Understanding infrastructure interfaces: common ground for interdisciplinary urban research?

Urban development is a complex, multidimensional process that no single discipline can understand, explain and address adequately. In the case of infrastructure, different disciplines address specific issues – technical problems, social dynamics, political power, - yet in reality these often intersect. This article documents the experience of analysing the governance of infrastructure interfaces through a multidisciplinary case study of transport and sanitation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The analysis relied on combining established frameworks applied to social and technical analysis, alongside that of the analysis of institutions and integrated planning. Scholars from development studies, planning and transport studies, architecture and engineering, anthropology, geography, political science and public administration were involved. Each provided conceptual and methodological approaches of value but with some proving more synergetic than others. Overall the process itself yielded considerable benefits for the joint research endeavour and confirmed the validity and additionality of interdisciplinarity in infrastructure research.