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Tijuana: life on the political equator Tijuana: life on the political equator
(about 2 months later)
“Estoy “Estoy al límite,” reads the graffiti in two-foot-high letters on the steel fence – I’m at the limit. This rusty wall is the edge of Mexico, and the end of Latin America. Driving along it, on a dirt road, the border is something of an anti-climax. Forget the fact that it looks like you could plough through this particular section with the right 4x4, the landscape around it is patchily inhabited and has all the hallmarks of a non-place. And yet this is the most significant line in the sand in the western hemisphere. On the other side, in the United States, is another universe.
al límite,” reads the graffiti in two-foot-high letters on the Teddy Cruz points to the building next to us, a bullring. “It’s great,” he says, “the very last building in Latin America before you get to the US is a bullring.” Even though he has been studying this border zone for more than a decade, he seems to have lost none of his enthusiasm for it. Originally from Guatemala, Cruz is an architect and professor of public culture and urbanism at the University of California, San Diego. He is also the foremost theorist of the Tijuana-San Diego border in terms of what happens when the urban culture of the developing world collides with that of the developed world. Both analyst and provocateur, for him this frontier zone is fizzing with potential, and he is using it to try to redefine the architect’s role in making cities.
steel fence – I’m at the limit. This rusty wall is the edge of The border between Tijuana and San Diego is the busiest land crossing in the world. There are an estimated 300,000 crossings a day – that’s more than 100 million a year. Since 9/11 vast sums have been spent on hardening this membrane, making it less porous. And yet it is predicted that after 2050 non-Hispanic whites will become a minority group in the US. As Mike Davis wrote over a decade ago: “These are millennial transformations with truly millennial implications for US politics and culture.”
Mexico, and the end of Latin America. Driving along it, on a dirt Tijuana is one of the fastest-growing cities in Mexico. With a population of nearly 2 million, coupled with San Diego it forms a transnational metropolitan region of more than 5 million. As the economies of these two cities are so closely linked, it would seem to make sense not to harden the divide but to embrace their symbiotic relationship. And that’s how it looks from San Diego City Hall, which recently opened a branch in Tijuana. The mayor’s office even prepared a bid for the 2024 Olympics to be hosted jointly by the two cities – an idea that the International Olympic Committee is not quite ready for.
road, the border is something of an anti-climax. Forget the fact that In one of those speculative reports full of foreboding about our urban future, UN-Habitat has predicted that this century metropolises will start joining up like blobs of mercury, crossing international borders to form urban mega-regions. Tijuana-San Diego is an intriguing prospect because the border is not just national but forms part of an imaginary line dividing the global South and North, the developing and developed worlds. This is what Cruz calls the political equator. The question is how the two worlds on either side of it can influence each other?
it looks like you could plough through this particular section with Los Laureles Canyon
the right 4x4, the landscape around it is patchily inhabited and has “This tells the whole story,” Cruz says, pointing to a slum that stretches along the Los Laureles Canyon. “This is the last informal settlement before the end of the continent.”We’re standing on a hill looking down into the canyon, where clusters of houses and parked cars line the dry riverbed and the valley walls. At one end of the canyon the houses come to a sudden stop, where the six-lane Benito Juárez highway cuts right across it. Running alongside the highway is the border fence and then, on the other side, a wildlife reserve. Shanty town on one side, national park on the other.
all the hallmarks of a non-place. And yet this is the most It’s an incredible panorama, but it has consequences. The road has now effectively plugged the canyon, which is part of the watershed system of the Tijuana River estuary. It looks arid now, but in heavy rains the water courses along the canyon, where these houses are, and can only escape through a drain in the berm wall. As people build on these hillsides they erode the topsoil, and the rain washes the sand and rubbish from the settlements into the nature reserve on the other side of the border.
significant line in the sand in the western hemisphere. On the other “Eighty-five thousand people live in this settlement,” says Cruz, as we head down into the Los Laureles Canyon. Right here at the border is where this colonia is most established. This is where the houses are most densely agglomerated, whereas if you walk along the canyon away from the border the houses begin to thin out. The paradox of that fact is that the closer these settlers are to escaping this place, the more of a place it is. The estuary just across the highway is a stopping-off point for birds migrating north, but this particular migration ends abruptly here.
