Managing Interdisciplinarity in Urban Planning Research

In contemporary research, interdisciplinarity is a common condition. This is especially true for urban planning where the need to leverage fast-evolving technology, emerging trends in social habits and globalization are challenging planners. Interdisciplinarity is often stated, and almost always expected. But only seldom is clear what it is really expected from it. Even if the term has a common meaning easy to be understood by all people, as happens with quality, it is often hard to define it in terms of normative expectations. Another aspect of interdisciplinarity is that, following the research phase, a teaching and application phase is frequently present. And is in this phase that issues arise. These issues should be reconducted to the original research but, being it interdisciplinary, there is a probability that the right knowledge domain is missed: a problem arising from technology maybe should be analysed also in urban design to be really solved. Is then important to create positive, effective, feedback to return these issues to the right research domain from the field and from the classroom. In addition, a trending approach is growing to move from interdisciplinarity to trans-disciplinarity, working with the stakeholders. In this paper, the most common and recent best practices are explored and formal definitions and constraints are provided to clarify both the interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches with a special focus on urban planning.