Socializing Architecture E-Book

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 474

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

At the intersection of architecture, art, public culture, and political theory, Socializing Architecture urges architects and urbanists to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization. Drawn from decades of lived experience, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman engage the San Diego–Tijuana border region as a global laboratory to address the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, explosive urban informality, climate disruption, the thickening of border walls, and the decline of public thinking. Complementing Spatializing Justice, Socializing Architecture is the second part of a two-volume monograph. It continues to build a compelling case for architects and urban designers to intervene in the contested space between public and private interests. Through analysis and diverse case studies, the authors show how to alter the exclusionary policies and instead advance a more equitable and convivial architecture. Professors Cruz and Forman are principals in ESTUDIO TEDDY CRUZ + FONNA FORMAN, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. Serving as directors, they are also invested in the University of California's Center on Global Justice, which advances interdisciplinary research with an emphasis on collective action at community scale.

Leseprobe

Socializing

Architecture

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Socializing

Architecture

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Teddy Cruz and

Fonna Forman

Hatje Cantz Verlag

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Introduction: A Critical Spatial Practice at the US-Mexico Border 7

Section I: ESSAYS

1Conflict is generative 14

2 Informality is Praxis 22

3 Co-Producing the City with Others 30

4 Where is Our Public Imagination? 44

5 A Practice of Mediation: Top-Down / Bottom-up 56

Section II: Projects

Clusters:

1Conflict Urbanizations: Visualizing the Political 68

2 Urbanizations of Adaptation: Cross-Border Migrant Flows 158

3 Immigrant Neighborhoods: Housing Laboratories 216

4 Bottom-Up Public: The FUNCTIONAL Dimension of Participation 352

5 Top-Down Public: Designing Urban Justice 442

6 Decolonizing Knowledge and Democratizing the City: THE UCSD COMMUNITY Stations 494

Notes 575

Image Credits 579

Acknowledgements 581

Colophon 584

This volume is the second in a two-volume series:

Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks

Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up

The first volume, Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks,presents thirty

provocations, or building blocks, that have shaped the research-based

political and architectural practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman.

The second volume, Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up,

manifests these commitments in spatial practice across five theoretical essays and six visual project clusters.

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We begin this second volume where the first left off, withretooling our-selves: seeing our own practices as sites of critical intervention. At key moments in the evolution of our practice, we have paused to construct what we call a “practice diagram”—to reflect on where we are, where we want to go, and to alter our priorities, tools and procedures to meet shifting geopolitical and sociospatial dynamics in the San Diego–Tijuana border region and beyond. Visually operationalizing in a diagram our evolving commitments and strategies to engage deepening social inequality and urban asymmetry has been an essential building block of our practice.

This critical detour always includes meditating on the state of our respective fields (Teddy in architecture, Fonna in political theory), their intersections, and the political and aesthetic positions we have taken over decades to engage social imperatives. Our shared dissatisfaction has always centered on a pervasive, beige professional neutrality in the face of global ecosocial crises. In the field of political theory, neutrality mani-fests as a rarefied conversation among defenders of abstract ideals that rarely engages the world. In architecture, neutrality has meant decorating urban inequality with veneers and dream castles. In recent years, we have been witnessing a grounded and solidaristic turn in political theory and a palpable social turn in architecture, with many design schools and cultural platforms demanding social and urban justice. For many, this is new terrain, because the neoliberal incentive structure since the early 1980s militated against social advocacy and public commitments in the design fields. These pivots are hopeful trends, and produce a very differ-ent professional design landscape than when we first launched our public interest practice two decades ago.

We believe architects and urban designers should take a position against inequality, accelerating climate change and the privatization of everything, and align our practices accordingly, continually checking our-selves: Why do we do what we do, for whom, when and how? We believe architects and urban designers should mobilize the tools of design to pen-etrate the drivers of injustice, exploitation and dispossession. Similarly, we believe that academics who think, write, debate and teach about these things should engage real-world inequality, listen to voices for whom these ideas reflect everyday experiences and co-produce new knowledgenot only for academic audiences but for citizens and policymakers as well.Academic institutions that make it difficult for researchers to partner

Introduction: A Critical Spatial Practice at the US-Mexico Border

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with communities, who erect barriers in the name of compliance, who denigrate community engagement as “service” rather than “research” and exalt academic publication as the holy grail of “research impact” need to change. They need to align their effusive narratives about “equity,diversity and inclusion” with actual protocols and policies that elevate institutional capacity to make positive change in the communities that surround them.

We see ourselves as urban curators, facilitating the movement of knowledges and resources across sectors and across urban borders. In this era of polarization, fragmentation and unprecedented privatization, we believe architects and urbanists can intervene in the gap between top-down institutions and bottom-up publics. While we understand the vulnerability of thinking dialectically about urban dynamics, for us thinking top-down / bottom-up has always been a point of entry into more experi-mental thinking “across.” In other words, the contested power relations between oppositions has catalyzed fresh political and spatial thinking about horizontally traversing them. In our practice we partner closely with community-based agencies to mobilize bottom-up socio-spatial intelli-gence, to transform top-down policy and redirect institutional resources to support bottom-up agency.

As with any curatorial practice, this work demands epistemic humilityand continual reflection on the ethical complexities of joining in solidarity with people struggling against injustice, from the privileged vantage of the academy, the cultural institution or other formal sites of power. We must avoid overconfidence in our capacity to know and say and do things that are relevant and faithful to real experiences. If we aspire even implic-itly to advance justice, fairness and equity on behalf of people who are already marginalized, excluded, dispossessed and exploited, we inflict double harm by assuming that our urban and architectural dreams hold meaning for them, that our wishes for them align with their own.

Here we will demonstrate a model of “co-production” that entails accompanyingstruggles against urban injustice in real time, and seeking dialogue with people who are receptive to collaboration, weaving diverse skills, knowledges and experiences together into a richer account of struggle and more responsive strategies of resistance, advocacy and urban intervention.1

The Essays: Theoretical Apparatus of a Critical Spatial Practice

The texts, diagrams and images assembled across these two volumes, Spatializing Justiceand Socializing Architecture, follow a sequence: from priorities(building blocks), to theories(essays), to projects(project clusters). The priorities we presented in Spatializing Justice ground the theories and projects of our practice, which are elaborated in Socializing Architectureacross five essays and six project clusters.

