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This paper considers the implications of current notions of the learning city. It argues that popular neoliberal ideologies create an environment in which lifelong learners strive for the learning city as an end product, both in production and for consumption, rather than embrace it as a living, social context. The rhetoric of the knowledge economy ideologues is very narrowly constructed but at the same time politically powerful and, despite clearly documented effects of globalised capitalism such as massive deskilling, tremendous structural unemployment and vast (and rapidly growing) urban slums, the dominant economistic paradigms and power structures make critical reconsideration very difficult. Some adult educators, like those in Hume City, Australia, or of the Shikshantar Institute in Udiapur, India, who hold a wider, critical view of lifelong learning, are promoting the learning city not as an end but as a social process of participation and negotiation.