ABSTRACT

To untangle the strange, irregular, and complex forces that shape urban sites requires deep and broad transdisciplinary knowledge. It calls for thinking through the complexities and multivalences of an urban site aptly described as a “multiscalar, heteroglot setting for interactions and intersections.” Such sites serve as the ground for reimagining a world where human and environmental health and wellbeing can be fostered and where one might tackle urbanism's wicked challenges and remarkable opportunities. In turn, the urban landscape is distinctly suited to constructing transdisciplinary knowledge. Landscape architecture holds the potential to lead this generation of place-based and site-framed knowledge. The urban site then might catalyze the production of site-knowledges that redescribe the academy not as an aggregation of disciplines but as a catalyst for shared and collectively generated knowledge. This essay explores how Urban@UW functions as a platform to explore territories of transdisciplinary scholarship and teaching led by design thinking and through the frameworks of boundary objects and concepts, alongside the tools of the thick section and collective site. As an academic laboratory, Urban@UW suggests how design schools could be leaders in reshaping not only how scholars discern, understand, and imagine the urban site, but how the academy becomes defined by the questions it tackles rather than the disciplines it defines.