Un'altra città è possibile. Il futuro delle città come progetto collettivo
Wednesday November 17th
Good afternoon and welcome everybody. As first part of this Congress we will have this roundtable with some other mayors and one mayoress of cities that are Educating Cities.
As it was mentioned during the opening ceremony, the Educating Cities movement today is the answer to a need that is felt by many cities. A different need, which goes hand in hand with different challenges, and different problems. But the answer to such challenges is not written anywhere, it is not foreseen, nor is it predetermined. What should Educating Cities do? We do not know in advance; Educating Cities will be the sum of the actions undertaken by cities which take this stance. This means that the methodology is built by acting and each city tries to build it by answering to their citizens’ needs. That is why we asked some mayors: “What does your city do as an Educating City? What has it done? How did it deal with this issue? What are the needs it provides for answers? How do you think the city should transform itself in the future? How can the need for lifelong education be met which is felt by the people in your city?”.
These are some of the questions that we asked them and these will be the answers that they give us today. Five mayors, four mayors and one mayoress, of different cities have joined us.
There could have been many cities; we selected a number, but not all of them could be present today.
Here with us will be the Lord Mayor of Vallenar, Juan Horacio Santana. Vallenar is a quite exemplary Chilean city; Educating Cities has Vallenar at heart because it has set in motion very interesting, and quite comprehensive actions within the city itself, and has very often served as an example for us.
The Lord Mayor of Genoa, Giuseppe Pericu, will also be joining us. He obviously could not be absent from this meeting and will have to explain to us his point of view on Genoa as Educating City.
Similarly Lord Mayor Joan Clos of Barcelona could not miss being among us given that Barcelona started and is at the head of this movement; therefore, we would like to take advantage of this moment to hear from the Mayor his point of view on Barcelona as Educating City.
Also joining us is Anna Pagans, Mayor of Girona, a Spanish city.
We had invited a Mayoress of another Spanish city, Gijon, because this is the city at the head of the Spanish network of Educating Cities, but she could not attend. Girona was the city that, before Gijon, had this task and that is why we invited them to participate.
Also joining us is Hermes Binner, former Mayor of the city of Rosario in Argentina; he was delegated by the current Lord Mayor of Rosario to attend, as Rosario is currently hosting a congress on the Castilian language in the world and thus he could not leave. Anyway, he is well represented as Mr. Binner was also the Mayor who started the movement of Educating Cities in Argentina and, in this respect, Rosario has been a focal point in Latin America.
I would also like to apologise on behalf of the Mayor of Adelaide, Australia, and the Mayoress of Helsinki. Both were scheduled but due to other work commitments, at the last minute they were unable to attend. We know that the life of mayors is unpredictable from day to day, and we can well understand that, despite their desire to be here with us, they could not join us on this occasion. We thank them anyway for having shown their willingness to participate in due course. Let’s now hear the Mayors’ answers.
First, I give the floor to Mayor Horacio Santana of Vallenar.
Firstly, I would like to greet the Mayor of the city which is hosting us, Genoa, and the Municipal Authorities that are with us at this table, and a special warm greeting also goes to each one of the delegates attending this event.
I would like to say that we are part of a small delegation consisting of a colleague, who is a councillor and professor, and a young architect and dreamer, whose task is being the Mayor of a small town in Chile of 47,000 inhabitants, a small mining and agricultural town, located in the furthest southern part of the American continent, which is projecting into the Pacific, Vallenar.
I am extremely glad to be here today both in this venue and at this extremely fruitful and valuable meeting. All of us attending here represent some big towns, others smaller or younger towns; we all have something to disseminate, we all have something to share in terms of educating, educational and training-related initiatives. We have all come here with our eyes wide open, with the objective of listening carefully in order to be enriched by these experiences. We all hope to leave Italy feeling stronger so as to go on, in our own communities, with the fight, the struggle, in order to educate and train, nowadays especially, our children, our youth and our own communities.
