Established at the level of both UAUIM doctoral schools, the INTERDISCIPLINARY DOCTORAL RESEARCH LABORATORY is intended to be an interactive and stimulating working environment for both PhD students and PhD supervisors at UAUIM.
The LCDI is based on the need to capitalize and continue the research experiences accumulated within the framework of projects/grants carried out relatively recently in our university, making their results visible and systematically accessible, made available as thematic and bibliographic databases to current and future PhD students.
In the medium and long term, the LCDI aims to involve PhD students and supervisors more actively in accessing EU funded projects, to develop a collaborative system of doctoral research, guided by internationally relevant, innovative and interdisciplinary themes, to develop a more efficient system of dissemination/publication of results in highly rated journals.
The LCDI is also a space of volunteering undertaken to build a permanent observatory of academic activity in doctoral schools, paying particular attention to how, under the impact of new technologies, the role, capacities and missions of researchers in architecture and urbanism are changing, always accepting new challenges.
In its first year of existence, the INTERDISCIPLINARY DOCTORAL RESEARCH LABORATORY is structured in 3 working groups: "INTER-ACT", "SMART RESEARCH", "DUNĂREA" each with clearly defined goals, and in the future this structure will be re-configured according to the interest and opportunities identified in the national and international research market.
The main mission of the "INTER-ACT" WORKING GROUP is to create a solid scientific framework for interdisciplinarity in the doctoral theses developed within UAUIM, both in the area of interference between architecture-urbanism-design and in the area of tangencies with other disciplinary fields. There is a twofold need: on the one hand, to preserve the specificity of the fields in which competences are distinctly delimited and, on the other hand, to address in doctoral theses current topics, in line with the new research paradigms at international level and which, in most cases, require an integrated, multi-/ inter/ trans-disciplinary approach. Moreover, in both cases, a strategy is needed, assumed at the level of each PhD supervisor, to strengthen the disciplinary rigour of in-depth study and to use the interdisciplinary environment for leapfrogging towards innovation and added value.
The SMART RESEARCH WORKING GROUP promotes activities related to the EU objective of the digital transition, the study of the impact and involvement of new technologies in doctoral research in architecture and urbanism, in the internationalization and better visibility of UAUIM research. At the same time, this working group aims to be a permanent observer of this phenomenon of overexposure of doctoral research (and not only) to exclusively digital means and tools, a challenge that the university environment of architecture-urbanism accepts, trying to train specialists of the built environment able to use digital tools at the highest level, but at the same time to educate in the sense of human creativity and its immense potential, advocating a (re)balance between what the computerised study environment offers and what the direct, unmediated experience of reality provides.
The "Danube" WORKING GROUP's mission is to build a synthetic and visible documentary framework of research projects on Danube cities (B- LAB, INTERREG- DANURB, INTERREG- DANUrB+, Living Danube Limes, D- SMCS, VVITA), which can constitute a "bridgehead" for future doctoral research on this topic. In this way, we are taking a logical step to ensure the integrated and long-term sustainability of these projects, offering them to PhD students and supervisors as study support and inspiration. In this way, the aim is to achieve what is currently lacking in our doctoral schools - namely the lack of cohesion of doctoral research topics, their "dispersion" over a very vast and diverse field, but which fails to gain relevance and echo in international academic circles.
The working group aims to promote this subject of the Danube in future architecture and urban planning theses, considering it a fertile and relevant subject for the geographical and cultural space in which we are situated, which is too little studied from the perspective of our fields of interest and which could continue the efforts already made.