Essay 1 reinterprets urban conflict as a generative framework for design, and an essential backdrop to developing a grounded theoretical and research-based architecture practice. In our case, we radicalized the San Diego–Tijuana border as a global laboratory in which to engage the most intense urban conflicts of our time. Essay 2 investigates ingenious bottom-up practices of urban adaptation and solidarity that spring from conditions of urban conflict. In our practice, we seek to translate these

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emergent urban practices into new political economies and spatial strat-egies of equitable community development. Essay 3 elaborates the role architects can play, facilitating cross-sector experiments to co-produce the city. While architects typically wait for the client and the brief to design within a given site and budget, these conventional hierarchies have never worked for us. Over the years, we have co-produced the brief with communities, understood not as clients but as co-developers. And together we summon the resources that are needed, bottom-up and top-down, to actualize these projects in the absence of formal support. In essay 4, we connect this urban experimentation with cultivating a broad-er civic imagination in our cities. Our cultural aspirations are inspired by compelling cases of Latin American civic experimentation over the last decades. Essay 5 concludes with reflection on the ethical and epistemic challenges of doing research in places of marginalization and struggle, and an imperative to retool ourselvesand expand the fields of design.

The Project Clusters: Interventions of a Critical Spatial Practice

The second part of Socializing Architectureis organized across six proj-ect clusters, which assemble and visualize the projects and initiatives of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman over the last years. Project cluster 1 presents the geospatial armature of our embedded practice at the US-Mexico border, scaling down from global, to regional, to very local border neighborhoods where we work every day. Project cluster 2 presents the often invisible cross-border urban flows and circulations that we have documented over the years. Project cluster 3 presents our work on social and emergency housing, documenting two experimental projects we have co-developed with community-based agencies on both sides of the border wall. Project clusters 4 and 5 present a set of international collab-orations that exemplify bottom-up and top-down urban ingenuity—projectcluster 4, a sequence of bottom-up public space projects with communi-ties across Buenos Aires, Madrid, Anyang and others; and project cluster 5, collaborations with top-down municipal institutions in Bogotá and Medellín to document and visualize the transformative civic and political processes that made these two Colombian cities global models of equi-table urbanization in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Project cluster 6 concludes with a cross-border public initiative that manifests and integrates all of the provocations and theoretical com-mitments of our practice. The UCSD Community Stations are a physical infrastructure of public spaces across the San Diego–Tijuana border region where top-down and bottom-up knowledges and resources meet. Co-developed between our public university, UC San Diego, and com-munity-based agencies on both sides of the border, the UCSD CommunityStations are designed to spatialize justice in the border region and mobi-lize cross-border citizenship through cultural action.

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As this book goes to print, the world is burning: pandemic and runaway climate change met with science denial; accelerating migration met with resurgent nativism and border building everywhere; dramatic social inequality met with disregard or tepid neoliberal antidotes; the return of fascism, populism and war in Europe; the dismantling of women’s rights

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in the US; and undergirding everything perhaps, the dramatic unraveling of public trust. In every dimension, in every corner of the world, we are facing the consequences of polarizing private and public interests. It is difficult some days to stay optimistic, to resist the pull of defeatism, and feelings of inevitability and futility. And we reflect on the meaning of sharing this work now. But our community partners always help us recen-ter, reminding us every day that spatial practices can do more—must do more—than ride these waves of history. We hope that sharing this work, at this charged moment, will contribute to accelerating dialogue and commitment among architects, urbanists and design schools everywhere to resist injustice and ecosocial catastrophe, and to engage in solidaristic modes of operation.

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Section I:

ESSAYS

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1 Conflict is generative

2 Informality is Praxis

3 Co-Producing the City with Others

4 Where is Our Public Imagination?

5 A Practice of Mediation: Top-Down / Bottom-Up

Section I:

ESSAYS

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Borders Localize Global Injustice

To remain neutral in face of social and economic injustice is to be com-plicit with the institutions and processes that perpetuate it. We challenge the hegemony of neoliberal urban development patterns across the world in recent decades, the damages it has inflicted to our collective econom-ic, social and natural resources, and the gap it has widened between rich and poor.

We live and work in a zone of conflict and disparity that divides two cities, two countries, two continents, two hemispheres. The border cities of San Diego, California, and Tijuana, BC, Mexico, share the Western hemisphere’s busiest land crossing, with 100,000 crossings every day. Our region exemplifies the global dynamics of uneven urban growth of the last decades. From the start, our research-based architecture prac-tice has forwarded the San Diego–Tijuana border region as a global laboratory for engaging the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, urban informality, climate change, the thickening of border walls and the decline of public thinking. As the third decade of the twenty-first century unfolds, this region is the main site of arrival for people seeking asylum from Central American violence, poverty and the accelerating impacts of climate change. Global injustice is intensely local here.

Our work localizes these global dynamics—“localizes the global”—from a critical distanceto a critical proximity. It shifts focus and narrative from the abstraction of globalization “out there” somewhere to the here-and-now of the local physical territory and its sociopolitical dynamics. This does not mean privileging one scale over the other. Advancing egali-tarian and multilateral forms of governance demands that we oscillate imaginatively across scales, and seek new critical correspondences between the global, the regional, the national and the local. In our prac-tice, we engage the normative, institutional, territorial, spatial, social and environmental conflicts and ruptures generated by discriminatory zoning, the militarization of policing and the socioeconomic inequalities in today’s neoliberal city. Our immediate social, geographic, environmen-tal and political context has been our point of entry into these crises across the world, for understanding how global conflict shapes contested power relations inscribed in the everyday lives of people.

