One of the main lessons from the PASCAL PIE program which ran from 2011 to 2013 was the significance of local neighbourhoods in building inclusive loearning cities. This impact was seen particularly in Beijing and Shanghai where the learning city initiatives reached down through city and administrative district levels to local neighbourhoods where the roles of community colleges and centres was particularly important. The important research role encouraged innovations such as the eco-village project in Shanghai.

PASCAL welcomes Bristol to Networks as a participant in the Inclusion and Entrepreneurial Learning Cities Networks. Bristol recently took steps to develop as a learning city and has established a high level Partnership Board which will hold its first meeting shortly.

Innovations in a range of 155 cities across Europe has been highlighted in submissions made by these cities to the 2014 Mayors Challenge, an initiative sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies following a similar competition in America.. The competition led to Barcelona declared the winner with Stockholm, Warsaw, Athens and Kirklees runners up.

Dipane Hlalele has sent the report below on the annual Sustainable Rural Learning Ecologies Colloquium held on 29-31 October 2014 at the Qwaqwa campus of the University of the Free State. This is the third time the colloquium has been held at the Qwaqwa campus.

A report on the CityObservatory web site (cityobservatory.org) provides data on the number of poor people living in "high poverty" urban neighbourhoods between 1970 and 2010 in America.The study shows that the number of poor people in these neighbourhhoods has more than doubled in this period from two million to four million, while the number of such high-poverty neighbourhoods in cities has nearly tripled from 1,100 to 3,100.