ABSTRACT
A learning city influences the future by linking learning strategies to cross-departmental financial and other strategies. Lifelong learning is not the territory of the education department alone – it is a social, a political, an economic, a health and sometimes even a spiritual phenomenon. A learning city is, like a child, a candle to be lit as much as a vessel to be filled. Knowledgeable consultants will be needed to start the process moving, to involve and animate the partners – councillors, counsellors, teachers and lecturers, administrators, the media people, the leaders of voluntary groups, the businessmen and the opinion-formers. In a city, the needs of families, or indeed individual citizens, do not occur in the neat and tidy parcels which local government has set up to deal with them. Everyone has personal, psychological, health, learning, housing, and a range of other needs.
