Appealing to an inter/transdisciplinary attitude: who is doing what in research centers working on urban sustainability?

Inter/transdisciplinary (ITD) approaches are key to cope with current societal problems, characterized by increasing volatility, complexity and uncertainty. However, such ITD strategies are difficult to be implemented in current research design, for the bureaucracy and the rigid structure of the academic community and the silos, competitive culture inside research centers. The present thesis seeks to enlarge the understanding about how to implement ITD approaches in research centers focusing on urban sustainability, how they can measure their ITD performance, their cooperation strategies, and what are the challenges associated with ITD. To this aim, a sample of 23 ITD research centers, mostly located in Europe, was selected and studied through the information available on their websites (n. of members, gender balance, years of foundation, mission, funding, etc.) and the results of semi-structured interviews performed with members of such institutions. A preliminary extensive study of the emergent literature about ITD has been performed to track down which criteria are currently suggested by the theory of organizational management to implement ITD approaches. Those findings have been compared with in the quantitative and qualitative data collected about the centers, to understand gaps between theory and practice of ITD and suggest success/failure indicators for inter/trans-disciplinarity. Our work shows a relation between the barriers that researchers find on their work (structural, communicational, budgetary) and the lack of common agreement on policies, as well as the lack of a legitimate and recognized role of ITD specialists within the university. Conclusions provide policy recommendations for the research centers willing to achieving more effective and efficient ITD research, and contribute to the standardization of ITD performance measures giving more hints on new indicators of success/failure in ITD research centers.