Transdisciplinarity and Social Scientific Spatial Research – IRS Spring Academy Part

During the past decades, the idea of transdisciplinarity has gained increasing momentum. Transdisciplinary research is regarded as a collaborative form of knowledge generation and knowledge application for solving societal challenges that integrates perspectives and actors from academia, civil society, government and administration as well as from the economic realms.

Transdisciplinarity comes with high promises. First, promoters express the believe that through the integration of multiple perspectives and practices on the same object of inquiry and by taking on board divergent normative approaches, a more holistic understanding of reality can be achieved. Second, the collaboration of societal actors and researchers is argued to advance problem-oriented and societally relevant research contributing to problem solution. By including the most advanced expert knowledge, affected parties and actors with expert knowledge to implement solutions, transformative qualities are ascribed to transdisciplinary research too.

Despite these promises – or rather because of these promises – transdisciplinary research is accompanied by severe challenges: it is time-consuming as it is an open-ended learning process, it may fail regularly, it is connected to high uncertainties with regards to its impacts and outcomes, and is driven by incentives contradictory to classical academic careers. Spatial sciences seem to exhibit a strong affinity to transdisciplinarity, because investigating spatial structures and processes requires an integration of several disciplinary perspectives by definition. Each city, region, urban district or village can be seen as an outcome of a process in which social, economic, cultural, physical, ecological, political and regulatory forces interact in complex, often historically unique ways. At the same time, spatial development can be a heavily conflictual process as it touches manifold interests and affects a wide spectrum of social groups in different ways. Therefore, the social scientific research of spatial development cannot be conducted in disciplinary silos and transdisciplinary approaches may provide an opportunity for integrating multiple actors and perspectives in shaping and advancing spatial development.

However, disciplinary inclusiveness and a relative openness to participatory research alone might not be sufficient to be well prepared to take advantage of transdisciplinary research and to deal with all the related challenges. Though transdisciplinary requires a firm rooting within the tradition of a scientific discipline, spatial sciences lack strong disciplinary traditions. Instead, spatial scientists are only loosely connected to each other by a shared interest in spatial categories, but in terms of disciplinary foundations, feel stronger connections to different adjacent fields. From the practitioners’ point of view, transdisciplinarity might not offer a clear alternative to the classical division of work as long as clearly identifiable outcomes and benefits for their interests are not linked to such uncertain and time-consuming endeavours.

Against these ambiguous backdrops, the seventh edition of the IRS Spring Academy seeks to address the following topics:

• state-of-the-art transdisciplinary research practices and methods in spatial sciences
• benefits and pitfalls of transdisciplinary research
• the specificities of transdisciplinary research with a spatial focus
• organisational forms of realising trans-disciplinary research
• practical examples of transdisciplinary initiatives
• transdisciplinary research and academic careers