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 benef