city spaces. Whilst subjects,

actors and authors of a city, in it we learn to be and live as citizens who respect each other,

and I say respect, not tolerate, and learn and develop together.

Learning is always a social interactive process, with our generation peers, with the younger

ones, with the older ones, or with the various resources other men and women produced

for us. It is the learning process we do with others and for the love of others, in the various

places of the cities we live in, which constitutes our own education.

Therefore, it makes all the sense to intentionally think about active participation processes

for citizens, from the very children at the heart of an educational community, which beams

from various city loci.

It is also with an active participation in city life that one learns by participating and founds

and develops citizenship. These are not different things. The more complex and exalting

level of each one’s training. The cities’ educational dimension crosses all its human activity

and sustains the cities, themselves, into the future. Those we elect to govern our cities and

who do not understand this do not deserve the trust we placed in them.

So, to be here, as a guest at the heart of an association for cities which we want and believe

to be educating, is a great pleasure.

I would like to tell you that in the panel which inspired these considerations of mine, we

divided the work into four areas of educational intervention: the intervention of public power

in animating local educational policies; the participation or intervention of children in the city,

and the respect towards them and their rights; the educational networks and the community

participation and multicultural aspects at school and in the city.

I will refer a few headlines for each problem as an example of the things, which in my

opinion, deserve to be more reflected on and deepened in future and permanent debates,

not only within congresses.

In terms of the intervention of public powers in the animation of local educational policies, I

would like to tell you that, although we apparently closed this theme with a first set of

statements, this intervention of public powers crossed the other themes, and I draw three

considerations from that. And, a reflection on the organisation of the panels.

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We verified that the assumption of the educational functions of communities and of those

communities’ powers whilst cities, are not entirely assumed in all instances, territories, etc.,

from which we gathered statements. And it could not be otherwise, because it is a matter

which we have recently become aware of around the world, and therefore it is something we

are building: a new democratic power of the city governments with the direct participation of

citizens.

The intervention level at which the municipal services are placed is unequal, but I believe

this has a lot to do with the power levels of the city governing bodies, this is, when the

central governments decentralise power and share it, or in other words, when they are more

democratic, or when the central governments are still slightly or less democratic. In the

presentations and statements we had access to, unequal ways of assuming educational

functions were noted in terms of cohesion measures. In some statements we felt more sets

of projects and activities, eventually, linked to the municipal plan, whilst in others we felt

more the reaffirming of a political programme, of a strategic speech, which will be

fundamental in giving congruency and cohesion to the municipal and community activities.

I confess that in my opinion the extensive panel work, with such short time for people to

declare their experiences, seemed to me damaging. I believe that in future congresses

should be rethought because we have access to the written presentations only after they

have been given, which means that if we do not have a minimum period of time in which to

say what we have to say, then it is not possible to follow any kind of debate, because there

is not even any matter to debate.

Therefore, very often we are left with only the text, with the strategic speech, sometimes, a

great quality one, but we are left without knowing how these projects and activities are

processed, some of which are of a large political range. It will probably be necessary to

alternate this strategy, this procedure of having panels with 19 presentations. They should

probably be shortened and alternated with other procedures and methodologies, such as

workshops, in which people can analyse in more detail the work methods, which are

fundamental, for the associated cities to be able to progress in the exchanges they have set

themselves out to do.

Of course, I am confidant that very briefly there will be other speciality meetings, in more

conflicting or problematic areas, in which it is necessary to deepen the issue.

However, within this field I would like to highlight two ideas put into action as signalling

practices, and I apologise for not invoking all of them. I did not propose to make an analysis

but a comment, therefore I will only highlight some ideas, just as ideas and not as

procedures.

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The first one, is the idea given to us by Caxias do Sul in Brazil, from the Participatory Budget

for the city and its application in schools. It was a pity we could not find out a bit more about

what actually went on in the schools, probably due to lack of time, but I believe it was crucial.

It is as crucial as the problem of managing assets and money, and city resource financing,

and the participation in the management of that sector is the great taboo of power and will be

tomorrow’s great political motor for democracy. It is not something of little importance, it is a

crucial challenge for schools, for cities, for countries. If we do not transform this into a great

ambition, we will not have democracy. The democratic control which gives credit and full

meaning to democratic values.

The other idea, is the dangerous but fruitful one, of the Social Condominiums in Mexico City.

