Future of Cities and Urban Spaces Erasmus Project

Project Title

Future of Cities and Urban Spaces

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Rural development and urbanisation; Transport and mobility; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship

Project Summary

Our partnership entitled “Future of Cities and Urban Spaces – FOCUS”, a cooperation between four secondary schools from Champagné (France), Santiago de Compostela, Warsaw and Bad Nenndorf (Germany), seeks to analyze different challenges European cities – and eventually the whole continent – have to face in the 21st century and explore strategies to address them.
The issues we intend to study include land consumption due to growing demand by residents and businesses which forces communities to decide how to allocate land to different purposes and which kind of buildings ought to be built. The partners also plan to examine the ever larger amounts of waste towns have to take care of and the traffic problems caused by the growing number of residents and commuters. All these questions are inextricably linked to the two major challenges of Western societies as they influence carbon dioxide emissions and have to be answered at a time when the well established processes of political decision making are increasingly coming under threat. “FOCUS” seeks to raise students’ awareness of these urgent problems in their European and global perspective and make them acquainted with different strategies to address these issues. In this way the partners hope to encourage critical thinking, to incite sustainable behavior and to highlight the importance of active participation in political processes while improving learners’ language skills.
The partnership will mainly address students from the ages of twelve to sixteen from the participating schools. At each institution there will be a core group of approximately 50 learners who will take part in several activities related to the partnership, while a significantly higher number of pupils can be involved more occasionally, usually during their regular lessons or the project days towards the end of “FOCUS”. Besides, around 50 teachers across different departments from each school are expected to contribute to project related activities in some way.
The partnership’s activities can be divided into four phases which all focus on one aspect of the topic, namely “Ecology”, “Arts and Architecture”, “Civics” as well as “History” with each phase lasting approximately six months. At every stage most of the work will take place during regular lessons in a wide array of subjects, as students for example produce posters on carbon footprints, study the decline of insect populations or compile presentations on New York as a “city of dreams”. Some of these results can then be used during the four short term exchange meetings which form an integral part of each project phase. During these meetings, which will be attended by teachers and pupils from all four schools, students can learn more about each topic, for example by visiting a wind farm, Nantes’ redeveloped port area or “Nowa Huta”, a new town from Poland’s Socialist era, but, more importantly, they will participate in different workshops. Here they will mostly have to find solutions for an urban problem studied before, for example by deciding how to allocate land for farming and/or residential development. In this process they can refer to findings from regular lessons and/or the visits during the meeting. In many cases, these sessions will be based on the concept of “Future Workshops” as developed by Jungk et al., while others take the form of staged debates or role plays. Based on the outcome of these workshops the partners attempt to relay one suggestion for improvement to the respective town halls at the end of each meeting. In addition, the four schools intend to organize project days in the summer of 2021 so a larger number of students (and teachers) can try out the activities developed during the exchange meetings and get a better understanding of the topics studied.
An educational manual with material to carry out a similar project, which will be accompanied by a video with footage from the different workshops, will be one the main results of the partnership while other products include a logo, an exhibition on famous buildings and their architects to be displayed at all four schools, a jointly created calendar with different visions of the city and an insect hotel apart from numerous other posters, presentations and texts produced during regular lessons. Especially by developing the workshops the project partners hope to achieve a long term impact on the schools as they can use the lesson plans thus produced to adapt (or implement) bilingual classes and to modify their curricula so as to encourage more interdisciplinary cooperation.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 105260 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gymnasium Bad Nenndorf & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Bednarska Szkola Podstawowa – Terytorium Raszynska
• Collège Wilbur Wright
• CPR COMPAÑIA DE MARÍA