We have been part of the Educating Cities network for nearly eight years. During this time we have gradually improved even though we could not do everything we would have liked to. Today, I will briefly present an experience that we have been developing for ten years in our city, and that is linked to the integration of a river, a river beginning in the Cordillera and flowing to the Pacific, through our city for more or less four kilometres. This river used to be a rubbish dump, it used to be our city’s backyard, a dark and dangerous place. In the course of these ten years, with some funding from various ministries, we have transformed it into a big park with sports facilities, green areas with trees, swimming pools built using the same stones of the river which, in summer, turns into a big bathing area for our community. This is an absolutely democratic project. This project for a promenade along the river bank won competitions for city good practices at national level and was also published in international magazines for the importance that such initiative has.
Today we are still working on this project because, in this sector, we have a series of very ambitious plans in terms of urban renewal. This is the initiative that we will present in order to share it within the working group that will deal with these topics.
I once again underline my appreciation for being here in these days, in this venue, together with the authorities of such important cities from different parts of the world.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Lord Mayor of Genoa, for welcoming us to this big city. Good evening to everyone. The city of Girona is proud to be here also at this table, and to represent a group of small and medium-sized cities with which we have been working through Educating Cities for many years.
For those of you who do not know it, Girona has 84,000 inhabitants, it is located 100 kilometres from Barcelona, the capital of our region, and signed the Barcelona Charter in 1990.
Since then we have kept our commitment to all the values enshrined in this Charter which we are indeed about to renew within this Congress.
In 1993 we developed in the city the Strategic Plan and, since then, we have included in it one of the six transversal axes of the Charter, i.e. the idea of “City of Culture, Educating City”.
In effect, the City Government has always given great importance to the idea of education as a transversal axis of the actions that were carried out and, therefore, in this sense, it has committed itself for the future.
In order to put these theoretical aspects into practice we have created various participation boards, some at sectoral level, such as the Education Board, the Advisory Board for Sustainability, the Board for Adults, and others at local level, i.e. neighbourhood boards.
Within these boards, discussions are carried out on the actions to be implemented within a neighbourhood or in the whole of the city, with the participation of different city players, from members of neighbourhood associations to teachers, from doctors to even members of the Church. The educational element which is part of these boards also represents an essential element in discussions concerning town planning as well as in projects on policies in general, not only that regarding education, and in the campaigns for the dissemination of such policies involving a good part of the citizens.
In Girona, we have a very particular example. As Mayor, every fortnight I am on local television in the programme “direct line to the Mayoress” where I answer live all telephone calls from citizens. Although this is a very local medium, it is very useful. It represents a direct contact, an effective means of communication which enables a high degree of participation and involvement in the management and planning of the city.
I think that another Girona is possibile, but it is the Girona that exists today, the one resulting from the previous one, that we have to provide all the tools in order for it to evolve, to grow in terms of all its competencies, and on which the principle of co-responsibility among all citizens and municipal governments can have an impact.
We are confronted with very important challenges, amongst them two major topics emerge which, at least for some European and Mediterranean cities, will certainly be dealt with in this Congress: knowledge-based society and migration processes. These are two key factors in order to make our population coherent. Such territorial cohesion of our societies is an absolutely crucial pillar in a moment of change such as the one we are living today, where migration processes are a new element for the future of cities increasingly characterised by plurality. This is a reality from which optimism, satisfaction and self-esteem must emerge and be conveyed in all fields, in schools, in the streets, in community centres, in libraries where the values that we praise so much and that we wish to be able to preserve for the future are moulded.
Being here with you is really a reason to be happy.
For this I have to firstly thank the President of the Educating Cities, Joan Clos. We owe a lot to those who worked hard in Barcelona for the formulation of strategic plans such as that of the Educating Cities. We also wish to thank Giuseppe Pericu, Mayor of Genoa, the city hosting this event today, which is so important for the culture of this year 2004. Genoa is also historically strictly linked to Latin America, as many ships left from this port transporting the majority of the ancestors who today form the Argentinean people: we are not only talking about Italians, but also workers coming from most of Central Europe who migrated in search for a better future. Obviously, I would like to thank the Mayor of Rosario, Miguel Lifschitz, who confided in my representation in this major event.
It is important to give you a historical overview of our situation as a city in Latin America. Around 25-30 years ago, the majority of the Latin-American countries lived under dictatorial regimes where human rights were systematically violated and where the most elementary rights to co-existence were attacked on a daily basis. Argentina is maybe the most complete expression of this hard, difficult reality, which left us with nothing more and nothing less than 30,000 desaparecidos (missing people), young people with an inquisitiveness, as well as social and political interests, whom these bloodthirsty dictatorships obliterated from their families and their own cities.
