• Project Leader: David Charles
• Staff: Cheryl Conway, Stuart Dawley
• Sponsors: FP5 project funded by the European Commission £157k (€890k for the total consortium)

Our main objective in this project is to test the concepts of a knowledge, or learning, society within the context of city regions, in order to assess how knowledge and learning can be utilised by cities within integrated strategies for their future development. There are five detailed objectives:

• To test theories relating to knowledge societies and learning societies through empirical investigation of forms of knowledge and learning within selected cities
• To identify the key roles played by cities in the wider knowledge economies of their regions/countries and identify the types of knowledge resources used by different networks within the city-regions.
• To investigate the institutions involved in collective learning processes within the case study cities, and specifically the roles played by tertiary education institutions and new forms of educational provider established to foster community learning and development.
• To assess the success of existing strategies to enhance learning and knowledge development within the cities, and identify potential good practices or lessons that could be disseminated more widely.
• To develop indicators relating to knowledge, learning processes and institutional engagement that will be helpful to local and regional authorities in developing appropriate intervention strategies.

The core of the project is a set of city-region case studies: Newcastle, Dublin, Dortmund, Tampere.