Building Transdisciplinary Urban Space (Part I): Theoretical Transurbanism

Abstract

This paper is the first part of  a  set  of three papers that  utilizes  the  classification of  transdisciplinarity  into  theoretical,  phenomenological and experimental transdisciplinarity (Nicolescu 2010) to suggest some fundamental perspectives and concepts that would be required in order to start  building  a  transdisciplinary  vision for urban space in research. The work is divided into three papers. In this paper we deal with Theoretical transdisciplinarity in urbanism, which needs to take into account the dialectical process of scaling and the interrelationship among various spatial scales; it also needs to come to terms with the idea of relationality of urban space, a humanistic view of space and place, the “poetics of space,” and a clear understanding of the idea of space in contemporary physics theories such as quantum gravity, together with an understanding of visual thinking. In the second paper we deal with Phenomenological transdisciplinarity as applied to urbanism, or the experience of the built space, which needs to transcend both intellectualism and empiricism via Merleau Ponty’s and Lefebvre’s triad of spatial practices, representational  space and spaces of representation, differential space, and Soja’s thirdspace; it also makes use of the architectural concepts of schemata, diagram and type; further, phenomenological transurbanism uses the concept of palimpsest in order to account for the experience of time in space. The third paper deals with Experimental transdisciplinarity, which in urbanism takes into account basic quantum concepts such as non-locality, entanglement, discontinuity, non-separability, and aims at explaining processes of planetary urbanization in the so-called “Anthro- pocene,” characterized by glocalization, hybridization, complexity, sustainability, remembrance and the reality of digital spaces.