1 Crossing Disciplines to Address Urban Sustainability

This paper presents findings from an ongoing feedback exercise for Bridging the Gaps: Sustainable Urban Spaces. Bridging the Gaps (BTG) is a programme of activities designed to stimulate interdisciplinary research. The work was carried out at University College London (UCL) as part of an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded programme. All of the EPSRC’s Bridging the Gaps programmes aim to initiate and support interdisciplinary collaboration within a university. The programme at UCL was designed to create research collaborations that addressed problems in the area of sustainable urban spaces, an area that features complex problems that are often at the interface of different academic disciplines. The programme initially focussed on building relationships in the three faculties which make up the UCL School of the Built Environment, Engineering Sciences and Mathematical & Physical Sciences, but subsequently brought in participants from other faculties. Bridging the Gaps has brought together researchers working on different elements of a problem, allowing each of them to contribute approaches from their own discipline. This paper presents feedback from participants in the programme. Respondents discuss their experience of cross-disciplinary working, and how important it is for their work. We address the question of whether the benefits are outweighed by the complexities of crossing disciplines, as well as investigating the role that programmes like Bridging the Gaps can play in making the process easier. We will address the challenge of creating the correct conditions for interdisciplinary working and ways in which we can use our experience to minimise the barriers in the future