Crossing Disciplines To Address Urban Sustainability.

This paper presents findings from the evaluation of Bridging the Gaps: Sustainable Urban Spaces (BTG), a novel interdisciplinary sustainability research funding program at University College London (UCL), funded by the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). All of the EPSRC's Bridging the Gaps programs aim to initiate andsupport interdisciplinary collaboration within a university. The program at UCL was designed to create research partnershipsthat focus on problems in the area of sustainable urban spaces, an area that features complex problems that often overlapdifferent academic disciplines. The program initially focused on building relationships within the three UCL faculties: TheBartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, The Faculty of Engineering Sciences, and The Faculty of Mathematical and PhysicalSciences, but subsequently brought in participants from other faculties. Bridging the Gaps has brought together researchersworking 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 program. Respondents discuss their experience in cross disciplinaryworking and its importance for their work. We address the question of whether the benefits are outweighed by the complexitiesof crossing disciplines, and we investigate the role that programs like BTG can play in making the process easier. We alsodiscuss the challenge of creating the conditions for interdisciplinary work and ways in which we can use our experience tominimize the barriers of crossing disciplines in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]