And I say this, because if we do not prevent perversions, the deviations from social

condominiums, this is, for socially disadvantaged people, through social dynamics, then we

may unwillingly transform that dream into a ghetto.

The maintenance and management of the condominium was mentioned, and how it can be

transformed into a learning process for citizenship and construction of a condominium

culture, in other words, a Columbus Egg for Educating Cities. Not only in order to create

social and educational condominiums for a democratic city, but also for this idea to multiply

in many other places around the city, assuming the democratic management of conflict

areas, affirming the negotiating position, the dynamic contractual aspect and the value of

dialogue and co-responsibility, to build the democratic formation in daily city life.

“If you are part of the problem you can be part of the solution” was the motto for this action in

Mexico City. This is the code for any educational policy programme for the actively affirmed

democratic city.

I would like to raise a problem in the area of child participation. This because I have already

been signalled that my time is nearly up. So, I believe it is a good idea to reflect on the

participation of children in consultative committees. The logic of representative democracy,

even when we call it participation, has a weak formative and educational potential and

clearly benefits the representatives.

City governments are using this system of Child Committees as consultative committees of

the local authority power, however further efforts are required to value the democratic point

of view of those who experience, those who had or did not have the opportunity to

participate directly in problems, conflicts, and in the negotiating dialogue democratic

management involves.

Why so much learning about democracy for so few?

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Should everyone have stories of direct democratic participation in order to learn in the city

how to share power and information, which truly creates the democracies?

Participation cannot be transformed into a bureaucratic and formal act, or we will all loose

out with it. An ethical reflection is imposed. But it is possible to make further efforts to

generate an entire direct participation dynamic from the basis to the top, from schools to

municipal power, but we cannot isolate the consultative committees from the direct

participation committees in schools, and should directly discuss each and every problem.

That is the challenge if we want democracy.

On the issue of culture, diversity, cultural diversity and integration, I would simply read these

considerations: we should create awareness towards the fact that together and interculturally

real problems can be solved, and this way we can transform living conditions in the city, and

lead the intelligence and the values of each culture to progress, because one could not

conceive a city valuing multiculturality for the promotion of dialogue efforts and intercultural

learning, without an explicit programme for the fight against racism, xenophobia, against all

kinds of discrimination and exclusion. A city, which has discovered the educational resource

of diversity, will have to discover the implicit value of inclusion, without which intercultural

dialogue would make no sense. This is a human rights issue, the school and the city will

have to show, this is demonstrate, that all children and adults share an equal value city,

whether they are handicapped, gypsies, whether they are the various groups we mentioned

in the panel. The exclusion from the normal school system due to some kind of learning or

socialising difficulty, implies not knowing this value and constitutes a discriminatory practice.

All intentional separation, even if in the name of prejudice, or even good-will, leads to life

segregation. We must create open and welcoming communities and make speedier

progress in the development of an inclusive society.

Workshop 5

“Education, training, employment and leisure: the strategic role of the city”

Maria de Lurdes Silva

First of all, I would like to greet all the participants of this Congress on Educating Cities, who

brought to Lisbon the story of the experiences they have participated in and the stimulus

of the projects they are involved in, aimed at transforming the cities we live in into

educational spaces.

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Secondly, I would like to underline that what I intend to say is strictly my opinion about what

has been presented here.

The work in the fifth panel enabled us to underline the strategic role of cities in the fields of

education, training, leisure and occupation of free time. I believe that it was proved that the

city’s strategic role was reinforced.

In fact, the city has added the educational potential of schools, has developed projects and

processes aimed at various literacies, has supported and facilitated initiatives in the fields of

training and education, has acted like the motor for building partnerships and mobilising

people’s will. The city has been organising itself in order to become a permanent resource

centre, and should project itself to correct social and urban unbalances, to add value to

public space and to create safe playgrounds and leisure spaces.

School as we have known it, was seen and confirmed by the statements in this panel, as

having gradually lost centrality and as revealing itself restricted, in terms of space and time,

to be able to hold all publics and knowledge areas. The municipal public powers are taking

initiatives and defining policies in the sense of assisting with this insufficiency. Social

cohesion and community development are based, largely, on the care and attention given to

the education of the younger generations. Life in the cities, the quality of civic socialising are

intimately linked to the education and qualifications of those who live and work in the cities.

