Intensive fieldwork courses are regularly held every year as a part of a collaborative exchange program between the Department of Urban Engineering (DUE) and overseas counterpart universities. The participants (graduate students from DUE and other collaborating faculties in UTokyo) visit the counterpart universities, stay for 1-2 weeks, and are provided with opportunities to learn about the current situations and challenges in the local urban environments through lectures and site visits. In addition, the participants will engage in group work throughout the program together with participants from other universities taking part in the program to make a final presentation at the end of the program. The raw exposure to the atmosphere of local sites in addition to people with diverse academic and cultural backgrounds is an invaluable experience that takes participants outside of their comfort zone, allowing them to see urban systems and sustainability from a new perspective.
Below are photos from the program held in Thailand in FY2019. A total of 18 students joined the program: 5 from the Environmental engineering course of DUE, 2 from Urban planning course from DUE, 2 from GPSS-GLI (Graduate Program in Sustainability Science Global Leadership Initiative, UTokyo), and 9 from other universities (Chulalongkorn University and Mahidol University). The group was also diverse in terms of nationalities; the program has had participants from Japan, Thailand, China, Indonesia, USA, Philippines, and Cambodia. This 10-day program consisted of three lectures, three technical visits and group work. In the group work, participants were divided into small groups and each group worked on a small project, where they identified an urban environmental problem in Bangkok city, collected background information, formed a research hypothesis, designed and conducted questionnaire survey, analyzed the data, drew conclusions, and presented in the mid-term/final presentations.