side, in the United States, is another universe. Cruz has done pioneering work in Los Laureles. He was the first to point out that the waste from San Diego’s construction industry was being recycled into new homes here. Further along the valley, where the settlement is more precarious, the evidence is everywhere. “You see those yellow walls?” says Cruz, pointing to the side of a house. “Those are garage doors from San Diego.” Garage doors are a popular material in this canyon. The houses are works of assemblage, like habitable collages. Elsewhere, there are whole post-war prefab houses, simply transplanted from the San Diego suburbs by truck. In crowded areas these are sometimes raised up on metal stilts, right on top of another house – a phenomenon Cruz calls “club sandwich urbanisation". He was so captivated by this practice that at one point he collaborated with amaquiladora to cheaply manufacture space frames specifically for raising up old bungalows. It was a kit of parts for building club sandwiches.
Teddy Cruz The use of readymades like this has led Cruz to describe such neighbourhoods in Tijuana as purely productive, as opposed to the consumption-based model across the border. Here, San Diego’s waste is recycled to build new communities. Revealing this symbiotic relationship was one way of ascribing value to a type of settlement that is under-respected. “This level of activity needs to be amplified if we’re going to understand the sustainable city,” he says. But while Cruz celebrates such creativity, he is careful not to imply that such communities don’t still need help.
points to the building next to us, a bullring. “It’s great,” he Most of Los Laureles is informal, technically an illegal squatter settlement, but many of the residents have begun the process of acquiring land titles. It is a slow process through which residents incrementally buy legal status and in exchange get the utility services and the political representation that come with it.
says, “the very last building in Latin America before you get to This is the kind of administrative process that Cruz has been at pains to engage with. For him, architectural design is far less important than the bureaucratic systems that determine whether communities are empowered or disempowered. And this is precisely one of those cases, where informal communities have the resourcefulness to build homes out of garage doors but not the bureaucratic tools – a legal address, for instance – to find employment outside of the informal sector.
the US is a bullring.” Even though he has been studying this border In Mexico, unlike in many other Latin American countries, squatters still have rights to the land. The agrarian reforms of the Mexican Revolution created communal parcels of land called ejidos, on which people could squat. But during the neoliberalisation of the 1990s, the government gave people permission to sell the land, and you got developers buying it up for peanuts when it was worth millions. “The point is,” says Cruz, “we’ve gone from hyper-collectivity to hyper-privatisation, and nothing in between.”
zone for more than a decade, he seems to have lost none of his One of the challenges of a place like Los Laureles is that shift from a public to a private ownership of the land. And this is where the canyon starts to be a source of innovation. In recent years, Cruz has been working with the environmental activist Oscar Romo, who successfully managed to create a ‘watershed council’ for Los Laureles, a political body solely addressing the needs of the canyon. That notion alone, of a hydrological system being given the kind of political representation of a municipal district, was groundbreaking. Crucially, it gave the community, now defined by a watershed micro-basin, a voice in how infrastructure would be brought in.
enthusiasm for it. Originally from Guatemala, Cruz is an architect So as well as bringing in much-needed infrastructure and political representation, which it is already doing, the council would also be a vehicle for a hybrid form of development, in between the collective and the private. Neither top-down entrepreneurial development nor illegal bottom-up development, this would be a third way. What is so significant about Los Laureles is that, far from being just another Tijuana slum, this marginal community is being used to explore the fertile intersection of a watershed system, a new development model and a national border – a collision of the ecological, the social and the political.
and professor of public culture and urbanism at the University of “This is the laboratory for me in the next five years,” says Cruz. “The first thing Oscar and I want to do is to build a community centre/scientific field station to work on the pollution and water issues.” The big question is whether he can get San Diego’s administration to invest in a place like Los Laureles, whose trash washes across the border into the estuary, as a way of protecting its own ecological interests. “Instead of spending millions on the wall, they could invest in this community so that the poor shanty town becomes the protector of the rich estuary.”
