Paper 65: Disciplining the Sustainable City - Moving Beyond Science, Technology or Society?
Is interdisciplinary research possible? Over the past decade three UK research councils, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), have collectively put over £30 million into a key interdisciplinary research site — the ‘sustainable city'. This paper examines how the Research Councils framed the problem of the sustainable city and, in so doing, put interdisciplinarity into practice. In each case, the Councils recognised that the problems of the sustainable city transcended conventional disciplinary boundaries but the collective outcome of their research has remained resolutely disciplinary in focus, something that has been particularly frustrating for policy-makers and other potential users.
The tension between recognising the complexity of the research problem and formulating realistic research questions is most apparent in the research programmes through which Research Council mapped the original interdisciplinary problem on to the more narrow set of disciplinary paradigms they represent. Thus EPSRC sees the ‘sustainable city' mainly in terms of technological systems and fixes; NERC sees it in terms of the flows and stocks of natural resources; ESRC sees it a distinctive form of social organisation. Unfortunately, in setting the problem up in this way, what was originally a complex combination of science AND technology AND society has been reduced to science OR technology OR society. In other words, to the extent that interdisciplinary research occurred, then it was within research councils not between research councils.
The critical question is whether this outcome could or should have been avoided. As Science and Technology Studies (STS) shows, moving between scientific disciplines, particularly non-cognate ones, raises problems of incommensurability in both language and purpose. Yet interdisciplinarity requires this and more. The perspectives are supposed to add up the single, integrated view that policy-makers and other users can use to inform decisions and take action. Given what we now know about the risk and uncertainty within even the narrow boundaries of disciplinary science, this paper argues that seeking certainty in interdisciplinarity is to search for the Holy Grail. Policy-makers and others will need to find other ways to act.
Paper 65: Disciplining the Sustainable City: Moving Beyond Science, Technology or Society? , Series Working Paper Series, (2004), ISBN 1 904815 32 4
Additional Information
Earlier versions of this paper was also presented at the Annual Meeting for the Social Studies of Science, held in Atlanta on 16-19 October 2003 and at the Resurgent City Symposium, held at the LSE on 19-21 April 2004. The authors are grateful to participants at both conferences for their feedback and particularly to William Lafferty. Any errors, however, remain their responsibility.