Collaborations across the divide: Sustainable urban environments

(Session sponsored by the Urban Geography Research Group)

Understanding what makes a city sustainable requires a dialogue between a huge variety of researchers. Geographers, architects, planners, designers, engineers, ecologists and sociologists all conduct research in an effort to better understand the sustainable city. Geographers are currently collaborating with people in all these disciplines and this session is for those geographers (and others) who are working in multidisciplinary groups on issues of sustainable urban environments. In this session we seek to explore the pros and cons of working in these large transdisciplinary groupings.

Six years ago Doreen Massey (1999) initiated a conversation on the relationship between human and physical geography that has expanded and developed in the interim period. Raper and Livingstone (2001) and Lane (2001) took up her challenge and a thought-provoking dialogue ensued, demonstrating a commitment within geography to understanding and interacting across the whole discipline. Geography as a discipline is very well placed to foster discourse across the divide between physical and social sciences and constructive ‘conversations across the divide’ have taken place at RGS IBG conferences since (Harrison, Massey et al, 2004). One location where these conversations can (and indeed are required to) flourish is within the large scale interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research projects, networks and consortia being supported by research funders. Within these projects there is the expectation of outputs that integrate knowledges created from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives and it is timely to consider the success of such transdisciplinary projects in order to see what lessons have been and can be learned (and what limitations there are) to aid further such collaborative efforts.

This session seeks to move beyond the conversations within geography to acknowledge the interdisciplinary conversations taking place between geographers and other disciplines. To focus the session we will concentrate on the conversations taking place between researchers working in the area of sustainable urban environments.

Focusing on multi- and trans-disciplinarity can help us analyse how sustainability of the urban environment is framed by addressing questions about: how different disciplines interact to develop understandings of the city; how disciplinary knowledges complement each other in producing a perspective of the urban; along what new trajectories can research into urban sustainability evolve to produce richer understandings of the urban; what are the effects of the multiple articulations of sustainability on understandings of the sustainable city; what are the methodological, empirical, theoretical and ethical implications of collaborative research on the city?

The session organisers invite proposals for papers that present research falling within this broad theme of sustainable urban environments. Theoretical and empirical contributions are welcomed that:

Identify ways in which qualitative and quantitative data can be managed and usefully integrated to provide a greater output than the sum of the parts
Report on transdisciplinary research in the area of sustainable urban environments (empirical studies, case studies etc)
Focus specifically on the experiences (both positive and negative) of transdisciplinary collaboration and the lessons that can be learned from such research
Demonstrate a commitment to understanding and interaction across the physical /social divide in relation to research on urban sustainability
Discuss problems with definitions, language and terminology across disciplines collaborating on the city
Discuss the implications for individual disciplines if boundaries are transcended and blurred

This call is open to all, particularly scholars working in collaborative groups with a multidisciplinary agenda.

Proposals for papers, with a short abstract (250 words), should be sent to either of the co-organisers, Mags Adams ([log in to unmask]) or Gemma Moore ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 13^th January 2006

Addresses:

Dr Mags Adams, School of Computing, Science and Engineering, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT

Email: [log in to unmask] Tel: +44 (0) 161 295 4599

Gemma Moore, The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, UCL, London, WC1E 6BT

Email: [log in to unmask] Tel: +44 (0) 20 7679 8236