Conflict isgenerative

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Border regions are a microcosm of the conflicts and injustices that glob-alization has inflicted on the world’s most vulnerable people: poverty, environmental degradation, accelerating migration, labor exploitation, human trafficking, gender and racial violence, explosive urbanization, unchecked privatization, the decimation of public trust, etc. Global forces of division and control are amplified in critical thresholds across the planet, like the San Diego–Tijuana border, where we live and work. Racist political narratives continue to portray this region as a site of criminality and violence. A politics of fragmentation and division reinforce public perceptions of the border as a barrier separating hostile oppositions. In a time of global closure, this border is emblematic of anti-immigration panic everywhere, stoked by the xenophobic and protectionist agendas of Trumpism, Brexit and far-right movements across the world. Nativism shows its face with impunity, boldly fragmenting regional and local terri-tories into archipelagos of exception, surveillance and exclusion, and physicalizing everywhere what can only be described as “urbanizations of fear.”

But this is nothing new: convergences between militarization and urbanization are a perennial history. The spatial and political history of our region is another nineteenth-century story of annexation and partition, with a long legacy of violence and radical disparity. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the border wall between the US and Mexico per-formed like a line in the sand, with markers and light fences demarcating where one country began and the other ended. People in border towns moved quite freely back and forth to work, to visit family and friends. Children on both sides hopped the fence in play, and hopped back as easily. But over the last decades, the invisible line that was rendered arbitrarily at one point in history has hardened, thickened. The border has become militarized with massive force and surveillance infrastructure. A series of obelisks across the open landscape in the latter part of the nine-teenth-century, a chain-link fence in the 1960s, a steel wall constructed with temporary landing mats discarded by the US military after Opera-tion Desert Storm in Iraq in the 1990s, a concrete pylon wall crowned by electrified coils and panoptic night-vision cameras in the 2000s, and a proposed thirty-foot-high continental wall in 2016, which was erected in various places, demonstrate a deepening penetration of division and sur-veillance that have been part of everyday life for border communities in this region for the last 150 years. Now, the border performs more like a partition than a boundary because its purpose is less to demarcate than to separate, and to willfully obstruct the flows that have always defined life in this region.

The hardening of the border wall at San Diego–Tijuana physicalizes the erosion of public thinking in the US—the dismantling of the social wel-fare state and the expansion of economic austerity. A newly expanded border checkpoint in San Ysidro, California, has transformed San Diego into the world’s largest gated community, subordinating collective life in this region to the fragmentation and privatization of our collective eco-nomic and social assets.

But we are not unique. The protectionist urge to build borders alwaysintensifies when neoliberal agendas accelerate and hijack our politics. This is as true of Fortress Europe as it is at the US-Mexico border. Both are fueled by a collective obsession with sovereignty, national self-determination, security, economic greed and social paranoia against the “barbarian invasion,” typically aligned with a populist commitment to

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market “freedoms.” Instead of seeing borders as fluid zones of opportuni-ty—their ideal of a “borderless” free market—these radically conservative cultural-economic agendas yield a rigid grid of global containment. The result is a global weakening of public institutions, geopolitical tensions—zones of overproduction, investment and excess on the one hand, and zones of scarcity, disinvestment and marginalization on the other—yield-ing dramatic socioeconomic disparities between rich and poor, between white and brown and between documented and undocumented, with new borders erected between them.

The Wall Is Everywhere

In a conversation many years ago, Mexican writer and social critic Carlos Monsiváis described the San Diego–Tijuana border wall as “portable.” We carry the psychic wall within ourselves, he said, as we experience the physical wall from without, dividing our dreams and aspirations from the opportunities available to achieve them. This psycho-spatial rupture manifests perhaps most profoundly at a particular place along the wall’s trajectory. As one travels alongside the border westbound, moving through the northernmost edges of Tijuana, one arrives finally at the Pacific Ocean. The wall continues its journey into the ocean for around 200 feet before it finally sinks, materializing the psychological land-scapes of ambiguity and contradiction that define these border cities.

The metropolitan identities of San Diego and Tijuana represent divergent socioeconomic and political universes. While San Diego calls itself “America’s Finest City,” Tijuana is viewed in Mexico as a decadent, transient world unto itself, distinct from and somehow inferior to the rest of the country. It is a region defined by radical disparity, where some of the wealthiest housing subdivisions in the United States sit only twenty minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America. It is a region of contrary attitudes to constructing the territory, side by side, overlapping and colliding, entangled in a double desire, between a shared destiny and a perennial divorce.

San Diego is emblematic of an urbanism of segregation and control epitomized by the master-planned and gated communities that constituteits sprawl. The border wall itself symbolizes a puritan planning tradition grounded in principles of separation and exclusion, intended to neutral-ize the heterogeneity and social complexity of the contemporary city. The wall is a dam that keeps Tijuana’s chaotic growth from contaminat-ing San Diego’s picturesque subdivisions. San Diego’s periphery reveals a massive eradication of topography, as the bulldozers of private devel-opment flatten the ground to install one-dimensional pads for the construction of cheap, cookie-cutter housing projects. This top-down sprawl not only neutralizes the character of the ground and erases its historical, environmental, cultural and civic meanings, but also imprints on it, as Mike Davis has observed, an ecology of fear that ultimately flattens, along its path, a crucial sense of political will and social respon-sibility.2Tijuana’s periphery, on the other hand, has mitigated distance by intensively urbanizing as a conurbation of informal, favela-like nomad-ic settlements. Tijuana’s informal communities are growing faster than the urban core they surround, creating a different set of rules for devel-opment and blurring distinctions between the urban, the suburban and the rural.

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From the perspective of borders, it is interesting that these radical con-trasts that distinguish San Diego and Tijuana have diminished over time as the two cities and their urban growth patterns have begun to emulate and cross-contaminate one another. San Diego–style gated communities and signature mini-malls have sprung up on Tijuana’s periphery, while Tijuana’s random patterns of density and mixed use, along with its informal economies, have crept northward into many of San Diego’s neighbor-hoods. In every global capital, an underdeveloped world exists, and every developing city replicates globalization. The global import-export pro-cesses that cause cities across the world to recycle symbols of progress suggest that, in fact, the periphery of the generic global metropolis is inspired by the suburban code of Southern California sprawl.