With time we have realised that this situation has left not only a legacy of murdered people, but also deep marks in the economic and social fabric. A good example to illustrate this evil legacy is the relationship between capital and labour. In Argentina, this distribution used to be equally shared, with only 2.1 percent of families living under the poverty threshold.
Today, at the end of this path, 58.6% of families live under the poverty line, and the distribution between capital and labour is 80% to 20%. This is official data from the National Institute of Statistics and Census, and they show how deep the poverty and social marginalisation are that we are living in. Such poverty cannot be fought simply through economic return, because there is a large social debt towards all those children, young people and adults who have not had the possibility of eating properly, profiting from adequate education and fully enjoying life.
Despite all these difficulties, in this time of democracy in Latin America, we are undoubtedly getting together again with these ideas and strengths that can act as examples, such as the one of Educating Cities. We are discussing a way of thinking and acting in a city where, in addition to this general crisis, there is the crisis of schools in terms of institution. Thus formal education needs to be restored based on the concept that the whole of the city can be “educative”, starting both from non-formal education, and having the maximum impact on informal education – which is sometimes the biggest counterweight to be faced – and by promoting processes of social integration capable of genuinely improving the quality of life of citizens.
We believe that firstly an educating city has to go through a political decision. Political authorities should make the political decision of wanting to be an educating city.
Secondly, we believe that it is necessary to create a theoretical framework, because it is necessary to outline the underlying theme capable of nourishing all actions that a city carries out with this educational idea.
Thirdly, it is necessary to create programmes based on what has already been said.
Fourthly, it is necessary to consider time, because time is undoubtedly what allows projects to become ripe, time allows us to make corrections as well as additions. Both time and space are the two fundamental variables for the development of our programmes.
In these 15 years Rosario has been and is clearly endorsing the principles of Educating City which date back to 1990 Barcelona. Its path has been variously characterised in relation to different groups and different problems, i.e. for children, women, the elderly, people with disabilities, for work, education, and housing. These processes have gradually become integrated thanks to this underlying theme provided by this theoretical framework; there is a remarkable conceptual integration among them; there is an ideological frame keeping them together and that therefore keeps generating always new and consistent alternatives which add on to the processes under way.
Among all these programmes, that will be presented in these days by the people in charge, I would like to mention here the one that is being carried out based on childhood as a concept of educating city. This idea is taking shape in mobile schools, a kind of school which finds in its own city the necessary territory for learning. Mobile schools have to enhance some important points, such as that of knowing the city, interrogating oneself on the city, asking oneself why. It is a kind of city that wants to know, wants to learn, wants to grow, where children and young people together with schools and parents are the fundamental driving force behind the acquisition of a new dimension of Educating City through non formal education. These issues truly have educational "stops", preferential places, that can be identified in order to reach these objectives.
Let’s take the figure of the artist Antonio Berni, very popular in Argentina. He has been a truly involved man in his time; in his works, he has described a character, a child, Juanito Laguna. The same artist used to say that this was not a poor kid but a kid who was poor because, as he played with what he found around him and that he took from the rubbish, Berni used to say that in his reconstruction Juanito Laguna was a child whose eyes were full of prospects. In all his works the need to work with the characters emerges, the need to identify in this representational painting each of the facts portrayed by the artist, and that generate in children a very interesting reconstruction of their environment and of their own context.
There is another "stop": the child goes to the museum, essentially the Castagnino Art Museum which is the main museum in the city; the child learns to talk with the works, to differentiate figurative painting with abstract painting, to interpret what the artist wished to say and to create, starting from this and with his own means, this integration with the city. This is also the journey towards the history of his city. What happens and what has happened, in history, with the city’s past? There are figures through whom it can be recreated. For example, the figure of General Manuel Belgrano has been reconstructed, whose parents migrated right from the port of Genoa, who in Rosario created the Argentinean flag. Children and young people can talk with different stages of the life of Belgrano and in the different places where Belgrano passed through.
This is indeed a very important integration process for the child, the young person with the characters that lived in the city and that have left important milestones in the history of the city.
Moreover, the Children’s Farm was built. This is a 5 hectares farm outside the city of Rosario where rural culture is combined with urban culture. There children can produce, sow, see farmyard animals, get eggs, they can milk, make cakes, bread and have this very important integration with human ecology.
