{"id":151,"date":"2011-07-02T19:03:36","date_gmt":"2011-07-03T01:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/interculturalurbanism.wordpress.com\/?p=151"},"modified":"2013-06-28T10:16:27","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T16:16:27","slug":"interdisciplinarity-in-urban-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"Interdisciplinarity in Urban Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Urban Studies is generally recognized as a textbook example of an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. \u00a0Contributors look to synthesize observations and insights from multiple disciplines including anthropology, geography, history, sociology and many others. \u00a0Such integrative work has the potential to produce new models, metaphors, concepts and heuristics for thinking about the city.\u00a0 \u00a0The field becomes \u201ctransdisciplinary\u201d when urban studies scholars collaborate with colleagues in urban planning, architecture, real estate, and other professions to practically implement ideas in the interests of improving urban life.<\/p>\n

A couple of recent articles in major journals ordinarily read by very different academic audiences indicate how much more is still to be done to build interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of urban studies.\u00a0 In the June 23 issue of Nature\u00a0<\/em>Florian Lederbogen and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg report<\/a> some research in cognitive neuroscience that begins to explain why city living is associated with a greater lifetime risk for anxiety and mood disorders compared to country living.\u00a0 It is known that anxiety disorders for city dwellers are 21% higher, mood disorders are 39% higher, and schizophrenia twice as common.\u00a0 The team\u2019s brain imaging experiments correlated city living with greater stress responses in the amygdala<\/strong>, a region of the brain involved with\u00a0emotional regulation and mood.\u00a0 This region was only activated in the subjects who<\/p>\n

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Amygdala<\/p><\/div>\n

were city dwellers. \u00a0The team suggests that their work points \u201c\u2026to a new empirical approach for integrating social sciences, neurosciences and public policy to respond to the major health challenge of urbanization.\u201d \u00a0A Nature News<\/a> account of the research notes that such integration has always been a hard sell for social scientists enculturated by their disciplines to believe that biology plays no role in human affairs. \u00a0Indeed, one urban design professional commenting on the research cautioned that “all cities are not the same” and that there is “great variation in types of urban environment\u201d worldwide. Nonetheless he admitted that understanding the neurobiological impacts of different urban designs would be a great boon to his profession.<\/p>\n

Global variation in city type is the starting point for the second article by Michael E. Smith, an anthropological archaeologist.\u00a0 Writing in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal<\/a><\/em>\u00a0Smith suggests that archaeology, with its \u201cdeep time\u201d perspective on human settlement, can be a major contributor to\u00a0contemporary discussions of urbanism including debates around such hot button issues as sprawl, squatting, and sustainability. Archaeologists might even offer some generalizations about the relationship between urban form and quality of life that are relevant to public policy if they can be confident about the comparability of ancient and modern urban contexts. \u00a0For example, detailed mapping and excavation of the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan<\/a> has revealed that architecturally distinctive “informal\u00a0housing” was a significant feature of the cityscape.<\/p>\n

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Teotihuacan City Plan<\/p><\/div>\n

Such housing fell\u00a0outside the planning purview of central administrative elites and, thus, may indicate that the “right to the city<\/a>” was taken-for-granted within this complex polity. Archaeology\u2019s contributions to contemporary debates have heretofore been limited because archaeologists haven\u2019t typically shown such an applied interest, nor developed concepts and models for studying the ancient city that would facilitate comparisons with modern cities.\u00a0 At the same time Smith understands that it takes two to tango.\u00a0 \u00a0In a 2009 editorial<\/a> in Urban Geography<\/em> he noted that most urbanists are not aware of how an understanding of the ancient world can benefit the comparative study of city life (Edward Soja’s interest in the ancient Anatolian settlement of Catalhoyuk<\/a>–arguably the first city in history–is one exception).<\/p>\n

Although Smith and Lederbogen operate in very different academic domains they are united in calling for research to break down the artificial boundaries that divide disciplines. \u00a0Such research stands to enrich both<\/em> disciplinary practice and public policy, and inevitably changes disciplinary practice itself.\u00a0\u00a0 This is what makes interdisciplinary work different from the various forms of multi- and cross- disciplinarity that far too often substitute for the former in most academic contexts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Urban Studies is generally recognized as a textbook example of an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. \u00a0Contributors look to synthesize observations and insights from multiple disciplines including anthropology, geography, history, sociology and many others. \u00a0Such integrative work has the potential to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-2r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2864,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/2864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}