Center for Urban Studies | Amsterdam | Netherlands
The Center for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam is a large research center that brings together actors from different disciplines and backgrounds. Maria Kaika, director of the Center for Urban Studies, explained how the center operates.
What is your institute’s approach to urban problems?
The social and behavioral sciences faculty has a strong presence in critical social sciences, ranging from political economy and political ecology to critical housing studies and critical research on smart cities. The kind of research that develops in the Center for Urban Studies reflects this critical social sciences perspective. Collaborations between other disciplines, such as planning and geography, are interesting because sociology tends to have more of a canon. When collaborating, these different actors negotiate this existing canon. In terms of research themes, there is a huge variety due to the seed funds. There is a strong presence of housing studies, environmental sustainability, political ecology, migration and governance. The center has, together with the municipality of Amsterdam, forged a close collaboration between policy and academia.
How does the center manage interdisciplinarity?
It depends on the specific cases and the different people involved, but we try to break down disciplinary boundaries. Some interdisciplinary collaborations have been easily established, such as between sociology, geography and planning, but there have also been cases where we needed more effort to develop new types of methods. Interdisciplinarity is not easy but brings in surprising outcomes and new conceptual and methodological frameworks. In the future, we are planning on expanding our collaboration to the natural sciences. Most collaborations start with a small scale focus from where different disciplines work together in order to start building up common methods and concepts that can help us break out of our own disciplinary boundaries.