The other axis of our childhood policy is the Children’s Garden. This is an area where there used to be an old zoological garden, which was very degraded, very small and where animals such as the polar bears waited to die in 2 by 3 metre cages. In this place of approximately 2 hectares, the children’s garden was built. This is a place where children basically get familiar with social sciences. There are three stages. The first one is the mythical stage, on top of a small mountain, where the stones talk, the water sings and where a series of mythical experiences can be lived in order for the child to perceive them and reflect on them, through his/her own personal path.
The other stage is that concerning the creation of the 20th century. There are graphical works, reproductions of works by all artists and all idea men and women of the 20th century. Through cubes and characters, children can play and acquire this knowledge. There are Chagall, Picasso, Klee, Kandel, and all the artists who represent the modern world. There is also all the world of Da Vinci, where children can see the movement, creativity and application of mechanics to modern sciences.
We also have an old railway station, the Embarcadero Station; a small station where functions, in accordance with the rules and teachings of Francesco Tonicci, the City of Children. Here schools, children’s councils and even a school of democracy are all operational.
Lastly, we have the island of sciences, the Island of Inventions, which is a large railway station which was closed and that, after being abandoned for several years, was refurbished to be used for learning about sciences and technology. That is where children can learn to use their hands to make toys, use their thought by observing the sky, see what stars do, up to everything concerning science and technology meant as poetics in the integration of such knowledge. There is also a workshop for teachers where they can learn, through practice, everything that can be taught at school and that is actually conveyed starting from this place.
Finally, where is the Educating City heading for? What are the challenges that we are planning for the Educating City?
Firstly, I think that an important fact is the protection of the public space. Protecting the public space means protecting ourselves form the voracity of the market.
Second challenge: open minds to interpret information.
Third challenge: education to rights.
Fourth challenge: the reconstruction of daily life; aesthetics, ethics, play, loved ones.
Lastly, the most important challenge is that of social inclusion. Only “inclusive” cities are happy cities which are really capable of implementing the integration of knowledge by all, and that make equality for all possible. This is one of the big undertakings we face in order to reverse what this model of social exclusion has left us, which we have experienced and we are still experiencing in Latin America.
Thank you.
Thank you and good evening.
I will briefly take up from where I left off from my speech at the opening this morning. While I was preparing this speech, and in comparing the experience of Genoa as an educating city with that of other cities, many tangible examples and many particular cases filled my mind.
It seemed to be difficult to generalise, give universal value to them. But then I thought that telling about our experiences, even if in a concise way, could allow us to find exactly those particular elements that can be meaningful also for other realities.
It is important to start from the fact – which has also come out in the speeches before mine – that the basic values around which the experience of educating cities is built – such as knowledge, cohesion, social inclusion – become specific, in very different ways, to the different territorial experiences.
For example, Genoa is a city that over time has undergone very heavy manufacturing crises with severe repercussions on the economic and social sectors. Over two decades we have lost around 150,000 inhabitants. Our manufacturing activities, traditionally linked to the port and heavy industry (iron and steel, refineries, mechanical industry) entered deep crisis. The extent of this crisis was such that on New Years Eve of 1983 in the whole of the port, (of which you only see the oldest part around here no longer has any commercial purpose) there was not even a ship berthed. According to a city tradition, on each New Year’s Eve the ships berthed blast their horns. On New Years Eve of 1983 no sound could be heard. This silence meant a lot for us. In those years, many industries were shut down, others were dismantled through privatisation processes, resulting in extremely severe social repercussions, also characterised by a considerable loss of the sense of belonging to the city on the part of many citizens. The working class gradually started to disappear, without being replaced, also because the process of production dismantling of State-owned industries was accompanied by welfare support provisions, i.e. relief systems for dismissed workers.
A class of former blue-collars emerged, older-aged former workers, who could no longer perform any activity. In the city a strong sense of social discomfort occurred that lasted until relatively recently.
People started to wonder what to do in order to come out of the crisis and re-launch the city’s development; the Mayors who held the post before me started to ask themselves the same thing. However, the turning point came only about six or seven years ago, through a serious realisation and acknowledgement of the existing problem.
