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Transdisciplinarity was the core subject of a special issue of Futures in 2004 including numerous cases of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary architectural and urban research and professional practice in several countries. This paper takes stock of achievements during the last 20 years before presenting challenges about bridging persistent gaps between theory, research and practice.

The special issue of Futures is a benchmark for numerous publications about transdisciplinarity in and beyond the multidisciplinary and intersectoral field of built environments. This paper presents a narrative literature review of publications about transdisciplinarity in architecture, urban design and planning since the 1970s.

Transdisciplinarity is still being debated, is often contested, and is not mainstream in research or practice. Like design practice, transdisciplinary inquiry is a creative process involving border work by participants in collaborative projects. Transdisciplinary inquiry is broader in scope and purpose than public participation, participatory action research and team science.

This paper discusses challenges that should be addressed by those in the field of built environments who endorse transdisciplinarity. Based on a half century of contributions about design theory and methods, the paper differentiates inquiry from research as fundamental to transdisciplinary projects.

We explore the design risk factors and associated managerial practices driving collaborative risk management for design efficacy in green building projects. By illuminating project design risk as an important project risk category in its own right, the study contributes to our understanding of optimising design efficacies for collaborative project risk management.

The study comprises exploratory interviews conducted with 27 industry project practitioners involved in the design and delivery/implementation of Green Star-certified building projects in South Africa.

The findings discursively highlight seven sources of design risk. We also identify seven specific collaborative risk management practices for design efficacy emerging from a consideration of how risk environments vary in the Green Star-certified projects, each with its own project design risk implications.

The study advances our understanding of how collaborations emerging from particular relational yet context-specific practices can be optimised to strengthen project risk management.