The wall, then, is portable and replicable. Local conflicts between density and sprawl, between formal and informal urbanizations, between wealth and poverty, mirror exclusionary urbanization across the world. Our border wall dynamics are replicated in cities and regions everywhere, as municipal, state and federal agencies compartmentalize territory through rigid jurisdictional boundaries that disrupt a fluid continuum of interdependences. What emerges is a global urban asymmetry, dividing enclaves of wealth and rings of poverty that surround and service them. In San Diego–Tijuana, discriminatory urban policies enable mega-scale architectural complexes, permitting special economic zones and gated communities to barricade themselves against the complexity and ambi-guity of precarious zones and those who inhabit them—people who, through their labor, service the very neoliberal economy that excludes them.

Zones of Conflict:Sites of Urban and Political Creativity

Only the most myopic politics will conclude that building walls across continents can solve our problems. Instead of wishing the “other” away with guns and fences, we should engage and cooperate with those most impacted by our policies, with whom we can imagine interdependent futures. A sense of mutual recognition and responsibility should guide US-Mexico relations and conversations, recognizing that the challenges of Mexico and Central America, are the challenges of the US too. More-over, the border wall that divides the US from Mexico, while far from the daily lives of most Americans, is invisibly reproduced in neighborhoods across the US, from Ferguson to Chicago, where public divestment, mar-ginalization, racism and inequality divide communities and institutions and enflame urban violence.

A capacity to think critically and politically in a world of flux and injustice was the touchstone of the historic avant-garde. Today, thinking critically and politically as an architect and urbanist means taking a posi-tion about where and when not to build, as much as where and when to build, for whom and why. These questions can shape a critical spatial practiceto realign the ethical and the aesthetic in the architectural field. We are not interested in designing a more efficient or beautiful border wall; we do not want to participate in the spatialization of injustice. For us, shifting geopolitical boundaries, neoliberal patterns of development, explosive urban inequality, diversifying social and cultural demographics,

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the migration of labor and the redeployment of manufacturing centers across hemispheres have provoked us to reconsider our practice.

Over the last decades, we have been rethinking of the role of archi-tecture within geographies of conflict, developing new conceptual frameworks as well as new procedures of engagement. Shifting one’s gaze from privileged sites of development to peripheral zones of conflict demands a new praxis.

Countering racist political narratives that criminalize our region and its inhabitants, we mobilize different stories, counternarratives that are “grounded” in the voices of those who live here. In this sense, our work is deeply ethnographic and committed to practices of always listening.3Through this work over many years, we have encountered astonishing urban and political creativity across the border region, ingenious bottom-up strategies of coexistence and cooperation that regularly transgress the fixity of boundaries. As we see it, the most compelling examples of urbanization today arise not from within sites of stability and economic power but from within sites of crisis like ours, where the conflicts betweentop-down and bottom-up urban agendas are most profound.

For us, conflict is a creative tool. Exposing the drivers of urban inequal-ityand challenging exclusionary policies is the first act in producing a more experimental architecture. Taking urban conflict as one’s point of departure, as an operational tool, requires expanded modes of practice. We believe that architects can negotiate today’s urban conflicts, can become interlocutors of institutional memory, can reimagine urban socia-bility and encounter, and can design new programmatic, formal and aesthetic categories that problematize relations between the natural, the social and the spatial. In other words, architects can engage critically the conditions that have produced our urban crises. We don’t have to surrender professionally to the neutral and largely decorative enterprise of urban design and planning today, which typically bolsters and camou-flages the greedy politics of urban development.

In our practice, architecture is not only or primarily about spatial-material intervention, but about constructing methods for visualizing the urban collisions between top-down policies of exclusionary urbanization and bottom-up social and ecological practices, and designing civic pro-cesses for creative mediation and intervention.4We believe that urban conflict can catalyze design. The San Diego–Tijuana border is the conflict zone where we work. Our practice is “embedded” here, but we are also committed to visualizing flows, correspondences and interdependencies between local, regional and global dynamics. Over time, we have curated a series of cross-border dialogues and nomadic public performances on both sides of the border wall to raise awareness of what’s shared and what’s at stake in refusing to collaborate. Ultimately, these dialogical community processes have been a point of entry for our practice, helping to rearticulate ideas of citizenship beyond the nation-state and seek new strategies of urban interdependence and regional collective action.

Our projects always begin with a conflict diagram, a research-based process that exposes, names and visualizes the contested political, social and economic dynamics that define a particular urban crisis, as a prereq-uisite for urban and architectural intervention. For us, this is a double project of critical research and action. It begins with engaging conflict dialectically and exposing hidden institutional histories in order to assem-ble a more accurate, anticipatory urban research and design intervention. This requires taking “detours” to engage diverse urban domains—social

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justice, ethics, law, economics, environment and politics—that have until now remained largely peripheral to design.

In other words, visualizing urban conflict becomes a method for generating propositions that are rooted in the controversies, contingen-cies and opportunities of a given site, an anticipatory framework that sets up the terms for intervention. In this sense, research-based process-es help to expose complex vectors of power in any condition, but they become projective and operative, constructing a scaffold upon which “things can happen.”

Visualizing the political does not stop at naming or “measuring” the conditions. At some point, critique must move toward proposition and action to avoid “analysis paralysis”—with the identification of strategies to uproot and challenge urban inequality, including cultural strategies to render the complexity of urban conflict more accessible to diverse pub-lics. In our practice, we design programmatic frameworks to reorganize institutional protocols, knowledges and resources, as well as images, diagrams, storyboards and cartographies that can communicate urban complexity and increase community capacities for political action.

Risking professional suicide as architects, we maintain that building more equitable and democratic cities today is not about better buildings or even better infrastructure, but about fundamentally reorganizing the intersections of society, ecology, economy, politics and space. A critical understanding of urban conflict becomes the material for architects in our time, the most important tool we have for reimagining the city today.

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While the “global city” has been organized through top-down urban logics of consumption, leisure and display, the neighborhoods at the periphery that fuel these zones of economic power with cheap labor are sites of bottom-up economic productivity and urban resilience. At the periphery, alternative economies thrive; informal social, environmental and spatial configurations emerge to tackle conditions of scarcity. Emergent urban practices are redefining existing norms of ownership in the city today and shaping a new political economy of urban growth that is typically off the radar of those who define the formal categories of urban develop-ment. In our research, we are committed to engaging, understanding and translating these stealth urban practices of resilience and adaptation to challenge the formal protocols of urban development today.