That is why, integration is seen and recognised as an integration tool. The school

infrastructure does not have the size nor does it possess the means and resources to

respond to such great demands as those we have nowadays. Therefore, the municipal

public powers have been making available large sums of money, to build infrastructures and

recruit specialists of various fields, to develop programmes aimed at the diversity of city

publics. Activities, which take place very often out of the school area are projected so they

reflect on the search for formal, or informal education, always understood as an asset, and

so that it also reflects on the students school knowledge gain.

The municipalities have a growing formal offer of informal education, so as to speak, and I

would add that it is in fact a formal offer of semi-informal education, seeing as it is

intentional, with previously defined objectives, a defined and established time and even an

evaluation of those activities and of that intervention. Public spaces, such as libraries, for

example, integrate clearly educational objectives and develop them through their own

programmes or in partnership with other schools. But, as we all know, school and a lot of

what goes on around it, reproduces and even strengthens social inequalities. Therefore, we

are quite sceptical, if not totally non believers regarding the illuminated utopia that through

education we can establish real equality amongst citizens, as the Marquis of Condorcet

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proclaimed on the 20th April 1792. But we have no doubt that literacy, in the developed

contemporary societies, implies world reading and interpretation capacities, which appeal to

various competencies literacy discriminates.

Scientific education is, therefore, one of the essential elements in capacity building, because

it is fundamental to produce a new generation of citizens, scientifically literate and better

prepared in a world which is increasingly influenced by science and technology. This

capacity building is the process of giving citizens the opportunity to exercise basic rights in

relation to scientific information and participation in the city.

And, although we are all well aware of it, mastering written and spoken language is one of

the indispensable elements for citizenship and even, most of all, in these times of internet.

One of the social exclusion factors will be school exclusion, which very often appears

associated to the lack of students’ linguistic proficiency. Aware of this relation, of this vicious

cycle, an objective to develop in children and youngsters the aptitude and use of the

language and the interest and desire to read was adopted by many City Halls, which made

themselves responsible for promoting or creating facilitating conditions for projects to

broaden the number and quality of readers. But to read the world nowadays also demands,

as it probably always has, esthetical and ethical aptitudes, as has already been mentioned

here. Educational art, theatre or school plays, confront children and youngsters with other

forms of expressing or communicating feelings, points of view and affections. They also

expose them to conflicts and dilemmas, which help them to converse with themselves and

with others, to question and affirm their character, to grow. But this is not the only essential

education nowadays. The numbers, the representation of reality in numbers, in quantities,

may exclude those who are not bearers of the access code for this language, those who are

illiterate in this sector.

When schools and public powers pay attention to these needs and try to look for answers

they are, naturally, educating and training, they are preparing for the employment market, for

life, for the life in today’s world. A varied, unequal and unfair world, but the city is no less.

The large cities, which detain the great economic potential and the greater opportunities are

poles, and have nearly always been attraction poles, for the peripheral and poor regions.

The arrival of these people in the city, creates around those large cities, city crowns and

satellite neighbourhoods and even ghettos, which shelter, often in unbearable conditions,

thousands and thousands of people. And, this is where we have many of the fractures,

which shake social cohesion and civic socialising and throw aside those who do not access

cultural assets and, therefore, do not speak the language, the same language as their co-

citizens. That is why, to transform culture into a social cohesion key element, to place culture

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as one of the basic axis of city development, is in my opinion, one of the paths towards

affirming city identify and wealth, which retains in the diversity of its people an inestimable

asset.

But non of us are fooled by the range and limits of this intervention. And the same applies to

that other tool, that new industrial revolution wave of new information and communication

technologies, which have reduced, or are reducing the world to the size of a village we call

“global”.

Quoting Luís Moita, I would say that: “The vulgarisation of the globalisation idea could be

difficult to explain, if it did not have some amount of truth to it: the speed at which long

distance communications occur, the instantaneous information in real time, the

dissemination of cultural stereotypes of various natures, the perception of literally global

threats, such as those weighing over the entire ecosystem, the production of artefacts from

components originating from geographically scattered locations, the large scale of migrating,

tourist and financial fluxes, are some of the facts which added up seem to indicate that

global qualification can be applied in reason to a significant number of “current phenomena”.