California, San Diego. He is also the foremost theorist of the As the last informal settlement in Latin America, with its nose pressed against the window of the North, Los Laureles is already symbolic. But it is also significant as the nexus of three crucial issues. Firstly, it reveals the material flows across this border: San Diego’s waste flows south to be recycled into a barrio, while the barrio’s waste is washed north less productively. Secondly, by disrupting the watershed, the border is undermining the stability of an ecological system. And Cruz’s idea is that Los Laureles should be a micro case study in transnational collaboration, so that the barrio is seen not as a slum but effectively as the guardian of the local environment. Finally, the canyon is another potential testing ground for developing land cooperatively, much as Urban-Think Tank had imagined doing in San Agustín, so that the communal agenda is not lost in the formalisation process.
Tijuana-San Diego border in terms of what happens when the urban For Cruz, the collision of complex issues embodied by this easily overlooked community is of global significance. “Any discussion about the future of urbanisation will have to begin by understanding the coalition of geopolitical borders, marginal communities and natural resources,” he says. “That’s why this canyon is fundamental.”
culture of the developing world collides with that of the developed Learning from Tijuana
world. Both analyst and provocateur, for him this frontier zone is If the US–Mexico border marks the collision of the global North and South – of the formal and the predominantly informal – then that line is less clear at Tijuana than it used to be. With the city’s growing wealth, you now see expensive mansion houses a stone’s throw from colonias like Los Laureles. At the same time, rich San Diego – which Teddy Cruz likes to call, because of the border fence, the largest gated community in the world – has its poor neighbourhoods. And San Ysidro is one.
fizzing with potential, and he is using it to try to redefine the The streetscape here is noticeably more depressed, and the average household income is only $20,000 a year, which is poverty by Californian standards. Yet San Ysidro has utopian origins. It was founded by the Little Landers, the cooperative agriculture movement of the early twentieth century that believed in the modest aspiration of “a little land and a living”. This neighbourhood is now home to a Latino community. As Los Laureles is the last colonia in Mexico, this is the first neighbourhood across the border.
architect’s role in making cities. “This place is completely off the radar for the municipality, because the whole emphasis has been on the checkpoint,” says Cruz. “So I said, let’s set the agenda ourselves.”
The What Cruz has been instigating in San Ysidro is a new model of participative micro-development. He has been working with a local NGO called Casa Familiar, which does everything from providing social services to creating community art projects. With Casa Familiar as the backbone of the project, Cruz set about trying to turn two under-used plots of land into a dense programme of affordable housing and social amenities.
border between Tijuana and San Diego is the busiest land crossing in The idea is that the plots are carved up into thin slivers, each one with distinct zoning that would allow it to accommodate a different housing typology. One of the plots, which Cruz calls Living Rooms at the Border, would become a row of small apartments, a row of larger family houses, a row of live-work units for artists, and a row of flexible units providing temporary accommodation for guests or relatives. Squeezing so many different typologies onto one land parcel is part of what’s innovative about this scheme. But even more interesting is the set of social relations between them. One parcel of land is providing everything from a diverse range of housing to social amenities and a cultural programme. All of which is connected by a dense system of relations between the neighbours within the plot and the community outside it.
the world. There are an estimated 300,000 crossings a day – that’s What is potentially seminal about this project is the diverse set of land uses. “We need a new concept of density,” he says. “Density is still measured as a number of things – units – per acre. Why not measure it as a number of social and economic exchanges per acre?”
more than 100 million a year. Since 9/11 vast sums have been spent on In the informal economy, as can be witnessed across Latin America, people will find a way to put even the most unpromising or unlikely places to social and economic use. By contrast, the strict regulations governing any American city strive to segregate the domestic from the economic, and categorise the city into zones suitable for property speculation rather than rich social interaction. Can San Diego learn from the likes of Tijuana?
