The organisers of the 2nd Learning Festival of Pécs, Hungary decided in the Spring of 2018 to develop and organise a special conference with the title: Learning Cities and Culture Working Together. Featured here is a collection of papers from the event.

Having been influenced by lots of international trends (see, for example, exxperience from a project in India, pictured below), the Conference was held on 20 September 2019 with PASCAL as one of the co-sponsors, and was attended by fifty distinguished keynote and workshop speakers from seven different European countries to discuss and reflect to some current issues in the development of learning cities in Europe.

'Transnational Winter School on Comparative Studies in Adult Education and Lifelong Learning’programme
organized by the University of Würzburg, where 90 students from nearly 20 countries participated

Those three strands of the conference for last year reflected both sides of the same coin by signalling complexity and simplicity of the impacts of heritage, values and culture in learning cities and regions, the challenges of smart and learning cities and of technological innovations and system developments and, finally, of the promotion of intergenerational collaborations in urban communities.

Consequently, papers of this collection on learning cities and regions point not only to obvious and hidden benefits of lifelong learning in urban environment, but also they openly and strongly demonstrate a precise state of art of learning cities in Central-Easter Europe based on quality developments, conditions of learning in a competitive social and economic environment.

I wish all readers to find intellectually inspiring thoughts and ideas when reading this collection! Hopefully, it may support further engagements and better learning in and around learning cities.

Balazs Nemeth