Architects and Designers Meet Sociologists to Design Urban Space. Reflection on the (im)possible crossing of disciplinary borders
Architects and Designers Meet Sociologists to Design Urban Space. Reflection on the (im)possible crossing of disciplinary borders

Summary/Abstract: Space as an academic concept occupies a place in various disciplines and professions. In each case it tends to be named, studied, understood and created in the appropriate conceptual apparatus, using the relevant methodology for the acquisition and analysis of data. On the other hand, an ever greater role in the process of designing space is accorded to the users themselves, who have certain specific preferences and their own models of shaping the space. Awareness of these different perspectives requires interdisciplinary cooperation. The paper refers to experience gained during interdisciplinary spatial design workshops, at which students of architecture, interior architecture, sociology and philosophy jointly prepared designs for urban space. The design process is analysed as communication between the representatives of disciplines using different resources of reflexivity about space. This workshop experience is not treated as ordinary, empirical research. It is rather an impulse and a starting point for further research on the cognitive aspects of cooperation gathering together experts rooted in different institutional contexts and fields of knowledge. The article discusses the possibility of cross-disciplinary cooperation between architects, designers, sociologists, philosophers, artists and other space constructors and users. Our assumption – based on the conceptions of reflexivity by Pierre Bourdieu, Scott Lash and Anthony Giddens – is that this cooperation is practised as an interdisciplinary relationship, incapable of overcoming disciplinary borders.

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