hardening this membrane, making it less porous. And yet it is Cruz recognises that social change and the creation of a more equitable city are not a question of good buildings. They are a question of civic imagination. And that is something that has been sorely eroded by the neo-liberal economic policies of recent decades. Cruz is a stern critic of America’s steady withdrawal from any notion of public responsibility. He talks of “the three slaps in the face of the American public” after the 2008 crash, namely: the Wall Street bailouts, the millions of foreclosures and the public spending cuts. “It wasn’t just an economic crisis but a cultural crisis, a failure of institutions,” he says. “A society that is anti-government, anti-taxes and anti-immigration only hurts the city.”
predicted that after 2050 non-Hispanic whites will become a minority So what is to be done? For Cruz, the only way forward is not to play by the existing rules, but to start redesigning those institutions. In San Ysidro, he has been seeking to change the zoning laws to allow a richer and more empowering community life. And changing legislation means engaging with what has been called the “dark matter” – not just the physical fabric of the city, but its regulations.
group in the US. As Mike Davis wrote over a decade ago: “These are millennial transformations with truly millennial implications for US This is the very definition of the activist architect, one who creates the conditions in which it is possible to make a meaningful difference. New social and political frameworks also need designing, and this i what Cruz has been doing in San Ysidro. “Designing the protocols or the interfaces between communities and spaces, this is what’s missing,” he says. It means giving people the tools they need to be economically productive, and giving them a voice in shaping how the community operates.
politics and culture.” In one sense, this could be misinterpreted as just yet more deregulation. But this is not a form of deregulation that enables more privatisation. On the contrary, it would allow more collective productivity and a more social neighbourhood. Here, the architect and the NGO become developers not with a view to profit, but to improve the prospects of the community. “We need to hijack the knowledge embedded in a developer’s spreadsheet,” says Cruz.
Tijuana In San Ysidro lies the seed of an idea, which is that the lessons of Latin America are gradually penetrating the border wall. What Cruz is trying to do is challenge the American conception of the city as a rigidly zoned thing servicing big business on the one hand and some quaint idea of the American dream on the other. Instead, the city could be more communal, more productive. And he’s drawing on the much more complex dynamics of informal economies, where no space goes to waste, where every inch belongs to a dense network of social and economic exchanges. That’s the model he’s using to try to transform policy in San Diego. The regulations need to be more flexible, more ambiguous, more easily adapted to people’s needs. This is not a Turneresque laissez-faire attitude, but an attempt to get the top-down to facilitate the bottom-up.
is one of the fastest-growing cities in Mexico. With a population of And while much of that may sound somewhat utopian, the San Ysidro project has had a stroke of luck that may soon make it a reality. Cruz is now the urban policy advisor to the mayor. As the director of the self-styled Civic Innovation Lab, he heads a think tank operating out of the fourth floor of City Hall, which means that San Diego now has a department modelled on the policy units that were so transformative in Bogotá and Medellín.
nearly 2 million, coupled with San Diego it forms a transnational What we have here is a Latin American architect, steeped in the lessons of Curitiba, Medellín and Tijuana, embedded within the administration of a major US city. And it’s clear that Cruz is establishing a bridgehead for the lessons of Latin America to find new relevance across what was once an unbridgeable divide. It’s early days, but the implications may well be radical.
metropolitan region of more than 5 million. As the economies of these
two cities are so closely linked, it would seem to make sense not to
harden the divide but to embrace their symbiotic relationship. And
that’s how it looks from San Diego City Hall, which recently opened
a branch in Tijuana. The mayor’s office even prepared a bid for the
2024 Olympics to be hosted jointly by the two cities – an idea that
the International Olympic Committee is not quite ready for.
In
one of those speculative reports full of foreboding about our urban
future, UN-Habitat has predicted that this century metropolises will
start joining up like blobs of mercury, crossing international
borders to form urban mega-regions. Tijuana-San Diego is an
intriguing prospect because the border is not just national but forms
part of an imaginary line dividing the global South and North, the
developing and developed worlds. This is what Cruz calls the
political equator. The question is how the two worlds on either
side of it can influence each other?
