From urbanism as a multi-disciplinary study towards the same ad an interdisciplinary one

Abstract

Urbanism/Town and Country Planning as both a field of professional practice and scientific endeavour has neither a properly defined status nor even yet a clearly circumscribed epistemology and this despite the term's having been in current usage for well nigh a century and even, despite the fact that various scientific and technical disciplines have busied themselves with the problems it embraces which the paper would define as being outstandingly social ones. Though concern for that which is urbanistic sprang in the first place from social and sociological concern. Sociology itself is here seen to have set the matter aside and done little here during the XXth Century. Neither Human Ecology in the first instance nor City Sociology in the second have been up to warranting the title of Urbanist for the sociologist. The paper likewise maintains that the attitude of other disciplines such as Geography, Law, Natural Sciences has been marled by a similar keeping their distance from the matter. All this has allowed for and even encouraged the ambitions of technocrats to make theirs and be free with the practice of urbanism thanks to a range of applied arts and technically related fields having to do with construction such as engineering and architecture, which state of affairs has given rise to an urbanism as often as not right contrary to social needs. As a consequence of the fore-going, the paper posits the need for an overcoming lof this disciplinary short-fall and advocates the setting up of such an inter-disciplinary science as would embrace not only urbanism itself but likewise and most generally those ties as between all groups, institutional social bodies and the environment and/or the humanly created habitat in which our activities take place.