Background: Real estate, infrastructure, and related urban systems are increasingly exposed to the physical impacts of climate change, threatening both their durability and societal stability. Today the understanding of urban climate risks and their management is emerging but incomplete, highlighting the need for collaborative, integrated, and transparent approaches. However, existing collaborative approaches do not often lead to practical and actionable solutions, exposing a gap in expertise on how to co-create truly integrative approaches in a landscape of fragmented knowledge. Method: This article introduces an integrated approach to transdisciplinary knowledge production on urban climate risk management, using the case of the Red&Blue programme (Real Estate Development and Building in Low Urban Environments). This research-intensive knowledge programme in the low-lying Dutch urban delta was co-created by diverse disciplinary researchers and cross-sectoral practitioners, including financial institutions. Here, the authors reflect on three key “how” questions concerning programme co-creation with stakeholders, the organization of the collaboration process, and capacity development for reflection on insights in transdisciplinary cooperation. Results: Preliminary findings over the last two-and-a-half years of the programme highlight key challenges in transdisciplinary cooperation. To address them, the authors stress the need for creating safe and open spaces for stakeholder dialogue, where diverse cooperation strategies help build shared vocabularies, enabling stakeholders to jointly define, identify, and analyze multidimensional climate risk issues and potential adaptation solutions. Conclusion: The integrated approach presented in this article offers a preliminary model and means to build integrated knowledge on climate risk management and related sustainability transitions in the built environment.

The Gluon researcher is a dedicated integration expert who leads the co-creation process of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge. This booklet, The Gluon, describes the origins and nature of the Gluon approach and the Gluon researcher role.

Despite the widespread interest in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity (ITD) as a means to address complex problems, many collaborations struggle with an integration deficit that leaves knowledge contributions in relative isolation and prevents ITD from fulfilling its promise.

Gluon researchers have three tasks. They design and implement integrative procedures, author integrated products, and study integrative methods. They therefore simultaneously learn how to co-create knowledge in different settings, while also extracting integrated observations about the problem domains that are studied. Like the elementary particle, a Gluon researcher therefore counterbalances the natural process of fragmentation that occurs when subatomic particles that collectively form a nucleus are not continuously connected. This division of labour reduces the workload of specialists and acknowledges the complementary contribution made by integration expertise in academia. The Gluon approach is therefore meant to radically improve the conditions for ITD.

Ultimately, this booklet serves to inspire ambitious ITD collaborations and calls on other integration experts to reveal themselves and share their expertise.