Public playgrounds as environments for learning citizenship. Notes from the Scientific Research Community: "Plurality and Diversity in Urban Context"

The paper will describe briefly some research carried out in the framework of an international network of researchers, whose major focus was to study the changing conditions of learning in urban life today as a consequence of increasing plurality and diversity in multicultural society. In this perspective, we will give a brief description of three situations of Italian urban life, in which migrants and nationals interact in public playgrounds. These situations will be presented as examples of situated learning communities. The paper will then present the concept of «community of those who have nothing in common» (Lingis, 1994), which expresses the possibility of building a community, not on the basis of similarity among the participants, but on the basis of difference. Finally, we will try to show how this inspiring concept casts a new light on the analysis of public places as environments for forms of experiential learning of citizenship.