WG1 focuses on circular cities, sustainability, art forms, and critical pedagogies, advancing a transformative approach to education where learning, expression, and action are intimately linked to social and ecological justice. Circular cities are understood beyond the economy, encompassing cycles of knowledge, relationships, and regeneration, where participatory learning and collective action create resilient urban ecologies. Sustainability integrates ecological awareness, environmental justice, urban agriculture, and decolonial approaches, embedding action-based learning into everyday practices. Art is central, functioning as a pedagogical and transformative tool that fosters ecological literacy, intercultural dialogue, and inclusive participation, while amplifying marginalized voices. Critical pedagogies guide reflection, dialogue, and praxis, challenging dominant paradigms and empowering learners to co-create knowledge and social change. Across these dimensions, WG1 envisions education as an interconnected process where creativity, care, and action converge to cultivate equitable, regenerative, and socially engaged communities.


Scientific presentation WG1

The scientific content that WG1 intends to develop during COST Action Year 2 builds on the consolidation of five distinct yet interconnected subgroups that have progressively emerged within the Working Group.

These subgroups reflect a growing diversity of research trajectories, while at the same time contributing to a shared interdisciplinary framework grounded in the dialogue between academic research and artistic practice. Across these lines of work, WG1 has been fostering a common space for discussion, collaborative reflection, academic writing, and the development of projects that connect scholarly inquiry with applied and creative approaches.



In the coming year, the Working Group aims to deepen and further articulate its engagement with a broad range of themes. These include land governance and pedagogies of the soil, with particular attention to eco-feminist and agroecological forms of learning within food and land justice networks. Another area of development concerns pedagogies of care and emotion in sustainable urban practices, especially through the exploration of tactical urbanism and urban art as situated modes of social and spatial intervention. A further research strand focuses on the role of critical pedagogies and applied arts in fostering more just and pluralistic educational environments, including a comparative investigation of school policies and practices affecting minority-language students across different systems. WG1 also intends to advance work on interdisciplinary street art, exploring how participatory visual methodologies involving children, young people, and adults may contribute to more inclusive and socially impactful approaches to urban art planning and practice. Finally, an important line of development concerns artistic research, applied arts, and EU governance, with the aim of producing a policy brief on the integration of arts-based interventions within urban, educational, and land justice frameworks.

Taken together, these research directions express WG1’s commitment to developing socially engaged, interdisciplinary, and methodologically innovative forms of inquiry. They also demonstrate the Working Group’s intention to strengthen the analytical, practical, and policy-oriented dimensions of its activity, while continuing to build bridges between cultural practice, pedagogy, and questions of social and environmental justice.