What we call globalisation is linked to a fantastic scientific and technological evolution. But

we also know very well that science and techniques are always socially marked in the sense

that human decisions and social contexts are indispensable for its emergence. In this light,

globalisation is also the product of an intentional political orientation adopted and pursued

with determination, and which is usually identified with the neo-liberal current. This

political orientation, which is an ideology, seems to search for legitimacy in the proclamation

of the end of ideologies and even leads us to forget it is not global. Globalisation chooses

and excludes. It marks a frontier between the discontinued stain which encompasses North

America, Europe and the region piloted by Japan. The rest, is almost entirely left out. It is on

the other side of the border. On this other side, where the people of developing or

underdeveloped countries live, the creation of a multimedia centre and its installation in a

100 sq. meter class room in a high school in a country’s capital, for example, constitutes an

important investment, and who knows, the only one available, and which serves to overcome

the financial difficulties of students and researchers, and to suppress the library

insufficiencies and the obsolete character of school manuals.

But this boarder also exist within each country, each city. Placing some on the rich side and

the others on the poor side. Education and culture are, therefore, opportunities for an

ascending social mobility, but which have almost never eliminated social inequalities. All we

need is to look at our times: never before did so many millions attended school, benefited

from a 2nd opportunity schooling and obtained academic qualifications. And, maybe, like

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never before has the trench dividing those who have, from those who do not have, been so

deep. But it is important to refer that the scholar degree and the training level are associated

to the remunerative and social statuses. Therefore, to despise or minimise the strategic role

of education and that of the city in training and education, in the construction of an inclusive,

public and quality school, would be the same as to deny the irreplaceable role of education

in the development of clear-minded social conscience, in acquiring collective democratic

values, in developing democracy.

But there is no better way to learn and live democracy than actually live it. Education can be

suggested as the means for the construction of democratic, fair and more equal societies,

and contribute towards turning school life into a process of education towards values,

towards citizenship, to assume responsibilities in the conception, planning, management and

evaluation of measures, which will develop urban space and help those who live in it to

grow. But citizenship is learnt in the city, in participation, in public space and with others. To

take forward a participated democracy process involving all the school community and city

segments: parents, students, staff and teachers, with the aim of defining principles, which

define the principles of capacity building, of an educational project within the city or of a

citizen school, which is non exclusive, democratic, emancipated, and which forms

autonomous historical elements. This is also a way in which to learn and live democracy, the

wish of the International Association for Educating Cities.

I think that the main message brought to us by the presentations of the fifth panel is: “You

educate in learning and you learn in doing”.

João Barroso

After these deep insights by the elements of this table, I feel as thou there is little left for me

to say, because you already have enough to keep your minds busy with.

However, I will give my testimony of what was most obvious to me, not only throughout the 5

panels presented by the members of the table, but also from the contact I had during the

various sessions I attended.

I would say that one of the most interesting aspects of a congress of this nature, where there

are a series of presentations and experiences, with the implicit value each one of the

experiences and presentations has brought to us here, is the fact that through them it is

possible to operate better the Educating City concept. The Educating City concept clearly

enunciated in the Barcelona Charter, is fed, altered and livened by the experiences

developed in the various cities.

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And I would like to call your attention precisely to try and highlight, what in my opinion is

summarised into one question: What is this concept’s essential content?

And also call your attention to the fact that this concept leads to the relationship between the

citizen, the city and education and, in this sense, it highlights in what measure can the city

be a space, a time, an educational action, and in what measure can education in general

and primary school in particular, present in various interventions, be a space, a time and a

citizenship action?

This relationship between education and city is, in my opinion referenced in three

dimensions: the first on, education in the city; the second on, education of the city; the third

on, education for the city.

Education in the city, the first content level of the educating city, enables us to recall and pay

homage here to a Brazilian pedagogue, I would call a universal pedagogue, who was

explicitly present in some interventions, namely those from our friends from Porto Alegre in

Brazil, but who was implicit in many of the strategies and processes developed in other

experiences. I am referring to Paulo Ferreira who wrote a small book entitled: Education in

the City about his experience as Municipal Secretary for São Paulo City between 1989 and

1998. It is a small book from which I will read a small excerpt that shows the political project

of a municipal entity in charge of education in a large metropolis, São Paulo, the third largest

in the world, and in which is written, and I quote: “In fact, we intend to change the face of our

school. we do not think we are the only ones, or the most competent, but we know we are

capable and have the political decision to do so. We dream of a capable public school, that

is built little by little within a creative space. A democratic school in which the questioning

methodology is practised, in which there is serious teaching and learning, but in which this

seriousness never turns into sadness. A school in which, when teaching about contents also

teaches about thinking correctly”.