Los
Laureles Canyon
“This
tells the whole story,” Cruz says, pointing to a slum that
stretches along the Los Laureles Canyon. “This is the last informal
settlement before the end of the continent.”We’re standing on a
hill looking down into the canyon, where clusters of houses and
parked cars line the dry riverbed and the valley walls. At one end of
the canyon the houses come to a sudden stop, where the six-lane
Benito Juárez highway cuts right across it. Running alongside the
highway is the border fence and then, on the other side, a wildlife
reserve. Shanty town on one side, national park on the other.
It’s
an incredible panorama, but it has consequences. The road has now
effectively plugged the canyon, which is part of the watershed system
of the Tijuana River estuary. It looks arid now, but in heavy rains
the water courses along the canyon, where these houses are, and can
only escape through a drain in the berm wall. As people build on
these hillsides they erode the topsoil, and the rain washes the sand
and rubbish from the settlements into the nature reserve on the other
side of the border.
“Eighty-five
thousand people live in this settlement,” says Cruz, as we head
down into the Los Laureles Canyon. Right here at the border is where
this colonia is most established. This is where the houses are most
densely agglomerated, whereas if you walk along the canyon away from
the border the houses begin to thin out. The paradox of that fact is
that the closer these settlers are to escaping this place, the more
of a place it is. The estuary just across the highway is a
stopping-off point for birds migrating north, but this particular
migration ends abruptly here.
Cruz
has done pioneering work in Los Laureles. He was the first to point
out that the waste from San Diego’s construction industry was being
recycled into new homes here. Further along the valley, where the
settlement is more precarious, the evidence is everywhere. “You see
those yellow walls?” says Cruz, pointing to the side of a house. “Those are garage doors from San Diego.” Garage doors are a
popular material in this canyon. The houses are works of assemblage,
like habitable collages. Elsewhere, there are whole post-war prefab
houses, simply transplanted from the San Diego suburbs by truck. In
crowded areas these are sometimes raised up on metal stilts, right on
top of another house – a phenomenon Cruz calls “club sandwich
urbanisation". He was so captivated by this practice that at one
point he collaborated with amaquiladora to cheaply manufacture space
frames specifically for raising up old bungalows. It was a kit of
parts for building club sandwiches.
The
use of readymades like this has led Cruz to describe such
neighbourhoods in Tijuana as purely productive, as opposed to the
consumption-based model across the border. Here, San Diego’s waste
is recycled to build new communities. Revealing this symbiotic
relationship was one way of ascribing value to a type of settlement
that is under-respected. “This level of activity needs to be
amplified if we’re going to understand the sustainable city,” he
says. But while Cruz celebrates such creativity, he is careful not to
imply that such communities don’t still need help.
Most
of Los Laureles is informal, technically an illegal squatter
settlement, but many of the residents have begun the process of
acquiring land titles. It is a slow process through which residents
incrementally buy legal status and in exchange get the utility
services and the political representation that come with it.
This
is the kind of administrative process that Cruz has been at pains to
engage with. For him, architectural design is far less important than
the bureaucratic systems that determine whether communities are
empowered or disempowered. And this is precisely one of those cases,
where informal communities have the resourcefulness to build homes
out of garage doors but not the bureaucratic tools – a legal
address, for instance – to find employment outside of the informal
sector.
In
Mexico, unlike in many other Latin American countries, squatters
still have rights to the land. The agrarian reforms of the Mexican
Revolution created communal parcels of land called ejidos, on which
people could squat. But during the neoliberalisation of the 1990s,
the government gave people permission to sell the land, and you got
developers buying it up for peanuts when it was worth millions. “The
point is,” says Cruz, “we’ve gone from hyper-collectivity to
hyper-privatisation, and nothing in between.”
One
of the challenges of a place like Los Laureles is that shift from a
public to a private ownership of the land. And this is where the
canyon starts to be a source of innovation. In recent years, Cruz has
been working with the environmental activist Oscar Romo, who
successfully managed to create a ‘watershed council’ for Los
Laureles, a political body solely addressing the needs of the canyon.
