The RESearch Centre on Urban Environment for Agriculture and Biodiversity (RESCUE-AB), within the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences of the University of Bologna, is committed to promote urban horticulture and biodiversity in Europe and in several countries of the Global South, bringing together skills and research expertise in the fields of horticulture, environmental sciences and entomology.Educational activities build upon a range of international projects, specifically devoted to create innovative training tools.These range from adult education for urban gardeners and school educators, to higher education curricula.Lifelong learning instruments addressing the social and environmental functions of urban horticulture have been developed within the framework of LLP-Grundtvig projects, such as the project "HORTIS" (Horticulture in Towns for Social Inclusion and Socialisation, www.hortis-europe.net).Successful application of the developed educational models are already being explored within social projects, such as the Urban Innovative Action "SALUS W SPACE" (Villa SALUS as a new Sustainable Accessible Livable Usable Social space for intercultural Wellbeing, Welfare and Welcoming in the Metropolitan City of Bologna), in which urban agriculture becomes a tool for social inclusion and capacity building among communities of political refugees and immigrants.Specific

The URBAN GREEN TRAIN (URBAN GReen Education for ENTteRprising Agricultural INnovation) project has been funded by the ERASMUS+ programme with the aim to encourage the creation of pioneering business initiatives in urban agriculture (UA), by reinforcing the so called "knowledge triangle" among education, research and business. Run in 2014-2017 by a partnership of public and private organisations from Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands, the URBAN GREEN TRAIN project has developed, tested and made available to different types of learners a pilot international, cross-sectoral, multi-targeted training path on Urban Agriculture Entrepreneurship. The present work illustrates the Model of Curriculum and the Recommendations developed by the project to highlight the main lessons learnt and the necessary support for planning further collaborative UA Entrepreneurship education initiatives and encouraging innovation in UA.

Urban gardens have many different and important functions in the actual society: from the food production to social, educational and therapeutic functions. Urban horticulture was extensively practiced during the '70 and '80 and, a after a period of shade in the '90, has came back into favour recently, when a large group of urban population is experiencing precarious income and underfeeding, as a form of self food production. Social and therapeutic functions of urban horticulture are nowadays widely recognized and used, in particular for the support and rehabilitation of disadvantaged persons. On the other side, the educational role of horticulture is recognized from 2002 by the FAO School Garden concept note, that stated the importance of school gardens to increase "the relevance and quality of education through active learning". The European project HORTIS - funded by the European Union in the framework of the Lifelong Learning Programme - Grundtvig sub-programme groups together experiences of urban community gardens all over Europe for the implementation of an innovative methodology and training tools to foster the acquisition of key competences for lifelong learning. In the present work, the main outcomes of HORTIS will be illustrated, with the main aim of providing an inter-disciplinary approach to strengthen the role of urban horticulture in the adult learning, especially with the aim to increase the life quality of unemployed or jobless adults and to explore the relationship between community gardening and key competences acquisition. In particular the positive effects of practical urban gardening activities will be illustrated especially in enhancing social cohesion and mutual help, in increasing the sense of belonging to the community and self-esteem, thus encouraging acquisition of transversal key competences. The innovative character of the HORTIS approach lies in its focus on gardening activities, supported by a specific teaching methodology and a set of high-quality educational materials, that combine self-food production techniques with informal teaching approaches aimed at the acquisition of new skills, and especially transversal key competences such as: learning to learn, spirit of entrepreneurship and civil and social competences.