What first brought us together, from the diverse vantages of political theory and architecture, was our shared interest in informality. We were both inspired by the bottom-up resilience and ingenuity of people who inhabit the periphery of cities in conditions of scarcity—how they assemblehousing and infrastructure, markets of exchange, governance practices, and general strategies of collective survival and solidarity. We were both drawn to the emergent and the unplanned, inspired by unexpected genius and the endogenous springs of bottom-up collective action. We were both also critical of an obsession in architecture and urbanism with form and aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake, and a neglect of the social, economic and political vectors that constitute urban space. The informal refers to the performative agency of people in conditions of emergency construct-ing their own spaces and economic relations in the absence of formal support, and constituting a set of bottom-up strategies that counter and transgress imposed political boundaries and top-down economic models. Ours has been a double task: while we visualize evidence that the infor-mal emerges from urban injustice, we also partner with agencies that are mobilizing these energies as bottom-up power to spatialize social justice.

Revisiting the Formal-Informal Question:From Binary to Dialectic

By formal urbanization, we mean the model of institutional planning that gives shape to the city from a macro perspective. Formal planning can be generated through government-led public agendas that organize the city through a deliberate civic armature (historically articulated by public

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space and infrastructure) that is subsequently infilled with private inter-ventions; or, as is the case in recent years, in the absence of committed public leadership, through the dominance of private development inter-ests. This second pathway frequently results in a highly deficient and exclusionary public realm.

By informal urbanization, we mean the social, economic and spatial conditions that evolve endogenously, organically from the bottom-up. Informal, everyday urban dynamics can be understood as extra-official since they are often invisible to formal institutions of planning. These stealth urbanizations often evolve as micro-strategies of survival to addressthe urgent needs of displaced or marginalized populations. Sometimes they manifest as bottom-up acts of collective defiance and resistance to the privatization and gentrification of our cities. Survival urbanization has intensified in recent years with the explosive growth of cities across the planet and the rapid urbanization of the world’s populations produced by political instability, climate change, food scarcity and the neoliberalization of the world’s economy.

Some scholars and practitioners have been uncomfortable drawing a distinction between formal and informal urban dynamics. The informal itself, as a concept, is problematic to those who suggest that formal and informal are not mutually exclusive, and that polarizing them undermines a more emancipatory consensus agenda for the city. While we accept their hybridity in practice, we believe the conceptual binary helps to con-vey power structures, disparities and counter-reactions in the neoliberal city. Formal and informal urbanization frequently clash, and this conflict physically manifests in the city as urban inequality. As long as social and urban inequality exists, the excluded will always devise scrappy, experi-mental strategies of resilience and adaptation that challenge unjust policies and agendas, and some will resist more overtly. We think it is timeto reformulate the politics of difference as a tool to penetrate the drivers of inequality. Here, the dialectic between formal and informal systems becomes a device to visualize conflict, and to conceptualize new strate-gies that can mediate interfaces between top-down and bottom-up forces.

Designing a more socially and economically inclusive political econ-omy of urban development requires the knowledges and resources of both domains. For example, we envision top-down institutions of develop-ment becoming more literate about informal urban conditions, designing more agile management systems to facilitate emergent dynamics in the contemporary city, negotiating large and small scales, public, private and collective gradations, and incremental adaptive growth. The eruption of informal urbanization today requires that planners recalibrate the totaliz-ing abstraction of certain one-size-fits-all urban recipes. The shifting boundaries between top-down and bottom-up, formal and informal, pri-vate and public interests can demarcate a contested field from which to produce new urban and architectural paradigms.

Informal Lessons for the Formal City

Tensions between the top-down and the bottom-up take different shapes in the city. Historically, sites of wealth and power exist in relative proximi-ty to sites of precariousness and marginalization. In recent decades, as urban asymmetry has intensified, slums, gated luxury condominium tow-ers and special economic zones have come into closer adjacencies with

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each other. For example, La Limonada, the oldest metropolitan slum in Guatemala, is just minutes from the wealthy zonas10 and 14; just as Villa 31, Buenos Aires’s most noted slum, is adjacent to Puerto Madero, the newest luxury mega-development in the city. Uneven development often takes a syncretic shape, with the informal encroaching into formal urban systems, adapting the homogeneity of autonomous, closed-ended spa-tial frameworks into heterogeneous programmatic assemblages, where diverse uses coexist in unpredictable ways. Famously, this has been the destiny of many iconic urban and architectural projects in the Global South, such as Brasília and Chandigarh, whose formal organizational log-ics have been transformed on the ground through informal social and economic adaptations across time. Low-income neighborhoods in global capitals everywhere experience this same sort of alteration, reconfigured from the bottom-up by the hands of immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America, often fueled by remittances from abroad.

These bottom-up strategies of “encroachment” beyond the property line, and their informal economic circulations and spatial adaptations, can be reinterpreted as welcome strategies for tackling social-economic inequality and climate change today, a way to challenge closed-ended urban methods of top-down urban planning and demand new forms of accountability in our institutions. We believe there is much to learn from informal patterns of adaptation: about socializing infrastructure to antici-pate inclusion, about social-ecological transformation and about the temporalization of space. Informal urban processes demonstrate the pos-sibilities of reactivating productivity and social proximity in the city today. Architecture, as a material system, has long been an instrument of spatial colonization in conflict with ecological dynamics, freezing time and the destiny of the city into a fixed object at odds with the temporal social and economic contingencies of real life. Informal urban dynamics have hid-den social and economic value that should be first recognized and then fully activated in strategies for more inclusive urban development. The informal is more than a romantic anecdote or bricolage. It is the physical evidence of urban creativity and intelligence that should be translated into a fresh urban language that challenges our clichés and public poli-cies. What is infrastructure, housing, zoning? These formal categories are reinvented through human urgency in the informal sectors of the city.

