An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Open City

Cities worldwide are being confronted with perpetual economic challenges, flows of migration, and increasing vulnerability to the consequences of global changes. Within contemporary urban lines of conflict, the ‘open city’ has resurfaced in urban scholarship as a potential guiding principle to the contradictory tendencies and calamities of cities. Despite the often approving and positivist take on the concept, the open city is not a homogeneous concept, and a variety of understandings – that are mostly limited to a specific discipline – are in circulation. These different understandings evoke a range of associations, leading to different interpretations of the concept and potentially conflicting properties associated with the term. Within the Open City: Theories, Perspectives, Instruments research project, we propose an interdisciplinary framework, which derives insights of openness from spatial, socio-economic and temporal dimensions, to systemise different understandings of openness and relate them to each other. To do so, we use a research design based on the method of assemblage that allows a variety of perspectives on the same research object. This paper presents how the outcomes of different disciplinary perspectives and research methodologies have been assembled to reach conclusions on the theoretical debate regarding the concept of openness and to further develop tools for the practical use of the open city concepts