The connection between the words ‘city’ and ‘citizenship’ is not co-incidental. Historically the city was the location in which the idea of citizenship emerged; also, the city, as a centre of administration, trade, commerce and migration, has, throughout history, been a crucial ‘site’ for the experience and enactment of citizenship, particularly under conditions of plurality and difference. While post-modern mega-cities may bear little resemblance to the city-states of the antique world or the cities in which the modern experience of citizenship was developed, the city – both as idea and as reality – remains an important reference point for thinking through questions of citizenship and democracy. From an educational standpoint, the city can therefore be seen as an important site for civic learning, that is, learning relevant for citizenship.

One important question this raises for educational research is how we might best understand and theorise processes and practices of civic learning. In his book Learning Democracy in School and Society, Gert Biesta (2011) outlines a theoritisation of civic learning focusing on the ways in which people learn from and ‘through’ the processes and practices that make up their everyday lives. Biesta suggests that such learning processes, containing both positive and negative ‘messages’ about democracy and democratic citizenship, are to be understood as non-linear (i.e. they are not a a linear trajectory towards an ‘ideal’ state of citizenship), recursive (action and reflection feed into each other) and cumulative (experiences from the past cannot simply be eradicated or ‘overwritten’ by experiences from the present).

Central to Biesta’s theory is the distinction between a socialisation and a subjectification conception of civic learning.  The first sees civic learning as the adoption of existing civic identities (individuals adapting to a given socio-political order); the second focuses on how political agency is achieved and political subjectivity enacted. The socialisation conception thus accepts the existing order and sees democracy as ordered, whereas the subjectification conception seeks the constant renewal of democracy as an ongoing experiment. The engagement with the experiment of democracy opens up new possibilities for civic learning as a way of ‘being public’ in which we cannot know in advance what the individual needs to learn, but rather see the learning as emerging from the ways in which individuals enact their citizenship in critical and creative ways in a context characterised by plurality and difference. This way of understanding civic learning thus expresses an explicit concern for the political dimensions of civic learning for, from and ‘through’ civic engagement.

The ambition of the symposium is to explore the usefulness of Biesta’s ideas, discuss limitations and expand the discussion towards a better understanding of the complexities of civic learning in urban European contexts. We bring together six empirical studies which focus on questions of citizenship and civic learning in their respective urban European settings, concentrating on the exploration of processes and practices of civic learning using Biesta’s theory as a reference point.