Well, this political and educational project of a municipal authority, which consists in

changing the face of a school and which in order to do so, needs to change its body and

soul, is a project that cannot only be left up to the teachers, nor municipal political

authorities, but is, in fact, a task for all of us.

School changes when it alters its relationship with others. Therefore, school needs to open

up to the city. And, to open up to the city, it has to begin by opening up to its students, who

represent the city within the school.

The second idea, the second content level of educating cities was, as I said, no longer

education in the city but education of the city. Because, in fact, the city educates by

educating itself. Our cities cannot be educating cities if they are not educated cities, this is, if

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they do not grow and develop according to educational principles and values we want to

instil in our children, in our youngsters and in the citizens in general.

If the city wants to educate towards democracy it must be democratic. If the city wants to

educate towards beauty it must be beautiful. If the city wants to educate towards knowledge

it must be wise. If the city wants to educate towards respect for others it must know how to

respect its inhabitants. The city must educate with examples not lessons. The city educates

for all it represents and not for what it wants others to be.

The third and last level of the Educating City is the education for the city. This means that

the city’s educational function cannot be confined to the intervention power of municipal

authorities in the educational sector.

We do not want, I do not want, and I suppose this view is shared by others, we do not want

to replace the Educating State, which is going through a well known and universal crisis, for

the Educating Municipality. The city in the sense of the Greek polis transcends the power

instituted by local authorities. Even thou local authority action is important, it cannot limit the

community action, which is so clearly demonstrated by that well-known proverb quoted in

many countries: “In order to educate a child a school is not enough, an entire village is

required, an entire city”.

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Closing Ceremony “Viewing the educating city in the new millennium”

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António Abreu

Ladies and Gentleman we will now begin the Closing Session, but, first of all, Mrs Marie

Rénal, the French government Representative of the Ministry of la Ville will address you.

Marie Rénal

In actual fact, I am here in representation of the City Minister, Mr Claude Bartolone, because

we have a strong partnership with the French Network of Educating Cities. I know that the

concept of City Policy may sound a little strange for other countries. In fact, in France we

have a specificity, which we are not proud of, and it comes down to having constructed cities

that were not very human, which led us in the 80’s to rethink and try and find a better urban

management system. We are working very hard in this sense and we are very alert to

anything concerning education.

I only arrived this morning and I have already heard many interventions about exclusion and

inequalities. It is precisely on this issue we are working, namely with the French Network of

Educating Cities, with which we have got together, in order to try and deepen the Educating

City concept and try and move forward new ideas, because in France there is still a mix up

between school and education.

I will not take to long on this, I simply wanted to invite you, not everyone because it would be

rather difficult, but anyway, invite you to the next International City Festival, which will have

its third edition during September 2001.

This International City Festival, is a moment for discussion and debate about the urban

universe, this exponential urban civilisation, which is invading the planet, not as it should, in

a manner that would enable its inhabitants to live better, but instead it is giving them a poor

quality of life. It is a moment to discuss, research, meet, but also to party, because the city

can also be a place to party. Therefore, we felt a party was needed for the city so we created

this International Festival.

It is not yet well-known, and for me, today is a unique opportunity, to let you know more

about it, and to say how we would very much like to see you there and be able to discuss the

issue of Educating Cities.

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You may contact us through the French Network’s Chairman, Mr Hubert Chardenay, from

the city of Rennes, who will give you my e-mail and who may eventually let you know how

you may come to this festival, to this meeting I would like to share with you.

Allow me just a couple of words to say that, within the scope of this festival, but also within

the scope of a programme we have developed along with this network, we developed the

idea, and therefore an action, called the City Classes. The City Classes are all about what

one of the speakers before me said: “To learn in the city, to learn from the city, education for

the city”.

Very well, this is what it is, but directed towards children. We have the idea that children live

in this universe, which they sometimes simply reject because we do not teach them and do

not give them critical access to this universe. So we developed the City Classes, which we

try to bring to Créteil, to an area called the Public Junior Arena, with the purpose of

motivating young people’s participation, which is crucial and which is not just linked to

recovering power, but which aims at giving them the power to voice their opinions, to say

what they know and wish of the city.

So we try and get them together in this Public Junior Arena. If any of the cities represented

here have had similar experiences, if you are used to working with children in this universe,

we would gladly welcome delegations of children working on this topic, in order for them to

be able to share their experience with the French children, who are developing this kind of

approach.

