According to the 2017’ UNESCO-document “Learning Cities and SDG’s” which is “a Guide to Action for mainstreaming lifelong learning as a key driver to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals” the learning city approach is “people-centered and learning-focused”. It offers a framework for planning and monitoring the progress of learning cities and draws on the SDG’s, their targets and relevant and measurable indicators for the implementation and monitoring of their actions. This ‘framing’ of ‘learning’ approaches the city as a kind of (large) enterprise that performs programmed tasks (actions) to be managed by objectives (‘targets’) and monitored on the basis of performance indicators (cfr. the Iphone-interface like presentation of the SDG’s on UNESCO’s website). In such a framing settings such as the university are seen (and understand themselves) as part of the mainstreaming of lifelong learning (to acquire the necessary competences, to establish the facts and indicators upon which to base the decisions) and part of the overall program. It implies a functionalist understanding of education as a defined practice (defined by what one knows and hence indicating what has to be learned) involving a thinking of the future in terms of scenario’s i.e. of a possible future translated in targets and based on what is ‘given’. Without questioning the good intentions and possible contributions or value of this approach, we would like to offer a different understanding of the role of university education and the approach of cities in relation to the challenges they confront. Starting from some comments on a short text of Isabelle Stengers (2004) and based on some concrete student work in various cities we investigate how we could make the university play a role in the imagination of an ‘impossible’ future where this imagination is not based on extrapolations of the given or on thought experiments and creative brain storms (leading to scenario’s), but on an invitation to the risk of a studious encounter by making (our knowing of) the city indeterminate (i.e. to ‘undefine’ her) and by engaging with her not as kind of enterprise or infrastructure that is performing tasks but as a world that offers occasions and resistances to which we have to expose ourselves, through which we get contaminated and implicated. Such an approach is not just ‘people centered and learning focused’, but mondial and focused on study as ‘work to be done’, and hence on its undefined work forms.

Stengers, I., 2004. Risquer une ville qui apprend, Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine, 95, 126-129. UNESCO, 2017. Learning Cities and the SDGs: A Guide to Action. UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning.