The UNESCO Futures of Education Commission in March 2021 issued a Progress Update on this initiative. A point of particular interest from the perspective of learning cities and communities was a comment on “The organisation and governance of education: building inclusive educational ecosystems” (UNESCO, 2021:13).

While learning cities have seldom been described as educational ecosystems, this concept has much to contribute to sustainable learning cities, with the PASCAL EcCoWell approach to learning cities directed at an integrated/ holistic approach, along the lines of a learning ecosystem, since 2011. In the light of this experience, this paper explores some of the ways in which learning cities and communities could be developed as inclusive learning ecosystems as steps towards a sustainable humanistic society.

Peter Kearns