Thinking Otherwise through "Third Cultures"

This is a different episode from the usual ones. Here I’m the one sharing some insights and ideas from my own research project, the EU-MSCA-funded MobileWorlds Research Project, based at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and mentored by Prof. Wendy Tan. Most importantly, I share here some of the core ideas that intersect between the Planetary Planning Podcast and the MobileWorlds project, and share an exercise with you, which might help you, dear listener, identify, break, and re-imagine the boxes you and other put you in…

So have a listen, get ready to participate with some pen and paper (see a relevant link below), check out the additional references below, and hopefully be inspired for your own research, practice, and or daily life. Feel free to share comments in case you tried out the exercise, and do let me know if there’s a specific guest you’d like me to interview next!

Link to build your own box:

References:

On third cultures:

Haste, H. (2016). Pluralism, Perspective, Order and Organization: The Fault-Lines of 21st Century ‘Cultures’ and Epistemologies. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 41(2–3), 167–187.

Ortolano, G. (2016). Breaking Ranks: C. P. Snow and the Crisis of Mid-Century Liberalism, 1930–1980. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 41(2–3), 118–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2016.1223577

Pollock, D. C., Van Reken, R. E., & Pollock, M. V. (2017). Third culture kids: Growing up among worlds (Third edition). Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Snow, C. P. (1990). The Two Cultures. Leonardo, 23(2/3), 169–173.

Useem, J., Useem, R., & Donoghue, J. (1963). Men in the Middle of the Third Culture: The Roles of American and Non-Western People in Cross-Cultural Administration. Human Organization, 22(3), 169–179. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.22.3.5470n44338kk6733

Some of my own work in relation to cultures of mobilities:

Cadima, C., Von Schönfeld, K., & Ferreira, A. (2024). Beyond Car-Centred Adultism? Exploring Parental Influences on Children’s Mobility. Urban Planning, 9, 8643. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.8643

von Schönfeld, K. C., & Ferreira, A. (2022). Mobility values in a finite world: Pathways beyond austerianism? Applied Mobilities, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2022.2087135

Von Schönfeld, K. C. (2024). On the ‘impertinence of impermanence’ and three other critiques: Reflections on the relationship between experimentation and lasting – or significant? – change. Journal of Urban Mobility, 5, 100070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urbmob.2023.100070

Von Schönfeld, K. C. (2024) Third Cultures—The (Cursed) Gold of Migrants? Migrant Knowledge Blog. https://migrantknowledge.org/2024/12/16/third-cultures-the-cursed-gold-of-migrants/

Von Schönfeld, K. C. (2025). Questioning streets. On plural origins, plural uses, and plural futures. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2025.101403

For those who prefer to read more than to listen, and since the transcript doesn’t seem to be working for this episode, I share a rough transcript of the episode below:

“Hello everyone, thank you for listening.

Today’s episode will be a little different from the usual - you’ll be hearing just from me, mostly about ways to “think otherwise” or “think outside the box” - something that guides me in my work more generally, but especially in the work I do for the research project MobileWorlds, which I’ve been doing now since 2023. It is an individual post-doctoral research project, funded by the European Union as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, about rethinking daily mobilities through what we call “third cultures”. I’ll get back to this in a moment. But why is this relevant to speak about here, though, you might wonder. Besides the quite close temporal coincidence of the start of the project and the start of this Podcast, they are also intimately connected in many other ways:

First, they are both about thinking otherwise, as I was anticipating at the start. For Planetary Planning, we’ve been trying to think about how the Planning discipline could be more deeply and explicitly concerned with human-to-human as well as human-to-more-than-human relationships. This often requires thinking a bit out-of-the-box of what has more traditionally been the way of thinking about planning, as a frequently very technocratic discipline, frequently focused on maximising economic gain – or growth – based on the ways in which a given area – urban or rural – has been organized and distributed spatially and in terms of social relations and connectivity. I’m generalising there, I am aware, and there is much more to the planning discipline. Importantly, there is a by now quite large strand of thinking in planning – both research and practice – which includes what is called “participatory planning”, that is, reflections and implementations on how to include diverse voices in the decision-making about what should be prioritised and done in urban and regional planning – often this is about human residents in a given area, for example, sharing their lived expertise on what that area needs and wants to be a better space for them to live their lives in – also in other-than-economic terms, and certainly beyond what necessarily economic growth might be able to deliver. This doesn’t yet tend to include more-than-humans, but does frequently attempt to make important steps towards including diverse groups of people and their often diverging interests. We’ve spoken a little about these processes in the earlier episodes of this podcast, for instance with Jonathan Metzger. All this does often require planners (and researchers of planning) to step outside their usual thinking and acting, to question their assumptions and so on.

Now, in the MobileWorlds project, we’ve been focusing on how to “think otherwise” especially regarding mobility and transport – how we get around, as an activity that is key for all other activities that we humans and most more-than-humans may want and need to engage in throughout our lives. And are sometimes forced to – it wasn’t so much the topic of the episode with António Ferriera a while back, but I recommend to check out his work for more on that. MobileWorlds emerged from the connection of three frustrations, one could say:

1. With the continued car-centric and efficiency-centric planning around the world, in cities and regions, and the frequent “excuse” of “culture” to do so,

2. With the dismissal of what are considered “non-scientific” approaches, such as anecdotal experiences and arts-based understanding, in both research and practice in planning – when a complimentary joining of these ways of thinking has always seemed an obvious necessity to me, and

3. With the strangely exclusive way that “third cultures” were being discussed in much academic work on the subject. Let me briefly explain what third cultures are then. There have been many definitions, but I’ll briefly touch on two.

One is that based on a supposed divide between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, identified as such by on J.P. Snow in the 1960s and 1970s, which could perhaps be transcended through a third culture, which would emphasise something like what we would now call more accessible science communication – again, simplifying his idea quite strongly, but I’m providing some relevant references for those curious in the episode notes. In any case culture here was clearly referring to specific norms, values, and ways-of-doing and understanding the world that were different between “sciences” and “humanities”.

A second definition of third cultures emerged around the same time of Snow’s – interestingly – but in a rather different field and context. Ruth Useem and her husband coined the term third cultures, or more precisely “third culture kids” in the 1970s to refer to children who grew up in countries other than their parents’ passport countries, due to temporary work of the parents in those countries. That is, for instance, children of missionary-workers, international-development workers, military, and other such work. The stays abroad for these children (and parents) would always be perceived as temporary, rather than what was often the case for migrants who might aim to stay in a new country permanently – and there was usually a perception of privilege, and perhaps even superiority, associated with the culture of the children moving to another country, as compared to the country they had moved to. In the Useems’ case, they studied children of missionaries from the USA who moved to India temporarily. The Useems argued that these children developed a third culture that was neither really a USA-culture, nor really an Indian-culture, but maintained parts of both, plus something quite other. Much literature on such “third culture kids” has since focused on the psychological and skill-based benefits and drawbacks of growing up in this way. There is much merit to this work, and much nuance about various aspects too, however, there was something I was triggered to think about in view of both my own background as a third culture kid, and in view of my wish to unbind some of the cultural justifications I kept hearing about not changing. Just to give you an example, I would hear people say they cycle because they are Dutch or were in the Netherlands, or people saying they drive because they’re from the USA, or people saying they parked a certain way because they were from Portugal, etc. There’s likely an important grain of truth in that, but at the same time I felt there could be an important value in exploring ways out of this kind of justification, because it might open us up to thinking more creatively about alternatives. And I saw third cultures as an opportunity to think that through – if we could acknowledge the extent to which many people nowadays come into formative contact with two or more cultures, either by moving between contexts themselves: country-to-country or from north-to-south or rural-to-urban within the same country or region; or by coming into contact with different cultures around them in the same place, for instance through work-colleagues, best friends at school, or even the local shops, restaurants and supermarket foods. And if we could think of third cultures in this way, could we then break out of our stagnant ways of thinking of our mobility cultures?