That is all. I thank you for your attention. I hope we will have another opportunity to meet

again.

Manuel Tornare

Can we expect to create a social connection through the development of a new urban

dynamic?

This is the question we have to ask ourselves today. Here are some lessons we learnt from

this VI Congress on Educating Cities, allow me to mention them: the city no longer plays the

social integration role it did during the first half of the XX century. Even more seriously, it

represents a fundamental change and participates in many ways in deepening social

inequalities and social fracturing.

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We witness in fact, a total inversion of the tendencies. The metropolis effect and the

increase of social inequalities appear, effectively, as a heavy tendency of the past two

decades.

Apart from the exclusion and urban violence phenomena, which mine democracy, the city

under the influence of centrifugal forces focuses on tensions that may put at risk the Social

State’s own stability. So, in order for the city to get back up onto the stage of integration, it is

necessary to make a new integration model emerge and put into motion new identity

producing mechanisms.

Can our cities face this challenge alone, or at least, can they contribute to make it emerge?

The parameters are so numerous and the actors so different, not only on a macro level, but

also on a micro-economic level, that any answer cannot be that simple. We can, however,

try and give a political clarification in the light of a new dynamic assumed by the cities in the

geo-political field. The steep increase of the city’s importance is a world-wide phenomenon,

mentioned here since Tuesday, and which overcomes the industrial world, stimulated by

globalisation. It is simultaneously the result of a fact of state, correlated by urban population

statistics and by a favourable political context, marked in the industrial countries, by the

Nation State crisis, and its corollary, the return to individualism.

The issues of poverty, exclusion and urban violence, or even quality of life in our cities, what

ever the macro-economic mechanisms may be that generate them, they will never be solved

without being accompanied or preceded by proximity measures, which help determine their

success. These measures do not only intervene in the state of the answers, but also in terms

of the diagnosis. It implies therefore, the participation of the urban authorities at all levels of

discussion. This kind of co-ordination has not matured enough yet to give its fruit.

Unfortunately. It implies, in fact, Ladies and Gentleman, on a municipal level, a mental

adjournment and a change of the traditional power relationships, which will not easily be

achieved.

Although the political authorities are ready, case by case, to discuss the political

environment matters, the local authorities, burnt by the effects of globalisation, are more

concerned about the needs of an urban re-composition, rather than about the binding of

international co-operations, of which the dividends are still not quite perceptible. The

experiences remain limited and those which we possess, do not allow us to rely upon

municipal commitments resulting from political matters.

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The city seems to constitute, nowadays, the best adapted territory for the re-founding of

citizenship. It is the pertinent space for expression and concrete implementation of the

human rights philosophy, as the MP and Saint Denis Mayor, Mr Patrick Brodroek wrote in Le

Monde Diplomatique.

The city will not bear a citizenship hope, without us also reflecting on the functioning systems

we inherited from the XIX century, and on re-establishing the necessary debate with all the

components of the populations concerned. For this, deliberation space and time are

essential, because only this way can the citizen’s real judgement mature. It is thanks to

reflections such as these, made during this VI Congress on Educating Cities, that we can

develop co-operations from city to city, breaking down the constraints I have just described,

as well as those behavioural patterns inherited from the past, which we intend to overcome.

Let us create this new citizenship defined in the Charter for Educating Cities, in the

Barcelona Declaration, in 1990. And I quote the Charter: “The Educating Cities will develop a

bilateral or multilateral co-operation, in order to exchange their experiences. With a

collaborative spirit, the Educating Cities will mutually help each other, in regard to study and

investment projects, whether this is done through direct collaboration, whether as

intermediaries for international bodies.”

What a fine philosophy! What a fine principle we have to put into practice!

Let us greet the City of Barcelona for having been, since 1990, the pilot of this process.

We thank Lisbon City for having placed at our disposal an organisation and location which

enabled this interchange and the development of our comments on our respective

experiences, as well as Eng. António Abreu, Council Official for Education and Dr. Maria de

Lurdes Rabaça, Directress of this Department. Let us thank them for their exemplar

commitment in carrying out this congress, and let us also thank their collaborators.

For an Official like myself of the City of Geneva, which has 30 000 Portuguese adults, who

will very soon have the right to vote in the municipal elections, and we are pleased that it is

so, it was a pleasure to see this dear City of Lisbon, a city with a prestigious economic,

political, and cultural past, a city which following obscure times during a hateful

dictatorship, gives us now, deserved lessons in social and in people’s rights issues.