In fact, we believe the most relevant urban practices and projects promoting social and economic inclusion today are emerging not from sites of economic power but from sites of scarcity and zones of conflict, where citizens themselves, pressed by socioeconomic injustice and necessity, are pushed to imagine alternative possibilities. It is from the sense of urgency that a new urban agenda is emerging, in which design and architecture are encroaching into the fragmented and discrimina-tory policies and economics responsible for producing inequality and marginalization. Again, we believe that a fundamental reorganization of social and economic relations—and not buildings—is the key to a more democratic and equitable city.

But informal urban practices are typically disregarded by planners, marginalized as something to avoid, to protect oneself from, to zone out of sight, to whitewash or clear, certainly nothing one would want to embrace or emulate or learn from. Through our work we challenge these biases, advancing informal neighborhoods not as sites of blight but of local productivity with important lessons for the “formal city.” While we condemn the economic forces that marginalize people in slums, we

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believe that the most compelling practices of inclusive urbanization are emerging from within these peripheral sites of scarcity. Today, we must rethink the future of the city from the periphery, where alternative pro-cesses of urban growth are being shaped stealthily from the bottom-up. These nonconforming urban processes should not be marginalized from our “idea” of the city. The self-built logics, the ingenious practices of structural and spatial retrofit, adaptation and resiliency, the vibrancy of informal market dynamics, the solidarity of communities confronting scarcity and engendering new forms of collaborative local governance demonstrate other ways of constructing the city and challenge the hege-monic neoliberal paradigm of urban development today.

While our design methods are inspired by informal urbanization, the interface between the top-down and the bottom-up is our main site of intervention. Top-down urban planning is necessary to anticipate territo-rial organizational logics, the scaling up of sustainable urban-ecological interactions and the efficient management and distribution of resources. But macro planning must not underestimate the micro patterns of com-munity development. The central questions here are: How do we mediate the planned and the unplanned? Can macro planning absorb the proce-dural intelligence of informal urbanization and its capacity to anticipate and negotiate the interface between spaces, resources, boundaries and the programmatic contingency of social density?

We are interested in translating the operative procedures of informal urbanization into new methods of urban intervention, curating a transfer of knowledge from the bottom-up to top-down institutions and policy-makers. This means designing new systems of political representation that visualize the potential of these emergent and invisible urban practices from below and mobilizing this evidence to demand more inclusive urban public policy and to protect those who urgently need protection. Top-down public investment should support the spatial ingenuity of the bottom-up, reinterpreting informal urbanization as a mechanism for a more just and productive city. Urban zoning should not penalize alternative densities and transitional uses. It should be reconceived as a generative force to anticipate local economy and activity, and respond to emergent social and economic necessities. Housing affordability should be reimagined through the hidden value of community sweat equity and participation; urban infrastructure should be rearticulated as a hybrid, flexible and resilient framework for social integration. Just as global warming is forcing us to reimagine the city as a more porous and resilient urban ecology, acceler-ating global migration today should provoke us to reimagine urban infra-structure as a mechanism for inclusion and integration. In other words, urban infrastructure must be understood as more than freeways, bridges or other singular-use urban systems. Infrastructure must be able to absorbthe migratory effects of climate change, poverty and political instability.

The Informal as Praxis

Engaging informal processes projectively, with an equitable public vision, suggests an expanded role for architecture in constructing the city today. We have been critical of the autonomous, self-referential language of the architectural field, articulating the city formally as a collection of dis-crete objects existing above a neutral speculative platform shaped by the forces of the market. Instead, we see the potential of architecture as

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a relational system that navigates complex historical, environmental, cul-tural, social, economic and political forces in the city, generating a more complex framework for urbanization itself. We investigate the spatial consequences of informal social and economic systems, whose design logics are not resolved a priori, but evolve incrementally, negotiating multiple and often contested metropolitan variables in real time. In infor-mal settlements, buildings perform as anticipatory scaffolds. A house might begin with a pad and a frame. As resources emerge, so follow spac-es; a second floor might evolve, threaded into the first. Habitation leads, spaces follow, nothing is wasted, everything is useful. This is why the exterior assemblage of informal houses resembles the interiors, as the aesthetic of the house is not determined by the resolution of an architec-tural object but reflects the memory of its own evolution.

Although many in the design and art worlds have recognized great aesthetic beauty in the ingenious bricolageof informal urbanization, we have focused on these environments not for what they look like, but for the ways in which they perform. They reveal a set of urban procedures, a political economy of urban cohabitation that holds clues for designing more equitable urban policy.

An important research agenda for us has been to produce new con-ceptions and interpretations of the informal. For us, the “informal” is not an aesthetic category or style but a praxis, referring to the social, political, economic and spatial processes that emerge extra-officially from the bottom-up. Instead of a fixed image, we see the informal as a set of urban operations that transgress imposed political boundaries and top-down economic models. In the context of thinking beyond “style,” recall Christopher Alexander’s theories of “pattern language” in the 1960s, and how they were hijacked by the field of architecture and reduced to a sty-listic sense of regionalism and a folkloric idea of the vernacular.5A more critical reading of Alexander would recognize that language is less a fixed category than a performative system capable of reorganizing the political economy of building. Likewise, we are interested in translating the actual functions of informal practices into new strategies of urban intervention to challenge existing formal protocols of economic development.

Through this lens, we see the informal not as a thing but as a set of practices which detonates traditional notions of site specificity and con-text into a more complex system of hidden socioeconomic exchanges. We see the informal as the urban unwanted, that which is left over after the pristine presence of architecture with capital “A” has been usurped and transformed into tenuous scaffolds for social encounter. Because of our work in peripheral neighborhoods at the US-Mexico border, we also see the informal as a site from which to shape new interpretations of community and citizenship within divided territories.

In the border cities of Tijuana and San Diego, a context of rigid sur-veillance and exclusion, neighborhoods on both sides of the border wall have negotiated scarcity and public alienation by constructing alternative urbanisms of resilience and adaptation from the bottom-up. Informal set-tlements in Tijuana, for example, build themselves by repurposing urban waste from San Diego, transforming incrementally through time from emergency dwellings to permanent homes. As immigrants travel north in search of new opportunities, they bring into San Diego their own practic-es of urban retrofit and adaptation. An informal business operates from a garage or shed; a nonconforming granny flat is built in the backyard to support an extended family or a small business. These informal economies

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and patterns of density have fundamentally altered the urban fabric of many older, low-income American neighborhoods—the places where immigrants land.