So these three joint frustrations – about mobilities planning, about valuing arts-based understanding, and about third cultures – led me to propose a project that would help rethink mobilities by exploring third cultures of mobilities through arts- and experience-based activities – such as arts-based participatory workshops, mobile interviews, and a festival combining planning, arts, unboxing, and zines. We’ve done this in Porto, Portugal, Bergen, Norway, and online – with Porto and Bergen as Northern and Southern European second-cities in their respective countries, both with ports and thus with important mobility and cultural diversity related histories…

The methods of working with arts – albeit mostly in amateur ways – in this revealed an important step in reconnecting different modes of understanding and allowing them both their moment to shine and to inspire: more technocratic and solution-oriented ones of more classic planning, and more arts-based creative and imaginary ones. The MobileWorlds project is now working on a Toolkit that will share several insights on how that has worked, how it might be applied in different contexts, and so on.

You can find out a lot more by visiting the project website, mobileworlds.online, also linked in the notes of course, where I’ll also be posting a whole lot more in the coming months regarding other outputs and insights.

But now, to come back to more-than-humans and planning, I want to suggest that much of what was done there in terms of mobilities, could also be interesting to do in terms of the topic of planetary planning. What could be a third culture of planetarity?

I invite you to think on this perhaps with the following exercise, adapted from a workshop done during the MobileWorlds Festival:

You’ll need pen and paper, or ideally pens of several colours, and a soft paper box. I’ll share a link in the notes to a suggestion of how you could build yourself one. It’s not meant to be perfect, especially since - spoiler alert – you’ll be destroying it quite soon after building it.

So, first, I invite you to take a moment to think about the following: what kinds of labels have been put on you, or have you put on yourself, that you are not quite content with. They don’t have to be negative per se, but something that feels like when someone – including yourself perhaps – says this about you, it doesn’t quite seem to do you justice: it might be a country they associate you with, or a specific activity. Human, perhaps. Planner, or academic; mother, or father; woman, or man; athletic, lazy, car driver, cyclist, plant-lover, useful, useless, foreign, minority, leftist, conservative… whatever it is. It should be something that might have some truth to it, but that when it is said about you, or when you say it about yourself, it doesn’t quite seem to fit, it makes you feel there should be more depth, more qualification to it. Because in the end, I think we all have several of those.

Then, use the most regular pen colour you have with you to write these labels on the various sides of the outside of the box.

And then, once you feel that box has on the outside all the labels you felt were important to include: take a deep breath, and smash it. Break it. Rip it. Destroy it.

Now, that was you breaking all those boxes you’ve been put in. Now, carefully open up the box, what is left of it, and find the inside of it. It’s fine if it’s several pieces, or crumpled, don’t worry. But now, use what is there, on what used to be the inside of the box and is now opened up, and write or draw with colourful pens what you wish you found there. What is that depth and qualification that you want to show, that you wish you could be or that you wish others could or would see. It can include labels, words, but it doesn’t have to, it can also be just colour, drawings, anything that makes you feel good and full.

And after having done that, I invite you to pick some of what you found inside your box, and to explore it in some small action near you. Yours might look very different from mine, but I realised in one of the times I did this exercise that I really wanted this to include a deeper, more genuine connection to the places where I live and work. So one thing I did was to go out one night and look for a tree near me, and try to find out as much as possible about it: what kind of tree it is, but also what it needs, how it lives, and how it might have gotten there, to that street, what its immediate surrounding was about, who was this that the tree’s street was named after? And so on. And just this small exercise created a cascade of new questions to explore about the place where I live and the beings I share this space with. Again, you might choose an entirely different exercise, but I can recommend this one, if you’re out of ideas for now!

There’s so much more to share and think jointly about, and perhaps in future we’ll do another episode on the podcast exploring such subjects with guests that might help us unpack more of this. But for now, I think you’ve listened to my soliloquy for long enough.

Thank you again for listening, and see you next month – with a guest again by then!”