We should, Ladies and Gentleman, write together, us and the cities, this page of history

suggested by the Charter, when it foresees the creation of a new right for city inhabitants.

The right to an Educating City. We as officials are the couriers, and the VII Tampere

Congress should, Ladies and Gentleman, confirm this right.


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Lasse Eskonen – Vice-Presidente da Câmara de Tampere

Responsável pelo Pelouro da Educação, Cultura e Lazer

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I consider it challenging to combine the ideas of this congress with the themes of the next

congress to be held in my hometown, Tampere.

At the moment our city is planning a new strategy for the city development with special

emphasis on education and research. It is my great pleasure to tell you about our future

concept of education and its backgrounds.

Turning points are often detected when looking back. Today, however, we are living in a modern society with crucial changes, which can be easily

identified.

The breakthrough, the information flow and the communications together with the new

technology and the use of its applications, in all areas of our everyday live, is rapidly

changing the way we act in our work and in our social live and in general.

We receive information more than ever and we must also be able to receive it for our

different purposes.

For many traditional industrial cities, like Tampere, that has undergone the structural change

from the industrial society to the modern one, the new information technology and its

applications have brought along a new group. In Tampere, for example, this means more

than 2.500 new inhabitants every year and a great number of new jobs in information

technology industry in companies like Nokia.

When facing this new development, the old infrastructures of education and learning do not

provide the optimal solutions for today generation; they are weekly changing the demands.

Today City cannot remain in the role of adapting itself to the development, but it must

actively influence the direction of development.

In the knowledge society, the state organisations are mainly determinant by their core know-

how and their ability to learn; therefore their education is, according to our point of view, the

central future success of the cities.

A well-organised system of learning is essential for urban development. We know that,

nowadays, the basic skills of information society are learnt in the school. In the context of the

global economical competition, however, it is not as easy to remember that the functional

community must provide equal access to education and training.

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The measures that guarantee the real freedom of choice for everyone are an essential part

of equality. We have here an objective to think and we must admit that it might never be

completely achieved.

Education systems do not exist anymore for children and young people. Others than the

actual adult education institutions offers adult education. In addition to the traditional, liberal

and municipal adult education, there came professional education with a firm connection to

the working life, which is very demanding on qualification.

The demands of professional courses are expanding fast in our society. Such education is

frequently financiated by employers who purchase it for their employees. However the

informal education is mainly work oriented on the top training and learning. The City has to

be ready to support the enterprises and other employers to organise informal learning

opportunities.

Even so, the duty of the modern educating city is also to offer its citizens the possibility to

evaluate the activities and services of the city. The citizens need their special skills to

analyse and criticise the solutions offered by experts; in addition to that, they also need

these skills for decision making and mastering their own life in this modern world.

The ethnic and cultural equality are rapidly becoming as important as the universal access to

education. Many cities have lost their traditional structures in a very short period of time.

Securing educational equality is more difficult than it used to be. When the old traditional

values are disappearing and new ones are being discovered, we must support, maintain and

developing everyone own identity in this storming world.

Accepting the multitude of cultures is, however, our both duty and our best opportunity. We

must truly view it as an opportunity, not only, to enrich the spiritual environment of our cities,

but also to reinforce their capacity to meet the challenges of the globalisation.

The future of education makes also great demands on the municipal organisation,

responsible for its management. It is time to leave this conventional and centralised decision

making system in favour of dynamic leadership. For example, the opening up of the formerly

very closed school system to its surrounding environment and the creation of contacts with

different interest groups are becoming more and more important.

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen:

Never before, in peacetime, have we met with such load of events. We will face the world

with its even more complex. This New World is a great opportunity for us to participate. The

world of today provides us with better possibilities than ever before to build-up networks in

order to find solutions for every day problems both locally and globally.

No city can survive alone anymore; an active co-operation on all levels is our only change.

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António Abreu

My dear friends, this Congress is reaching the end. It was for us a great pleasure to have

organised a congress, which for the first time was in this field of education. I hope it stood up

to your expectations, seeing as you contributed greatly towards the effort carried out in

taking this congress as far as possible.

There were 802 participants, from 215 cities, from 50 countries.

This was not a scientists congress, the nature of the discussions and of what we intend,

does not add up to that. We had to balance various interventions, from a wide variety of

natures, to also meet a wide variety of criteria, which the scientific committee, with its

qualified academic elements, knew how to understand and select.

