Miruna Mazurencu Marinescu Pele (p), Karima Kourtit, Daniel Traian Pele, Peter Nijkamp

The purpose of this study is to analyse city clustering dynamics by addressing the influence of city safeness indicators on the overall city performance of a selection of 40 world cities. We have performed a quantitative analysis on a combined data-set on cities, taking into consideration the Global Power City Index (GPCI Index ) and its dimensions and the Safe City Index and its components for the years 2015 and 2017.This is a step forward from previous research that only took into consideration city performance embedded in GDPI Index. It appears that the city safeness is able to explain a great deal of city variability performance. For example, in 2017 Paris left the best performing cluster formed by Paris, London and New York in 2015, most likely due to the terrorist attacks that took place. Multidimensional approach on city performance that also includes safeness is nowadays preferable when analysing city clustering dynamics. The statistical analysis has been performed by using Python software, whose results are fully reproducible.

Martine Gadille (p)

In this paper we deal with the spatial and socio-cognitive processes at stake for students and their family when a three-dimensional collaborative virtual world is used at school. The technology of 3D-virtual world is broadly used at home by young people aged 11-14 when they play with the current generation of online video games where people are embodied by avatars in immersive environments. Inversely, the uses of this technology in the secondary school with an educational purpose has not followed the same spreading in all countries, even they have been in existence for over 20 years. But the new educational challenges such as teaching personalisation, associated to the spreading of digital tools and communities seems to coincide with a resurgence of interest in this technologies and their accelerated uptake in education. A literature has developed since the 2010 focusing on the assessment of techno-pedagogical uses of 3D virtual worlds and their interest for learning design and teaching practices with the purpose to better know when and how they can be successfully used. It acknowledges that learning technologies, when used well to carry out tasks, allow high engagement and active learning between school and life. The originality of our proposal is to identify from the educational uses of a virtual world in a secondary school, the restructuring effects, at the urban level, of a learning space. Two kinds of changes are identified through observations. Firstly, we show how uses in class are shaping uses at home. We focus on the performative effects of embodied cognition, allowed through avatars, on social proximity between teachers and students. Secondly, we argue that this spatial reconfiguration of learning by extending the traditional physical space of the classroom in a virtual world challenges the coherence of public policies in the face of a new form of digital divide in the city. The ability to collaborate within the territorial network of education actors is therefore challenged to improve the digital knowledge associated with distributed digital equipment.
We use a qualitative method with ethnographic observations from the emergence of the project (2017-2019). A participatory action research approach has enabled us to collect diverse data:
- interviews of teachers, students, territorial actors
- videos of virtual world based tasks
- videos of students in class when using their laptop to run 3D-world based tasks
- statistical exploitation of digital traces of connections to the virtual world platform.