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"Built environments are multidimensional and need to be understood by careful analysis. They should be understood before reconsidering how professionals of the built environment should be educated and trained to reduce the gap between knowledge, practice and real-world circumstances. There is an urgent need to rethink the role of policy makers, researchers and practitioners involved in the construction, renovation and reuse of the built environment in order to deal with the environmental/ecological, economic/financial, and social/ethical challenges of providing a habitat for current and future generations in a rapidly changing world. These complex challenges are too complex to be dealt with only by one discipline or profession. This book presents and illustrates innovative contributions applied during the planning of built environments, with case studies focusing on five strategic domains and the interrelations between them. These recent contributions apply concepts, methods and tools that enable concerted action between stakeholders collaborating in policy definition and project implementation. These methods and tools include experiments in living-labs, prototypes on site, virtual simulations and agent-based modeling, as well as participatory approaches with citizen science for data collection, the development of alternative scenarios, and visioning plausible futures"--

Transdisciplinarity is creative human agency including cognitive, intellectual and behavioural activities of individuals and groups. These activities define and are mutually defined by beliefs and ideas, knowledge and know-how, language and meanings, norms and rules, and opinions and values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should embrace these cultural, social and psychological predispositions because they are core constituents of a trans-anthropo-logic. This requires transcending common research methods used in scientific studies and using scaffolding that facilitates agency, and positioning individuals and groups. However, scientists are rarely trained to pilot projects involving multiple stakeholders with different positions. This article explains why trained facilitators are needed to pilot transdisciplinary projects. They can cultivate transcendence and transgression – both analysed by the late Julie Thompson Klein – beyond the scope and purpose of common research methods. In essence, transdisciplinary practices respect different ontologies and epistemologies while incorporating ethical principles and moral values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should accommodate and reduce asymmetries of power between politicians, public administrators, property owners, researchers and laypeople that are shaped by extant historical and societal variables in specific situations. Transdisciplinary projects should also apply multiple sources of quantitative data and qualitative information that represent the complexity, diversity and perhaps incommensurability of intentions, meanings, perceptions and values about specific subjects or situations. This is being achieved by innovative projects that should become beacons for change.

We should rethink individual and collective positions that promote and sustain the health of the planet and people in an era of increasing uncertainty and unpredictability concerning various threats to our lives and the livelihoods of all living species on Earth. This fundamental rethink is a prerequisite before radical societal change is implemented to respond more effectively to persistent global problems than numerous ineffective responses during the last 50 years. Our positionality, which defines and is mutually defined by fundamental values and worldviews, will influence how we anticipate or discount the risk and threats to our common future. This contribution follows a period of documentary research and personal reflections at the Ecumenical Institute at the Château de Bossey, in Switzerland. The aim was to reconsider a global, conceptual framework that acknowledges pluralism and includes an ecumenic and ecological interpretation of people–environment interrelations. Given that ecumene, economy, and ecology have the same linguistic roots in ancient Greek philosophy, combining them with core principles of human ecology creates an inclusive and wholistic framework for repositioning ourselves using eco-ethical principles and equitable and just values in a world of persistent problems that threaten life on Earth. This repositioning can begin by reconnecting children and adults with natural ecosystems, and three approaches currently applied are included.

Christopher Alexander and Serge Chermayeff co-authored Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism in 1963. This seminal contribution has largely been forgotten. Today, a human-centred framework is rarely discussed by researchers and practitioners, neither from a theoretical nor a pragmatic perspective. Nonetheless, some fundamental principles defined in that book 60 years ago are pertinent today in our hyper-connected world, and they have been illustrated by the need for human-centred housing during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. This commentary explains the spatial organization of domestic architecture that can support and sustain choices about private and public life in a world of global networks, intrusions of social media, and increasing video surveillance that challenge our autonomy and privacy.

Synergies between urban planning and public health were synthesized a decade ago by the Lancet Commission's article "Shaping Cities for Health: Complexity and the Planning of Urban Environments in the 21st Century." Since then, innovative research projects, urban planning projects, and accumulated experience from the World Health Organization Healthy Cities project confirm that transdisciplinary contributions enable the achievement of core principles of healthy cities. This article clarifies important differences between the content, scope, and outcomes of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects about public health and urban planning. It explains why transdisciplinary contributions are more likely to bridge the applicability gap between knowledge and practice in response to persistent urban health challenges; notably, they transgress the boundaries of public health and medical science; they prioritize political action in both the formal and informal construction sectors; and they include citizens, community associations, and private enterprises as partners in consortia for concerted action. This article proposes a radical shift from incremental, reactive, and corrective approaches in planning for urban health to proactive and anticipative contributions using backcasting and alternative scenarios that prioritize health. The article uses the case of public green spaces in planning for urban health. It identifies the shortcomings of many empirical studies that are meant to promote and sustain health before describing and illustrating an alternative way forward.

There is a need for innovative research on housing and health. In contrast to traditional disciplinary studies, which are sector-based, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions offer a broader approach. Interdisciplinary approaches highlight the difference between a biomedical model that often adopts a symptom-treatment interpretation of housing and health and a holistic or integrated model that combines biological, cultural, economic, political, psychological and social factors in a new way. This article illustrates the pertinence of interdisciplinary contributions to develop a more holistic understanding of housing density and how it can be interpreted to understand the complex relationship between housing conditions and health status.