Promoting Critical Perception of the City through Acquisition of ‘Third Place’ Neutrality

Students can gain valuable knowledge through engagement with real life examples of planning issues and their resolution. This exposure, however, often remains quite limited to that of the urban context within which they are situated. Lessons learnt are often heavily biased by the urban setting and the prevalent cultural values and attitudes and therefore may not readily contribute to producing the self-critical planner who may challenge the status-quo. This paper highlights how exposure to a different urban context through international study tours could help students realise and thereby discount for the biases that may distort their perception of an urban context and its planning issues. It is contended that a firsthand experience of another city supplemented by an acquired cultural sensitivity could help students develop criticality about their own urban context. The paper reports on findings from a survey of planning students participating in two study tours to Tokyo led by the author in consecutive years, focusing on the shift of students’ perceptions about Tokyo and their own city due to tour exposure. For both years, emerging themes from individual responses to questionnaire surveys were further explored in a focus group discussion format. While one study tour group was explicitly asked to assume a position of objective neutrality in line with the ‘third place’ concept, the other was not. The degree of shift in perceptions of the two study group participants is compared. The paper will draw conclusions and offer recommendations regarding the utility of applying the ‘third place’ concept borrowed from cultural and foreign language learning to the design and execution of international study tours for planning students.