In 1999, over eight or nine months a city development strategic plan was developed – with a substantial participation of citizens – which dealt with the various topics. This strategic plan was thoroughly discussed, basically appreciated more at the level of associations than of parties and institutions’ representative bodies. Although the Town Council talked about it very little, industrial associations, employers’ associations, trade unions and other intermediate associations talked a lot about it.
We went through a process of identification of all the forms of association present in the territory in the different fields, and we listed around 3,000; we came into contact with those permanently established based on the different sectors: cultural and social associations, solidarity, and voluntary associations, etc.
We tried to keep our close connection with the objective, which was and still is, of recreating a mainly cultural identity of the social community that lives in our city. From that kind of disruption due to the negative economic values that I briefly mentioned, the aim was to get to the recovery of a strong sense of belonging to a community full of potential for the future.
We have worked hard and in reality we have managed to achieve some initial results, through processes that I would now like to try and explain in short.
The processes started as a result of a political decision under way, they did not come from below. What comes from below is the request, the manifestation of a need maybe even not well-defined, but the decision concerning the need to work in this direction came from above. The second aspect is that the associations present in the territory have been of great importance for us. Talking to people individually, with each single one is difficult. Talking to subjects sharing the same interests and driven by the same objectives is much easier and certainly much more successful.
The third important element is the entering into pacts and agreements with any one group of associations, on the basis of which it is possible to act. We did this when we drafted the cultural programme for the year of Culture 2004 with the cultural associations; the Councillor for Culture, Luca Borzani, did it with approximately 300 associations, giving rise to an on-going dialogue on the various topics concerning city life in what we call “the eugeni@ pact”.
I think I can stress the fact that a more targeted and direct approach, which is sector-related, either on the theme of culture or on the theme of solidarity has prevailed, rather than a participatory system, and therefore of dissemination of knowledge and recognition of requests, generally aimed at the problems of a community in their whole.
Then we observed a very strong need consisting in the fact that - and I think that similar experiences emerged from some of the previous speeches – it is necessary to start from discussions and from the exchange of ideas in order to get to the production of actions and events, and that the best communication possible of what is being done is achieved exactly when a project becomes reality.
I think that the works carried out during 2004, and in particular those within the Old City, are the ones that mostly have created the effect of recovery of the cultural identity of the people living in our city, right after the repeated discussions and the numerous meetings on this topic at the level of general or specific planning.
I don’t know to what extent such experience can be generalised, but at least for us, its basic characteristic is that it takes place in a parallel and different way in relation to the government experience of the city organised through local-government elections of the Councillors and of the City Council.
Today, no city councillors are here, I cannot see any. In actual fact, what we do is lived by the world of parties and by the world of political organisations legitimated by elections as a different experience. And this lack of involvement is cause for great difficulty. In conclusion, and thinking of the question that you posed us regarding the future, regarding what we think of doing tomorrow, this is what I say: we set ourselves a goal that we have defined “social town planning”. Genoa in these last few years has deeply changed from the urban, economic and social point of view; many dismantled industrial areas have been recovered, the unemployment rate, which a few years ago was approximately 10-15% today has dropped to 5%, the overall situation of the city has therefore distinctly improved in many respects. We think, however, that it is necessary to identify as thoroughly as possible and with the involvement of as many people as possible, what affects life daily in the city both in terms of social malaise, and in terms of liveability in the city itself. We are working on a slogan: “a social plan on being rather than well-being”. We intend to further our knowledge on how people can “be” within a city, obviously including the needs for social support to the weakest groups, but also the needs linked to the quality of life. And it is no longer a matter of street furniture or roads, it is a matter of more differentiated problems. Problems that need to be addressed by a large variety of subjects who frequently operate in an independent and disharmonised way. For this reason our aim is to develop – through a strongly participatory process – a planning document capable of identifying, as far as possible, needs and demands, as well as all those public or private bodies that in various capacities are liable to intervene; and also capable of emphasising the most serious shortcomings, trying to redress them through a path to follow for the future. So as we have tried to improve the look of the city, we would like to also improve the human and social aspect of the city. This is a project that also other cities obviously have and we would like to try and put it in practice - on the basis of the experience deriving from being part of the Educating Cities network – through the definition of a series of pacts and agreements with the different entities operating in the social field, in order to then keep working together on the basis of this comprehensive town plan, by means of an on-going updating process, both with regard to the emerging needs, and to the answers that we are able to give.