That notion alone, of a hydrological system being given the kind of
political representation of a municipal district, was groundbreaking.
Crucially, it gave the community, now defined by a watershed
micro-basin, a voice in how infrastructure would be brought in.
So
as well as bringing in much-needed infrastructure and political
representation, which it is already doing, the council would also be
a vehicle for a hybrid form of development, in between the collective
and the private. Neither top-down entrepreneurial development nor
illegal bottom-up development, this would be a third way. What is so
significant about Los Laureles is that, far from being just another
Tijuana slum, this marginal community is being used to explore the
fertile intersection of a watershed system, a new development model
and a national border – a collision of the ecological, the social
and the political.
“This
is the laboratory for me in the next five years,” says Cruz. “The
first thing Oscar and I want to do is to build a community
centre/scientific field station to work on the pollution and water
issues.” The big question is whether he can get San Diego’s
administration to invest in a place like Los Laureles, whose trash
washes across the border into the estuary, as a way of protecting its
own ecological interests. “Instead of spending millions on the
wall, they could invest in this community so that the poor shanty
town becomes the protector of the rich estuary.”
As
the last informal settlement in Latin America, with its nose pressed
against the window of the North, Los Laureles is already symbolic.
But it is also significant as the nexus of three crucial issues.
Firstly, it reveals the material flows across this border: San
Diego’s waste flows south to be recycled into a barrio, while the
barrio’s waste is washed north less productively. Secondly, by
disrupting the watershed, the border is undermining the stability of
an ecological system. And Cruz’s idea is that Los Laureles should
be a micro case study in transnational collaboration, so that the
barrio is seen not as a slum but effectively as the guardian of the
local environment. Finally, the canyon is another potential testing
ground for developing land cooperatively, much as Urban-Think Tank
had imagined doing in San Agustín, so that the communal agenda is
not lost in the formalisation process.
For
Cruz, the collision of complex issues embodied by this easily
overlooked community is of global significance. “Any discussion
about the future of urbanisation will have to begin by understanding
the coalition of geopolitical borders, marginal communities and
natural resources,” he says. “That’s why this canyon is
fundamental.”
Learning
from Tijuana
If
the US–Mexico border marks the collision of the global North and
South – of the formal and the predominantly informal – then that
line is less clear at Tijuana than it used to be. With the city’s
growing wealth, you now see expensive mansion houses a stone’s
throw from colonias like Los Laureles. At the same time, rich San
Diego – which Teddy Cruz likes to call, because of the border
fence, the largest gated community in the world – has its poor
neighbourhoods. And San Ysidro is one.
The
streetscape here is noticeably more depressed, and the average
household income is only $20,000 a year, which is poverty by
Californian standards. Yet San Ysidro has utopian origins. It was
founded by the Little Landers, the cooperative agriculture movement
of the early twentieth century that believed in the modest aspiration
of “a little land and a living”. This neighbourhood is now home
to a Latino community. As Los Laureles is the last colonia in Mexico,
this is the first neighbourhood across the border.
“This
place is completely off the radar for the municipality, because the
whole emphasis has been on the checkpoint,” says Cruz. “So I
said, let’s set the agenda ourselves.”
What
Cruz has been instigating in San Ysidro is a new model of
participative micro-development. He has been working with a local NGO
called Casa Familiar, which does everything from providing social
services to creating community art projects. With Casa Familiar as
the backbone of the project, Cruz set about trying to turn two
under-used plots of land into a dense programme of affordable housing
and social amenities.
The
idea is that the plots are carved up into thin slivers, each one with
distinct zoning that would allow it to accommodate a different
housing typology. One of the plots, which Cruz calls Living Rooms at
the Border, would become a row of small apartments, a row of larger
family houses, a row of live-work units for artists, and a row of
flexible units providing temporary accommodation for guests or
relatives. Squeezing so many different typologies onto one land
parcel is part of what’s innovative about this scheme. But even
more interesting is the set of social relations between them. One
parcel of land is providing everything from a diverse range of
housing to social amenities and a cultural programme. All of which is
connected by a dense system of relations between the neighbours
within the plot and the community outside it.
