The Science of Urbs and Its Discontents: A Proposal for Reconceptualizing Urbanism

Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría

Authors

Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría U.S. Fulbright Senior Specialist in Urban Planning, New York Invited Professor of Urbanism and Globalization School of Architecture and Urban Planning Shenyang Jianzhu University Shenyang, Liaoning, China

Keywords:

Transdisciplinarity, urban space, phenomenology, urban studies, capitalist urbanization, sociospatial transformations

Abstract

This paper suggests a mode of inquiry for urbanism based on transdisciplinarity. Our contention is that if massive geohistorical developments pose a fundamental challenge to the entire field of urban studies (its basic epistemological assumptions, categories of analysis, and object of investigation), as posited by some researchers, then a satisfactory way of meeting such challenge cannot come from within urban studies or any other discipline, but rather from a transdisciplinary perspective “beyond and between disciplines,” one that rejects scientific realism and uses its own, distinct epistemological axioms to flesh out the interactions between object and subject (knowledge and design, discovery and creation) in research as the preliminary foundation for a new conception of urbanism. This paper works as a draft where the focus is on collecting and organizing evidence as a first step in our project for a proposal for transdisciplinary urbanism.

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