B.13. Schools as Community Hubs. Learning Ecosystems for Democracy across Pedagogy, Health, Architecture, and Urban Planning

The panel explores the community hub as an outcome of evolutionary models of future schooling (Poli, 2024) towards ecological, networked, and democratic configurations. The hub is discussed as a innovative scenario (OECD, 2020) that integrates the 0–6 system within an architecture of lifelong educational opportunities (OECD, 2017) and as a lever for equity. Schools, in this view, cultivate coexistence and collective agency through cooperation and participation (Dewey, 1916; Biesta, 2011), foregrounding the conditions that make democracy a lived practice and responding to the call for a new social contract for education that positions school as a common good sustaining wellbeing, inclusion, conflict mediation, and care for the educational community (UNESCO, 2021). Contributions from pedagogical, socio-health, architectural, and urban-planning perspectives are welcomed. Pedagogical papers may address school–community alliances, curricula extended across physical and digital spaces, distributed leadership, interprofessional collaboration, settings and furniture for innovative learning environments (Fullan, 2007; Mangione Cannella, Chipa 2025). Health perspectives may mobilize Whole School and Health Promoting Schools frameworks (EC, 2023). Architectural contributions may examine thresholds, porosity, and spatial flexibility as conditions for participation, universal accessibility, and codesign practices that bring together pedagogical and technical–design needs (Gehl, 2010). Urban-planning contributions may consider hubs as nodes of social innovation and spatial justice through welfare networks, proximity mobility, adaptive reuse, deliberative processes, and collaborative design (AUE, 2016; Pileri et al., 2022).

Drawing on the Enterprising Communities (Manfredi, Costi 2023), the panel examines hubs as devices of integrated transformation and identifies criteria, cases, and research directions for the school-as-civic centre.