Towards Transdisciplinary Urbanism: Megaprojects, Power and the Urban Imagination

Abstract

This article presents some building blocks for a transdisciplinary approach  to  the  study of urbanism. By using the case of urban megaprojects research as an example of potential transdisciplinarity, the article explores concepts such as “centrality” and “bordering” in order to suggest distinct and yet interrelated ways to explain “power” and “growth” in a terrain – that of urban studies – subject to several disciplinary accounts that  are  typically  not  integrated. In  opposition to the economic logic of urban megaprojects, it is suggested a particular idea of an “urban imagination” that contributes to establishing the transition to a more systematic and integrated undersanding of megaprojects and urbanism under a transdisciplinary vision. It is suggested that a transdisciplinary approach to urbanism as a methodology ought to take seriously the ethical ideal of inclusiveness, which fails to realize when we hold the belief that the outside world of things is not as deserving as the inner world of the mind, and when we privilege the perspective of epistemology over ontology, over the conscience of the eye and over the value of observations. When we build a transdisciplinary approach to urbanism, a key issue then is how to revive the “reality of the outside” both as a dimension of human experience and as a research strategy.