Sustainability and the challenge of transdisciplinary approach to the built environment research in Nigeria

Abstract

With respect to the contemporary built environment, a wide range of basic issues – economic, social-cultural, political, participatory and sustainability-related – are being contested on the global stage and at local levels. The intellectual tradition of the built environment field however suggests that the knowledge-base of the various disciplines has been more „inter‟ than „trans‟ in its relationship. This paper challenges the myopic trivialization of the built environment as primarily focusing on the aesthetics of form and space, to the exclusion of broader issues. It explores the question of what knowledge base disciplines such as architecture should be founded on. Based on a literature review, the paper draws conceptual distinctions between transdisciplinarity and the confined territories of uni- and sub-disciplinarity, and clusters of cross-, multi-, pluri- or inter-disciplinarity. It highlights emerging global environmental issues relating to the built environment that make the increasing demand for the transdisciplinary approach imperative. It posits that the transdisciplinary approach can offer significant intellectual benefits to the built environment field in terms of methodological insights, critical analysis of conventional assumptions and providing new perspectives. Recommendations are offered on how the practical challenges to such research can be overcome. This demands that built environment theory, research and applications should be grounded in contexts which consider not only the physical and spatial, but also the psycho-social and ecological to be essential features of environmental reality.