Developing shared understanding through online interdisciplinary collaboration: Reflections from a research project on better integration of health outcomes in future urban development practice

Highlights
•Collaborative working between different fields has become a common feature of academic and practitioner research in current times.

•There is limited literature on the practical process of doing ‘foundational’ collaborative work remotely, especially from the perspective of early career researchers.

•The practical process of online interdisciplinary collaboration is explained based on the authors’ reflections.

•Successful interdisciplinary collaboration requires a compromising mindset and mutual respect among researchers.

Abstract
Collaborative working has gained widespread recognition in policy and practice. However, there is less research on the process of doing collaborative research in practice than there is on the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological aspects of such work. In this paper, we address this gap by offering reflections on our practical experience of online interdisciplinary collaboration as part of a wider research project on future urban development practice. We sought to develop a shared understanding of the systems of urban development decision-making. We utilise two established frameworks of interdisciplinarity to reflect on our experience and offer practical recommendations that can help facilitate such work carried out remotely by early career researchers from diverse academic backgrounds. In so doing, our paper offers fresh insights on some of the common issues in interdisciplinary collaboration and on developing shared understanding and intellectual coherence through productive online interactions. As research is evolving to tackle complex problems that require a holistic understanding, our paper contributes to developing replicable methods for remotely conducted interdisciplinary work in the early phases of large-scale collaborative projects.