Sciences Urbaines : Interdisciplinarités Passive, Naïve, Transitive, Offensive

The present article investigates several types of interaction between different disciplines and the urban planning i.e. the interdisciplinarity for the working knowledge of urban planning. The authors begin first by describing a kind of interdisciplinarity which they call "passive". This kind of interdisciplinarity was implemented in the context of the very important development of urban planning after the Second World War. It consists in a collaboration which associates different disciplines which participate in the urban projects. The authors show the limits of this kind of interdisciplinarity and consider other kinds which they call "naïve" and "transitive". In these cases of interdisciplinarity, scientists do not participate directly in the urban planning but propose several approaches deduced from the "hard sciences" such as physics (fractals) or computer sciences (multi-agents simulation, self-organized complex systems). Although these kinds of interdisciplinarity propose new approaches in urban planning, they are not very well appreciated by the majority of the urban planners. More recently urban planning has become the target of researchers who hope for urban planning to be scientific. This implies the use of "scientific methods" (theoretical elaboration, checking hypothesis reliability, critical analysis of the results and choice of a model) and this appears to be a new kind of interdisciplinarity called "offensive" by the authors. In fact this new kind does not follow the well know paradigms of the urban planning and tends toward the introduction of new methods so that the structures of urban planning itself may be modified. The authors conclude by asking about the future of urban planning facing new forms of interdisciplinarity.