CapAsia

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The main goal of CapAsia is to profoundly enhance the critical and creative thinking capability of the participants through the learning of social, cultural, and spatial practices, as well as design and planning approaches, in a radically different world-region. This facilitates the understanding (by reflection) of the students own cultures, environments, and their larger global context. Today, Asia is also the most influential Regional in the world. Hence, as much as about ourselves and our past, Asia will give us some clues about our own future. Many goals that the American society is striving to achieve such as sustainability and many traits that most contemporary societies are losing, for example, self-sufficiency, community, and integrated land-uses, may be operating well in Asia, albeit approached from locally-relevant perspectives in an increasingly Westernizing and globalizing environment.

CapAsia takes a more "subaltern" approach compared to the dominant developmentalist view. The proponents of the developmentalist view position the United States as the world's economic, political, and cultural leader, and assert that the developed countries know best what the "Third World" needs, what they should do to become developed, and have the expertise and resources to help those who are perceived to be in need of such assistance. (United States maybe increasingly replaced by China.) Instead, we shall ask why Asians do the things the way they do? Why do they build the way they do in Asia? And what can we learn from them?

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The two main components of the program: "Planning to learn" and "building to learn" refer to learning about one's self in relation to the "other," participating in others' processes, rethinking one's place in the world, and questioning, fundamentally, how one chooses to engage the world and its people first as a fellow human being, then as a member of a community, as well as a professional or a scholar. This experience is guided to both reveal new knowledge about society, culture, planning, and design, find new uses for existing knowledge, ad to find oneself.

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Asia has something for everyone, but you ought to be open to it.

(Gandhi)

Asia is one of the best places to achieve these goals. It is so remarkably different from the United States that field study participants, when in the region, are very much outside their "comfort zones"; it challenges them from day one. They are thus compelled to think about the world outside of America. The setting facilitates the understanding of Asia and other parts of the world without being prejudiced or stereotyped and develops a strong consciousness of the world. Moreover, by reflection, the participants develop a critical understanding of their own cultures and environments, including their own biases and prejudices.