برنامه‌ریزی شهری : انضباط " چند زمینه ای " ؟

The need for cross disciplinary boundaries appeared in scientific research at least twenty years ago. Since its foundation, at the beginning of the 20th Century, urban planning has been claiming the assets of multidisciplinarity. It is particularly concerned with transgressing disciplinary boundaries. However, multidisciplinarity may weaken urban planning as a discipline, because it is a recent knowledge domain that has borrowed without questioning from the knowledge acquired in both the social and engineering sciences. Urban planning may forget to formulate an inventory and to build its own theoretical and practical assets. This article argues that it is only when a dsicipline has acquired its own identity that it can implement a fertile transdisciplinarity contribution.

Transgressing disciplinary boundaries in research appeared, not less than about twenty years ago, as a blatant requirement of modern science. However, this approach has a long history as illustrated by Thomas Kuhn by the incursion of the physician Dalton into chemistry at the beginning of 20th Century [1]. This approach was considered as an intolerable audacity until recent decades. As far as urban planning is concerned, the shift of all sorts of problems towards urban issues by the human and social sciences increasingly associates both practising urban planners and researchers, with the specialists of other knowledge. Thus today, it is very difficult for urban planners to ignore the numerous approaches developed by other disciplines. In general, urban planners and researchers are open minded to interdisciplinarity, even though they usually graduated in a precise discipline. Those that have crossed disciplinary boundaries, have frequently been integrated in a multidisciplinary team. Therefore, their initial academic training contributes to urban planning practices, and it also nourishes theoretical debate. A double friction, within the multidisciplinary team often occurs. On the one hand, by the exchange with other disciplines dealing with urban issues; on the other hand, urban planners are required to better define the foundations and the originality of their domain. This preoccupation should concern those teaching and researching within this discipline. If this work is not realised, then urban planning, (which is not recognised as an autonomous discipline despite the pretensions of its founders) could disappear as quickly as it appeared. Therefore, it would be reduced to the surreptitious emergence of an intellectual and professional lobby that tried unsuccessfully, during the 20th century, to give itself a scientific foundation just as the exact sciences realised in their domain. It would be regrettable if urban planning followed too closely other mature sciences, because it would then only refer to the theoretical and methodological frames of these well established disciplines. If team work constitutes an excellent occasion to learn from these disciplines, it is also a unique opportunity for urban planning to emancipate itself, so that it can further the construction of its own identity. These subjects are discussed in this article. First, the article considers the explicit multidisciplinary position which characterises urban planning since it was founded at the end of 19th Century. Then the article will discuss the difficulty of being a “multidisciplinary discipline”. Indeed, this viewpoint implies a double requirement during collaboration with other domains of knowledge. First, it requires an accurate appropriation of what is discovered in other fields; second, it requires an up-to-date identification of what constitutes the city. In essence, the city is the core of urban planning and what makes urban planning original in its perspective and its contribution to knowledge production.

This article has considered the state of urban planning. It has discussed the important need for urban planners to reconcile their strong multidisciplinary conviction with another requirement to construct their own disciplinary identity. Indeed, it is rather obvious that a precondition for transdisciplinarity lies in the existence of identifiable disciplines and, simultaneously, in the ability to have a constructive dialogue with other specialised domains of knowledge. Urban planning is multidisciplinary discipline that integrates professionals, educators and searchers who are specialised in a wide range of topics. Therefore, urban planning should have a set of clearly identified assets, that will enable those who refer to it to develop an accurate transdisciplinary curiosity. Since this curiosity is not a purely formal intellectual veneer, it will be useful, because it can be re-appropriated in a critical manner, for a better understanding of any problematic that is specific to urban issues. Indeed, nothing refrains urban planners from having diverse profiles, whether they are considered in terms of their academic background, or to the nature of their works, or the type of transdisciplinarity they adopt. Only the breadth of human knowledge and the relative importance attributed to specialisation can limit this transdisciplinary incursion, and to a lesser degree for individuals than for the groups. However, urban planning has to clarify its own identity. This task will permit urban planners to render their transdisciplinary contributions more efficient. In turn, these contributions nourish in a fertile way the theoretical and practical assets of urban planning. Urban planners should pay particular attention to those contributions in which they participate for the creation of places more suitable for everyday life. In the mean time they should also remain open to contributions that other disciplines may offer them in order to achieve this goal. Beyond national and disciplinary frameworks, one notes that contributions of research work, notably in the urban field, increasingly develop within interdisciplinary trans-national networks. These programmes are related to territorial knowledge, and to actions and projects that can benefit from international comparisons and disciplinary confrontations. They can also benefit from disciplinary co-operation in order to improve current understanding of the dynamics of increasingly interdependent territories and also those complex arrangements of the authorities that implement territorial transformations. In the future, this co-operation will be all the more efficient when each convergent discipline will be able to delimit its specific contribution, both with respect to the intelligent re-appropriation of what is being produced by others, and with respect to the formulation of its own principles and methods. Urban planning is not the least concerned by this stake.