Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to explore the innovating of relationships for learning as a critical issue in responding to the wicked challenges facing both higher education and cities in the 21st century. Innovating relationships for learning is identified as important in this paper for three reasons. First, the increased blurring of boundaries across work, learning, and everyday spaces enabled by information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other emerging technologies gives rise to the need for more flexible and fluid understandings of relationships for learning beyond traditional organizational settings and structures. Second, the complexity of issues facing 21st cities suggests the need for new and evolving forms of collaboration. Third, the need for education to be relevant to everyday, real-world environments is a concern and gap, inviting the potential for reconfigurations in learning relationships, contexts, and approaches. Theoretically this work builds on educational urbanism and what has been referred to as the spatial turn in pedagogy. Using an exploratory case study approach, in-depth interviews about smart cities and learning cities were conducted across diverse sectors in multiple small to medium to large cities, mostly in Canada but also extending to Europe. Content analysis was used in the analysis of the data, employing inductive and deductive approaches, from study data and a review of the research literature, respectively. In parallel with this study, anecdotal evidence was also gathered from people across the city through individual and group discussions enabling further analysis and triangulation of data. Findings from this work contribute to the literature across multiple domains including 21st century relationships for learning, educational urbanism, innovation, learning cities, and smart cities. Additionally, this work is expected to ignite interest in a practice and research space for innovating relationships for learning in support of smarter universities, learning cities, and smarter cities.

Keywords:

Creativity, cross-boundary relationships, ICTs, innovation, learning cities, libraries, next generation classrooms, relationships, smart cities.