What
is potentially seminal about this project is the diverse set of land
uses. “We need a new concept of density,” he says. “Density is
still measured as a number of things – units – per acre. Why not
measure it as a number of social and economic exchanges per acre?”
In
the informal economy, as can be witnessed across Latin America,
people will find a way to put even the most unpromising or unlikely
places to social and economic use. By contrast, the strict
regulations governing any American city strive to segregate the
domestic from the economic, and categorise the city into zones
suitable for property speculation rather than rich social
interaction. Can San Diego learn from the likes of Tijuana?
Cruz
recognises that social change and the creation of a more equitable
city are not a question of good buildings. They are a question of
civic imagination. And that is something that has been sorely eroded
by the neo-liberal economic policies of recent decades. Cruz is a
stern critic of America’s steady withdrawal from any notion of
public responsibility. He talks of “the three slaps in the face of
the American public” after the 2008 crash, namely: the Wall Street
bailouts, the millions of foreclosures and the public spending cuts. “It wasn’t just an economic crisis but a cultural crisis, a
failure of institutions,” he says. “A society that is
anti-government, anti-taxes and anti-immigration only hurts the
city.”
So
what is to be done? For Cruz, the only way forward is not to play by
the existing rules, but to start redesigning those institutions. In
San Ysidro, he has been seeking to change the zoning laws to allow a
richer and more empowering community life. And changing legislation
means engaging with what has been called the “dark matter” – not
just the physical fabric of the city, but its regulations.
This
is the very definition of the activist architect, one who creates the
conditions in which it is possible to make a meaningful difference.
New social and political frameworks also need designing, and this i
what Cruz has been doing in San Ysidro. “Designing the protocols or
the interfaces between communities and spaces, this is what’s
missing,” he says. It means giving people the tools they need to be
economically productive, and giving them a voice in shaping how the
community operates.
In
one sense, this could be misinterpreted as just yet more
deregulation. But this is not a form of deregulation that enables
more privatisation. On the contrary, it would allow more collective
productivity and a more social neighbourhood. Here, the architect and
the NGO become developers not with a view to profit, but to improve
the prospects of the community. “We need to hijack the knowledge
embedded in a developer’s spreadsheet,” says Cruz.
In
San Ysidro lies the seed of an idea, which is that the lessons of
Latin America are gradually penetrating the border wall. What Cruz is
trying to do is challenge the American conception of the city as a
rigidly zoned thing servicing big business on the one hand and some
quaint idea of the American dream on the other. Instead, the city
could be more communal, more productive. And he’s drawing on the
much more complex dynamics of informal economies, where no space goes
to waste, where every inch belongs to a dense network of social and
economic exchanges. That’s the model he’s using to try to
transform policy in San Diego. The regulations need to be more
flexible, more ambiguous, more easily adapted to people’s needs.
This is not a Turneresque laissez-faire attitude, but an attempt to
get the top-down to facilitate the bottom-up.
And
while much of that may sound somewhat utopian, the San Ysidro project
has had a stroke of luck that may soon make it a reality. Cruz is now
the urban policy advisor to the mayor. As the director of the
self-styled Civic Innovation Lab, he heads a think tank operating out
of the fourth floor of City Hall, which means that San Diego now has
a department modelled on the policy units that were so transformative
in Bogotá and Medellín.
What
we have here is a Latin American architect, steeped in the lessons of
Curitiba, Medellín and Tijuana, embedded within the administration
of a major US city. And it’s clear that Cruz is establishing a
bridgehead for the lessons of Latin America to find new relevance
across what was once an unbridgeable divide. It’s early days, but
the implications may well be radical.
Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, by Justin McGuirk, is published by VersoRadical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, by Justin McGuirk, is published by Verso
• The tragedy of Tampico: a city of violence, abandoned to the trees• The tragedy of Tampico: a city of violence, abandoned to the trees