These bidirectional transborder dynamics constitute an urban politi-cal economy of adaptation, retrofit and reuse; they suggest new ways of conceptualizing urbanization across this divided territory and challenge established top-down conceptions of belonging. In other words, these informal cross-border urban flows have also provoked us to reimagine the idea of citizenship as a creative urban practice, rooted in the bottom-up agency of the marginalized. Citizenship should mirror the formal and informal relations among people in everyday life. Belonging is an intense-ly practical matter, localized through the alteration and negotiation of boundaries, informal participatory governance, and the mobilization of informal economies and community development strategies.

We believe these bottom-up practices and interdependencies are the building blocks for a new kind of regional citizenship that has great significance for planetary urbanization as well. We see citizenship not as an identity designed and legitimated from above (the conventional way of thinking about citizenship), but rather as a set of performative urban actions from below that often connect people across the border through practices of flow and exchange. This bottom-up action can take the shape of emergent, everyday lived practices among marginalized communities, or more deliberate strategies of urban intervention designed to counter or resist exclusionary political and economic power.

A community is always in dialogue with its immediate social and eco-logical environment; this is what defines its political nature. But when this relationship is disrupted and its productive capacity splintered by the way jurisdictional power is imposed, it is necessary to find a means of recuperat-ing its agency. This agency and activism often manifest in informal urbaniza-tion, which we see not only as an image of institutional alienation, poverty and exploitation but also as a set of everyday practices in marginalized communities, powerful evidence of bottom-up political and urban agency.

Informal urbanization is typically invisible to formal institutions, and it needs translation and political representation. In other words, informal urban practices need resources and mediating agencies that can repre-sent their intelligence and demand accountability and support from top-down institutions. We do not celebrate informality to let formal insti-tutions off the hook. While the creativity and emergent entrepreneurship in informal communities is compelling, truly awesome sometimes, we resist unwittingly conveying to governments that they are capable of sus-taining themselves without public support and that institutions can there-fore ethically unplug. Similarly, we have resisted gestures that give property titles to slum dwellers to “include” them in the official economy without protection mechanisms that guarantee social and environmental justice. Formalizing slums risks transforming these environments into laboratories of neoliberal economic tinkering and speculation, incentiviz-ing the improvement and sale of parcels as commodities, without any assurances against exploitation by profit logics that neglect local com-munities and their social and economic well-being.

Our creative fields are well positioned to expand design into new urban strategies—translational, pedagogical and curatorial—to engage the informal and transform the political. Beyond architectural form, archi-tects can be designers of political and civic processes to frame a more inclusive urbanization.

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Neoliberal “Urban Molotovs”

The metropolitan explosion of global cities across the world in the last decades was driven by a neoliberal political economy that prioritized deregulation, privatization, disinvestment and austerity. This unprece-dented urban growth concentrated wealth in privileged urban centers and coincided with an equally unprecedented explosion of slums at the edges. This asymmetry lies at the heart of today’s urban crises, a pattern that is consistent everywhere.

The combination of market-driven speculative urbanization and the erosion of the social safety net has exacerbated inequality in cities across the world. It is the same story everywhere: an “urban Molotov cocktail” comprised of unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, rising living costs and shrinking public support systems, forcing the displacement of many residents in urban communities. These disparities seem to be standard-ized, by-design. In the US, for instance, in the last decades, economic and land-use policies were connected to particular instruments of finan-cialization and transformed many downtowns and other special economic zones into bubbles of wealth, enabling them to concentrate economic and political power through urban redevelopment corporations. For decades, tax-increment law enabled downtown San Diego, for example, to retain tax-revenue-generated urban development, effectively disenfranchising the diverse urban neighborhoods surrounding it, a border which is often demarcated physically with massive freeways—de facto infrastructures of segregation.

Even though the “return to downtown” was a welcome agenda in the early eighties after the postwar urban flight to the suburbs, its redevelop-ment strategies into the mid-2000s ended up accelerating gentrification at a massive scale. Accompanied by luxury condominium towers and hotels, sports stadia, convention centers and the ubiquitous corporate commercial franchises catering to tourism, these exclusionary economic development recipes foreclosed possibilities for residents of older communities, small businesses, alternative cultural agencies and young populations to remain downtown, as they had for decades when it was affordable to live there.

Co-Producing the Citywith Others

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Co-Producing the Citywith Others

Ten years after the economic crisis of 2008, these asymmetric patterns of urban development had become the norm. Developer-driven revitalization is accelerating gentrification across US cities, bleeding into the edges of poor neighborhoods immediately adjacent to wealthy downtowns. Today, mega redevelopment projects are a formidable bubble of land specula-tion that inflate skyrocketing real-estate markets. Many of us thought this had finally imploded and would give way to new checks and balances and institutional reform across urban development industries. But recent federal economic policies like “opportunity zones” in both Democratic and Republican administrations cement the triumph of the private over the public, and exacerbate inequality and gentrification. “Opportunity zones” are effectively metropolitan tax havens for private developers, camou-flaged as socially concerned, equitable urban development.

The Triumph of the Private

Today more than ever, the private developer is the chief protagonist in the development of the city, where free-market speculation and deregulation produce algorithms for building that undermine community benefit. This is the result of a weakened top-down public and the loss of a public urbanframework within which buildings, even understood as commodities, could perform in more democratic and civic ways. Moreover, as cities compete to seduce the corporate headquarters of multinational corpora-tions and their franchises to compensate for diminishing tax revenues, the public now sponsorsthe private, as many privatized urban behemothssiphon public subsidies to enable their development proformas.