Thank you.
Let me briefly explain some of the ideas that we are promoting in Barcelona in order to tackle the topic of the relationship between the Educating City and the education process.
It seems that in the last few years we have been more capable of resolving the physical problems of the city, those related to “hardware”, rather than the “software” problems. It seems that we are more able and master a general methodology, I would say all around the world, to make progress so as to have better roads, better spaces, better gardens, better rivers, increasingly worthier town projects, but on the contrary, as we were saying before, what is most costly for us is finding a software, a whole set of co-existence rules that improve the quality of life in cities.
Cities and municipal governments, in general, make an effort to try and solve this part, which is the hardest one, however certainly not, to a large extent, the only responsibility that we have, and although we basically do not have the most adequate resources to be able to create the conditions for this social functioning to take on elements capable of substantially improving it.
This is where we clash with contradictions of today; we clash with this huge change in cultural paradigm, with this world process of globalisation, internationalisation of the markets, migration, stagnation in a way and reduction of the manufacturing and industrial process, on the one hand, and with the spectacular increase of cities’ service economy, on the other hand.
If we add to this the new technologies and the more global ideological change on neo-conservatism, this is the context where we are now trying to manage urban co-existence. An urban co-existence with less unifying elements and more policies and aspects, instead, that diversify social realities. Families, groups increasingly differentiate themselves, they are more and more distant from the commonplaces that unite them when building co-existence.
The city is faced with having to build the spaces and values that make this co-existence possible. It should be of no surprise that in the decade of the 1990s, in different parts of the world, we witnessed real social crises taking place in the suburbs of some cities in the most industrialised countries. In 1992 and 1993 there were crises in some cities of the United States, particularly in Los Angeles; in 1994 and 1995 there were crises in the migrant suburbs of English cities; then 4 or 5 years ago there were crises in the French cities. We saw how, at least in Europe, and to some extent also in the United States, in such context of uncertainties the political views that are mainly based on the most conservative aspects of society gain ground, as a certain return to the hypothetically basic principles seems to settle the population more.
Thus neo-conservatism or the far right movements in Europe and in the United States have established a sort of political haven faced with the greater degree of openness of our societies and the uncertainty deriving from social changes.
Our schools are living this transformation in a very direct way. In the last few weeks we have been witnessing the moral shock, for such a convivial country as Holland, represented by the most recent events (the murder of Dutch director, Theo Van Gogh, because of his movie "Submission" on the Koran and on the submission of women), together with what is behind these movements.
And all we needed was episodes of terrorism such as those in New York or Madrid, with more than 240 deaths, to add and worsen this base of uncertainties linked to the unfolding of such incidents.
How are we trying in our cities to give answers capable of reviving values of co-existence? We have concretely started a programme of civic education, which has an initial duration of one and a half years, however, with no pre-established finishing date yet, through which we would like to develop a feed-back programme, going two-ways, involving citizens and thus all institutions, above all educational institutions. We have centred the first year on three tangible aspects:
- cities’ noise, sound, and the high level of sound emissions,
- traffic, the lack of discipline and the incivility of drivers in cities,
- the issue of cleanliness or its opposite, i.e. the process of littering the streets,
with very peculiar results.
For example, with regard to sound, amongst the residents living in our homes a sensitivity towards the reduction of environmental noise is emerging; but we are obviously a Mediterranean city where life in public streets is very intense.
There is thus a conflict of interests between citizens and neighbours. The noise had never been a great problem in our city. It is curious and interesting how, in the last few years, the perception of noise as a city nuisance is increasing, although we are objectively reducing the decibels level recorded by the sound level meters in our streets, thanks to the adoption of various measures in this direction.
Further, with regard to tangible themes, we have a cleaning service that is well integrated with other realities. We collect urban waste and clean the city every day of the year; we don’t do like in British or Central European cities, where waste is collected twice a week, or like in Austria, three times a week, so one is obliged to keep waste at home and throw it away only on collection day by the City Council.
