During the 1990s, the UK Learning City Network was a large and influential movement with government support, the most significant national body of its kind anywhere. Yet, less than a decade later, it was in decline and now no longer exists. But while few UK towns or cities any longer use the term "learning city", the notion lives on as…

Education for active citizenship has been a key development in social policy over the past two decades, leading to a number of initiatives that have sought to strengthen political, social and moral literacy. This paper briefly reviews the UK policy context by situating this within communitarian definitions of citizenship. Despite the growth of…

In the United Kingdom, social enterprise is promoted as a mechanism to capture the supposed innovation and dynamism of the private sector to (amongst other things) wean "Third Sector" organisations off their dependence on grants and to offer opportunities to "empower" socially excluded communities. In this article, we place…

Online discussion can be designed to develop the skills and confidence of students as well as providing an opportunity for constructing knowledge. If students decide not to participate or join too late, they put their own development and the quality of the learning community at risk. This article reflects on a first term undergraduate experience…

This paper presents the processes and findings of a three-year action research project implemented in a small number of urban slums in the city of Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta), the capital of the state of West Bengal in Eastern India. The project involved partnership between an established institute for cerebral palsy in Kolkata, two…

There was a notable transition in the nature, content, and administration of rural policies in many developed nations in the 1980s and 1990s. These changes concerned issues of governance and institutional framework, the definition of "development," and policy goals and content. A key question, however, concerns the extent to which shifts…

The Cynon Valley Project in Wales, United Kingdom, used funding from the Save the Children Fund and the Bernard van Leer Foundation to address consequences of economic decline in the two communities of Fernhill and Perthcelyn. The project's focus was on early childhood education and community development. Though starting at about the same time and…

In 1995, IBM United Kingdom, in collaboration with the Community Development Foundation, set up the National Working Party on Social Inclusion in the Information Society (INSINC) to examine the impact of new information technology on local communities and the potential for greater social inclusion within the information society. This INSINC report…

This collection was gathered from a seminar entitled "Education and Leisure in North European Urban Spaces," which was the result of cooperation between the Sports, Leisure, and Tourism Work Group of the International Union of Architects and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Papers were given…