The emblematic case, as the second decade of the twenty-first cen-tury comes to an end, is Hudson Yards in New York City. This neoliberal urban stew is made of the same ingredients: tax-break-sponsored privat-ization, suburban theming and urban gating comprising millions of square feet of luxury housing, corporate office space and exclusive retail programs installed on an anti-street. A $1.5bn tabula rasahovers above the ruins of public transportation infrastructure. This mega project physi-calizes the concentration of economic and political power in urban development at the expense of a more distributive political economy that might lift all neighborhoods in the city. As New York Timesarchitecture critic Michael Kimmelman described Hudson Yards: “at heart, [it] is a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent.”6The creation of this exclusive luxury palace at the expense of collective resources follows the same logics as the urban development processes we’ve witnessed in London, Istanbul, Buenos Aires and elsewhere over the last decades, where large swaths of public land were given to private developers in the name of economic growth.

Camouflaging Privatization with “Style” and “Innovation”

Beyond free-market fakes, we lack alternative approaches to a public urban reality.7Even seemingly innovative agendas such as “New Urbanism” and the “Creative Class” have become instruments for municipally endorsed privatization that exacerbates inequality. Dressing suburbia with facadesof cityhood while suburbanizing center-city neighborhoods,

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New Urbanist recipes typically prioritize historicist and form-based codes over social inclusion. In other words, New Urbanism has generally reduced the housing crisis to a question of “style” without addressing the foundational crisis: lack of affordability, community participation and public ownership. And while its more human-centric planning approach-es were a welcome agenda for municipalities to retrofit the big-box, asphalt-covered suburbanization of the sprawling city of the 1980s and 1990s through notions of smart growth, walkability and livability, these urban mechanisms too often became rhetorical packages of urban “ame-nities” that camouflaged privatization.

Equally, the Creative Class agenda capitalizes on the aesthetics of a cosmopolitan hipster culture of arts, food and loft living, in which artists and cultural producers become reluctant brokers of gentrification. What the Creative Class agenda does not seem to advocate is affordable rents or mechanisms to incentivize bottom-up local economy as prerequisite to cultural development. As Ernest Hemingway reminds us in the opening pages of A Movable Feast, Paris became a magnet for writers and artists in the 1920s not because of its celebrated cosmopolitan aura and “bohe-mian atmosphere,” but because of its affordable rents.

With their veneers of beautification and innovation, and often the commodification of the very cultures that have been priced out of the neighborhood, both of these neoliberal urban trends have accelerated gentrification and have done little to advance social or economic justice in the city. Adopted by many municipalities across the US, they do not rethink affordability or existing models of property ownership. They over-look entirely the value of social participation and the role communities might play in co-producing housing and redefining ownership in more inclusive, collective ways.

Adding to this portfolio of questionable progressive urban renewal agendas, even historic preservation has become a tool to camouflage private agendas as public benefit, resulting in the adaptive reuse of older urban fabrics as theme parks and exclusive economic zones, preventing local communities from benefitting from these improvements. As Michael Henry Adams laments regarding the gentrification of Harlem: “every new building, every historic renovation, every boutique clothing shop—indeed,every tree and every flower in every park improvement—is not a life-en-hancing benefit, but a harbinger of a local community's own displacement.”8

While often well-intentioned in their aspirations for restructuring a more egalitarian, middle-class urbanization, both New Urbanism and the Creative Class agenda fail to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal devel-opment, but instead camouflage it beneath a consumerist veneer of innovation and multicultural inclusion. Remaining neutral in their position on urban inequality,9they surrendered the kind of political advocacy nec-essary for social and economic justice—likely because they hoped the market would take care of “those things.”

Exclusionary Lending and Zoning by Design

Gentrification is ultimately the result of deliberate economic and urban policies through which zoning and lending align to aggravate exclusion. While zoning should be an important framework for regulating unchecked, irresponsible urban speculation and guaranteeing social and environmen-tal welfare, it has historically been the opposite: a design tool for

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segregating urban development, categorizing and dividing the metropol-itan field and splintering everyday life. There is ample evidence that exclusionary land uses and real-estate economic modeling segregate by income and race, resulting in long-term urban and social decay. The urban ruins of redlining, for example, the radical institutional mapping process that targeted and racially profiled urban areas for disinvestment, are spa-tial evidence of these processes, and the foundation of current racist economic zoning policies that deliberately block denser, affordable mul-tifamily housing across the city. This is especially important as climate change demands new models of inclusive densification to challenge irre-sponsible sprawl. In sum, when lending and zoning align to segregate by design, they become the most powerful drivers of structural inequality and exclusion.

Downtowns across the United States have remained bubbles of wealth, while the older neighborhoods that surround them have remained sites of disinvestment. These marginalized, low-income areas of the city become sanctuary spaces where immigrants settle. The cook, the janitor, the maid, the busboy, the nanny and the gardener live here. In other words, it is within these communities at the edges of the older metro areas that a ready-made blue-collar workforce awaits to service the luxury hotels and condominium towers of downtown and the McMansions of the new suburbs. These mid-city neighborhoods are service-sector communities supporting commodified lifestyles in adjacent zones of wealth.

What rents and housing markets will be available to this laboring class? What kind of affordability do these communities require to accom-modate their low wages? What kinds of mixed uses will increase their capacity for entrepreneurship? There are currently not too many options. According to the 2019 housing census, San Diego has the second least affordable housing market in the US, with only eleven percent of house-holds capable of affording the median-price home of $600,000.10

The marriage of immigrant labor and neoliberal urbanization has in many ways defined the histories of urban growth in cities across the world,reinforcing the proximity of precarity and wealth and exacerbating the crisis of housing affordability. The suburbs of Paris, for example, on the other side of the Périphérique—the border-like ring road that envelopes historic Paris—are dotted with old immigrant communities who have historically been ghettoized in social housing slabs to service gentrified Paris. Arab Emirate cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi have built migrant labor housing camps to facilitate the construction of their dream castles in the desert, and many California cities and economies continue to depend on the cheap labor of Mexican migrants who have historically worked the agricultural fields of Imperial Valley and Central California, and supplied the majority of service-sector labor in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, where housing is scarce and expensive.

Affordable housing financialization has systematically prevented community-based agencies from taking a more meaningful role in co-producing housing. Currently, an affordable housing developer can qualify for tax credits only by