Interdisciplinarity in practice: Reflections from early-career researchers developing a risk-informed decision support environment for Tomorrow's cities

Physics-based simulations of multiple natural hazards for risk-sensitive planning and decision making in expanding urban regions

“…Tomorrowville is a virtual urban testbed which has been designed to represent typical physical and socio-economic aspects of evolving cities in the Global South ( [92]; this special issue). In this special issue, an interdisciplinary group of researchers use Tomorrowville as a platform to develop and test the Tomorrow's Cities Decision Support Environment ( [89][90][91]; this special issue). In this work, we simulate multiple hazards in the present-day (i.e., initial) urban development configuration of Tomorrowville (denoted as TV0).…”

“…For the TCDSE, various hazard scenarios would be simulated for each hazard to produce a database of dynamic intensity maps. These can be, in turn, used within the TCDSE's 'Physical Infrastructure Impact' module to assess impacts from natural hazards on the built environment, for instance, through appropriate fragility (i.e., the probability of various damage levels as a function of a hazard intensity measure) and consequence models (e.g., [89][90][91]; this special issue).…”

Interdisciplinary research in hazards and disaster risk

“…Evidence suggests that these issues need to be made explicit in order to enhance interdisciplinary working (Filippi et al 2023; Gilligan 2021; Sapat 2021). This is also beyond geography: disaster studies incorporates sociologists, anthropologists, earth and environmental scientists, engineers and medical scientists, among others.…”

“…The development of agent-based modelling and machine-learning techniques has also, conversely, led to a greater drive within the physical sciences to model social processes (Costa, Haukaas and Chang 2021; Ghaffarian et al 2021; Wang and Zhang 2019). At the same time, there has been significant growth in interdisciplinary research projects seeking to enhance collaboration between social and physical scientists, recognising that the complexities of disaster risk require biophysical, technological and sociological assessments (Filippi et al 2023; Hicks et al 2014; Kendra and Nigg 2014).…”

Influence of Interdisciplinary Teaching System on Interdisciplinary Competence of Engineering Graduate Students: Analysis of Mediating Effects of Interdisciplinary Identity

“…Despite multiple interdisciplinary teaching modes being designed to meet this need, critics view interdisciplinary teaching innovation at this stage as lacking novelty, scholarly depth, methodological rigor, and integrated planning [6]. It has been recommended that the value of interdisciplinarity cannot be explained without attention to the subjects valuing it and the inner changes they undergo [7]. However, previous studies of interdisciplinarity in engineering education settings primarily focus on the direct relationship between interdisciplinary teaching approaches and interdisciplinary competence.…”