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Context, background and objectivesAccording to the UN projection, the world’s urban population will double in one generation and by 2050 most major cities will become large metropolitan areas, amplifying issues related to climate change and increasing inequality. Many disciplines are dealing with these issues, yet in sectoral ways rather than with an integral metropolitan vision. TELLme was triggered by the metropolitan challenges that our century is facing, both in the extreme urbanisation growth and in the lack of a systematic approach in the HE disciplines studying the metropolis. Understanding the complexity of the metropolis and the gaps between the theory and practice with proper tools: TELLme was a response to this growing demand for metropolitan competence. The main project objective was therefore to lay the foundations of the Metropolitan Discipline, as a new transdisciplinary and shared approach to the study of the metropolis, and to shape its Educational proposal for training a new generation of leaders that understand the metropolitan issues. In this respect, the partnership composition enabled a fundamental work of comparison and enriched the Metropolitan European Knowledge with the Latin American approach, more focused on the need for an environmental pact between nature and the human being.Activities and resultsThe Metropolitan Discipline addresses the complexity of the metropolis according to its physical, social, economic, and governance dimensions, understood and described in a theoretical framework, called MGIP. With the MGIP (common premises) and the Glossary (common language), we defined the conditions for dialogue and mutual understanding between different disciplines. On them, TELLme framed the method, i.e. the Metro-dology, for applying the MGIP in the concrete metropolitan contexts making use of the Cartography, i.e. maps setting relations among selected elements and allowing to refer simple data to the concepts of the discipline, and the digital tools, e.g. the Hub where maps are visualised. The Metro-dology is also at the core of the TELLme Educational proposal: it is the base on which we built the pilot training experiences and the Training Programme Guidelines with the framework of the Transversal competences and management skills it aims to develop. Since the Discipline is conceived as a theory built on practice, the influence of the tools is predominant. Among them, the most relevant for the Training and the Cartography is the MGIP/Glossary Software, a software prototype deeply linked to all the project outputs.As a final result and a narration of the collective effort, the Inaugural Book was published, explaining the Discipline under different perspectives and showing the creativity of the collective intelligence gathered by the project.ParticipantsAbout 500 participants were directly involved in the project activities. In particular, in the 3 training pilots, the Initial Project Seminar held in Seville, Spain (Feb 2018) and the 2 Training Labs held in Guadalajara, Mexico (Feb 2019) and Mendoza, Argentina (Sept 2019), we could involve HE students and professors, policymakers and civil servants at the local, regional, and national levels, NGO and civil society representatives, entrepreneurs, and local and international experts covering the full spectrum of metropolitan actors and stakeholders.Impact and longer-term benefitsWith the aim of promoting a Discipline that addresses the problems of metropolitan regions in the world, one of TELLme’s purposes was to create a community of practitioners of the metropolitan discipline. TELLme aimed to strengthen social capital, primarily through a network of experts, as well as generating new knowledge and a global foundation for a discipline that will see its peak in the coming decades. Through the dissemination and exploitation activities, we could reach more than 6,000 people: HEIs students and teaching staff, public administrators, policymakers, NGOs, and also citizens, thus promoting the growth of this community and the adoption and replication of both the Training Programme and the Cartography, at HE level and in the metropolitan government bodies.This endeavour was possible thanks to the infrastructural value of the project. TELLme, in fact, enabled the creation of a reference framework with tools for this community as a benchmark for current metropolitan discourses open to further development and enrichment in the next years. In this context, TELLme was also instrumental to question the increasing disciplinary boundaries and create a ground for transdisciplinarity both within the HE and in the relation between the HE and the society with the aim to reduce the gap between theory and practice around metropolitan concerns, so to establish, at a global level, the importance of comprehensively addressing the challenges faced by large urban agglomerations through the consolidation of a metropolitan discipline.
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