Contemporary urban phenomena resist disciplinary enclosure: microclimatic heat, for example, appears simultaneously as atmospheric measurement, architectural condition, bodily exposure and symptom of infrastructural abandonment. Yet conventional interdisciplinarity frequently aggregates these perspectives without examining whether the research object remains stable across their translations. Drawing upon Haraway’s situated objectivity, Stengers’ ecology of practices, Barad’s relational ontology and Latour’s sociology of association, an alternative assembly must transform contradiction from methodological inconvenience into investigative infrastructure. Under this protocol, each discipline declares its evidentiary limits and records the encounters that compel those limits to change. Consider an overheated housing estate where external sensors indicate tolerable temperatures while residents report severe nocturnal distress. Rather than dismiss testimony as subjective error, accountable disagreement expands the object of inquiry to include indoor heat retention, restricted mobility, tenancy conditions, energy poverty and uneven access to cooling. The discrepancy therefore reveals not competing descriptions of an identical space, but differently constituted realities whose friction demands epistemic reconstruction. A case-study synthesis would consequently document not only thermal readings and interviews, but also the precise revision event through which environmental science accepts domestic immobilisation as legitimate exposure evidence, or architecture recognises tenancy governance as a material determinant. The framework is falsifiable: transdisciplinarity has failed wherever no participating practice alters what it counts as relevant evidence. Urban knowledge becomes publicly accountable, therefore, not through harmonious synthesis, but through an auditable archive of disciplinary transformation in which institutional resistance itself becomes an empirical finding.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599; Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Lloveras, A. (2026) TransEpistemology. LAPIEZA-LAB. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18999225; Stengers, I. (2018) Another Science Is Possible. Cambridge: Polity.
