Introduction: Problematising Urban Social Cohesion: A Transdisciplinary Endeavour

Abstract

Conceptualising, exploring and operationalising different meanings of social cohesion to make them useful for studying the dynamics of 'cities and social cohesion' in urban Europe: that is what this Special Issue aims at. It is based on research on 'Social Cohesion in European Cities' within the FP7-SSH-Project Social Polis, the first social platform funded by the EC SSH programme. 1 Decades of European research on urban development and economy, urban social fabric, housing and labour market, social, cultural and political fragmentation and, more recently, on security issues and citizenship in the city have produced an extensive body of results in different disciplines that are relevant to urban social cohesion research. Social cohesion is given various meanings in the scientific circles, social milieux and policy arenas in which it is addressed. Most frequently, it is presented as a policy objective with reference both to the social forces and public actions that are needed for the inclusion of all groups,

Social innovation and creativity in cities: A socially inclusive governance approach in two peripheral spaces of Barcelona

“…It is the locus of everyday life e of perception of, and mobilization around local issues e that produces locality; where collective identity and sense of place are socially constructed, and livability is defined. The local can be seen as a privileged and empirical entry point for understanding the modalities of social cohesion through creativity and social innovation, spatial change, new policy initiatives, or collective action (Miciukiewicz, Moulaert, Novy, Musterd, & Hillier, 2012, 1858. Following Miles (2005), the recognition of the cultural manifestations and possibilities of everyday lives is probably more economically and socially sustainable than pursuing a "world city" image based on flagship cultural institutions such as the Tate Modern in London or the Guggenheim in Bilbao.…”

Integrative Spatial Quality: A Relational Epistemology of Space and Transdisciplinarity in Urban Design and Planning

“…Such multi-disciplinary collaboration may also happen in research projects, where different skills and methodologies may play a specific role in the process of inquiry. Such cooperative processes, however, are limited in what they can achieve (Austin et al 2008) and it is in interdisciplinary work that the participants cross their 'own' epistemic boundaries, to co-produce new concepts and methods (Miciukiewicz et al 2012;Madanipour 2013;Moulaert and Cassinari 2014). Interdisciplinarity means working towards a shared analytical framework and/or methodological apparatus for joint research on the same theme between scholars coming from different disciplines and fields (Moulaert and Cassinari 2014).…”

“…Widening the scope of collaboration through engaging specialists with everyday life, transdisciplinarity has emerged as a mode of cooperation between scientific analysts and professional practitioners for improving a mutual understanding of a certain phenomenon or problem and developing a shared way of addressing it (Miciukiewicz et al 2012;Moulaert and Cassinari 2014). Largely overlapping with the integrative character of interdisciplinarity, but giving substantially more space to practice communities (Moulaert and Cassinari 2014), transdisciplinary collaboration is the stage in which 'a fundamental epistemic shift' takes place, in which the participating parties are able to produce a coherent reconfiguration of the situation (Austin et al 2008, 557).…”

Building a Meta-Framework to ‘Address’ Spatial Quality

“…'Sharing' and 'agreeing' refer to the different theoretical traditions and research approaches that are involved and have both an interdisciplinary and a transdisciplinary meaning (Moulaert and Cassinari 2014). Interdisciplinarity -working towards a shared analytical framework for joint research on the same theme between scholars coming from different disciplines and fields -and transdisciplinarity -cooperation between scientific analysts and professional practitioners for improving spatial quality, for example -have recently been integrated into an interdisciplinary approach in which researchers and practitioners collaborate in a research and action process from day 1 (Miciukiewicz et al 2012;Moulaert and Cassinari 2014).…”