In spite of this, the perception of cleanliness of streets is worsening. New problems arise. For example, in our city, up until 15 years ago, dog droppings had never been a city problem. But in the last 15 years, animal droppings have increasingly become in our city a major problem of cleanliness. There are more senior citizens who live alone and own animals. Right now, out of a total of 700,000 households in Barcelona, we estimate between approximately 150,000 and 200,000 dogs that daily go out for a walk or to do their business on the streets. The level of intolerance among those who like animals and like having an animal, and those who hate animals, especially dog droppings, is on the rise and completely opposite. But this is only one aspect of cleanliness. Together with the issue of dog droppings we could include the uncivil behaviour of some shopkeepers who, although the City Council advises them to correctly recycle their waste, they do not cooperate to effectively solve this matter. This is generating a sense, a perception of dirtiness which is higher than ever, although the service’s level of cost per kilometre, per resident, per metre of street is higher than any other.
Co-existence in cities is already subject to various challenges, as we were saying before.
Current society is more individualistic, it has a lower sense of community, less civil cohesion and this slowly causes a deterioration process affecting co-existence. And Educating Cities have to be exactly the opposite, they have to be the ones starting the reversal process.
In many cases we managed to do so. For instance, with reference to the recycling of domestic solid waste, in order to convince families in Barcelona to start recycling we basically went through schools. It was young people, boys and girls who brought their recycling message to families.
As in most countries, we are coming from an excessive consumption of tobacco but we are reducing the level of smoking. Equally important pressure to reduce smoking within families has come through school programmes. Indeed, thanks to information on the meaning of this dependency children have been an important element that has influenced parents and has pushed them to stop smoking.
I understand that faced with this situation, with a society that is living in a phase of transition and crisis of its values - maybe on a more dramatic note - schools feel over-saturated with responsibilities.
When families reduce their educational pressure on children, the tendency is for schools to take on the roles that are part of the education and upbringing of our children, with all that this entails. We are thus in this situation of balance, where I think that schools rightly oppose some resistance. Sometimes, however, society still keeps expecting schools to take on this role. This is not an equation nor is it a resolved issue, but it is something that we need to address; it is a process, and we will wait and see how it evolves.
I insist, cities such as Barcelona have made a crucial effort to improve the public space, to guarantee that the public space exists and is democratic, so that nobody excessively appropriates, or privatises the public space. However, space is only the "hardware"; we need the "software", that is to say the values of co-existence of our new generations.
We have gone from 2% of immigrant population to 12% in 4 or 5 years. We are witnessing one of the important migration waves in the history or our city. In the 20th century we already experienced an important process such as the one occurring today, and we also had one in the 19th and another in the 14th century; however, in our history we have rarely been subject to such a substantial change as the one we are living now.
Schools are taking care of most of the integration process of migrants, and this too is not fair for schools, as they are overburdened with responsibilities and work. But, at the same time, they are also our main hope.
In the old town of Barcelona, that is in the area that mostly looks like the area in Genoa near here, the majority of schools have 50% or 60% of foreign students. In schools with 30 or 40 kids, the average is made up of foreigners and it is normal to address 15 or 20 of them in 3 or 4 languages.
We have to face this emergency with the same school resources of usual public schools. Private schools are fairly selective; they try to avoid overburdening themselves with migrants. Thus an imbalance is generated between the percentage of the problem that needs to be managed by public schools, on the one hand, and by private schools, on the other.
In spite of this, public schools remain a better tool. When I visited some of these schools in the centre of Barcelona, I asked the teachers: “How is it going? It must be very hard.” These teachers gave me an answer which really struck me: “No, children easily adapt. In three months, the majority of them, especially in the case of children under the age of ten, perfectly speak Catalan, Castilian, their own mother tongue, some other language learned at school from a friend, and they also integrate fairly well. The real problem is adults, their parents. Those who have difficulty in living children’s co-existence are not the children themselves, but their parents with their own worries.” And this should not cease to be a lesson for all of us to keep reflecting.
We have seen five cities, five different situations, five viewpoints on the way educating cities act. This roundtable has been extremely clarifying to me, as it has given us the possibility of better understanding that in various situations the fundamental element, today’s real challenge for the city is no longer physical space. This can be created, with few or many difficulties.
The real challenge is the building of the community and of the common project, and it is exactly here, I think, that the Educating City must make its big contribution, so that mayors, and the teams running our cities, can go ahead in this big challenge.
Thank you all.