We are very thankful towards all those who helped us organise this congress. And there

were many who did so in a voluntary manner, following the co-operation they have had with

the city and the city with them, in various fields, in favour of education and training.

We did not have a television channel covering the event, but on our first congress day, the

channel with the highest viewing rate, opened up the daily news programme with five reports

on robberies and child rape. This gives us an idea of the task we have ahead of us.

Our friend Lasse Eskonen, made an intervention which will be immediately followed by the

introduction to the congress to be held in June 2002. I would like to wish the Tampere City

Hall, the best of success in carrying out this congress. The VI Congress is over. Let us

welcome the VII.

Mr Lasse Eskonen tell us all about it.

A warm farewell to you all.

Lasse Eskonen

Surprised? Here I am again!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the last part of the text you saw says, it is not fact of winning a prize

but are the people that matters.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m also from Tampere. This is the image that young people, like

students have about Tampere. Many things have been asked, what they thing about

Tampere, and they say that it is a place where they would like to live.

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We are extremely happy that the executive committee of the international association of

education of the cities has agreed with them and decided that the next congress of the

association will be held in Tampere, year 2002. On behalf of the city I would like to express

our thanks to the association for its decision. We will try to do our best to fulfil your

expectations.

Tampere is the centre of the second biggest urban area in Finland and traditionally a

dynamic centre of industry, culture, research and education. Tampere is an example of a

clean modern and safe Nordic city. The city has two universities, two polytechnic

universities; many research centers and institutes of higher education. The city of Tampere

is na important center of research and hi-tech industries among them, the world wide

known -Nokia Mobile Phone Company- with more than 4.000 research experts.

The city has nowadays 200.000 inhabitants. The city is one of the biggest growing urban

areas in Finland. The population increases approximately 2.500 persons per year.

Tampere is located only 160 Km from Finnish capital Helsinki. It easily accessed by car,

trains and airplane. Only at 25 minutes from Helsinki and 50 minutes from the Swedish

capital, Stockholm. Tampere is an excellent congress city. The congress center, Tampere

Hall, the hotels, shops and restaurants are all at a walking distance of the city center. The

city is located between two beautiful lakes with its natural peace. Tampere has many to offer

in terms of recreation and social events. Tampere has enough to provide whatever the

congress may require, yet small enough to make the delegates and their family to fell home

during their stay.

The congress will be held at Tampere Hall, the largest congress and concert center in the

Nordic countries. Tampere Hall is located between the centre and a pleasant park, at a

walking distance. It is a modern conference center with all state of the art facilities.

Participants will be accommodated in a wide range of hotels in Tampere that provides an

attractive set of options.

The main objective of the next congress will be to study the future of education and the

roles, opportunities and responsibility of the city in the area of diversifying education.

The main themes of the workshops will be:

“The role of the city in creating and maintaining the educational systems”

“ Modern learning environments”

“Local and global networks values, ethical and ethnical aspects in education equality and

marginalization in education and work”

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The scientific committee of the congress has begun its work. The president of the committee

is Ms. Lervinnen, professor of adult education at Tampere University.

The conference will be in June. At that time the Finnish nature shows you its best

characteristics, like mid night sun and blue lakes.

Ladies and Gentlemen, on behalf of the city of Tampere, Finland: Welcome, Beinvenu,

Biene venido …

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To the Non-Executive Board

To the Scientific Committee

To the Executive Committee of the IAEC and its secretariat

To the various figures and institutions which contributed to the analysis / proposal of the congress theme

To the workshop moderators, the analysts and the co-ordinators

To the speakers, both those from Portugal and abroad

To the event’s sponsors

To the town councils and institutions which hosted the study tours

To the various town and city councils, institutions and individuals (both from Portugal

and abroad) who addressed the congress

To the town councils in the Greater Lisbon Metropolitan Region

To the students from Schools of Architecture, Art and Designer who sent in proposals for the congress logo

Especially to DAGAI/GRI, DMAEV and Videoteca departments of the Lisbon City

Council which helped to organise the event

To UCCLA

To Ambelis

And a special word of thanks

To the staff of the Department of Youth and Education who devoted themselves from the very start (the application made by the City of Lisbon) with dedication and the

highest level of responsability and professionalism to the organisation and realisation of the event.

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vi congresso internacional das cidades … · vice-chancellor of lisbon university, josé barata...

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