How architectural innovations migrate across borders

The urban explosion

of the last years of economic boom

also produced dramatic marginalization,

resulting in the explosion of slums

in many parts of the world.

This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth

surrounded by sectors of poverty

and the socio-economic inequalities
they have engendered

is really at the center of today's urban crisis.

But I want to begin tonight

by suggesting that this urban crisis

is not only economic or environmental.

It's particularly a cultural crisis,

a crisis of the institutions

unable to re-imagine the stupid ways

by which we have been growing,

unable to challenge the oil-hungry,

selfish urbanization that have perpetuated

cities based on consumption,

from southern California to New York to Dubai.

So I just really want to share with you a reflection

that the future of cities today

depends less on buildings

and in fact depends more on the fundamental

reorganization of socio-economic relations,

that the best ideas in the shaping

of the cities of the future

will not come from enclaves of economic power

and abundance,

but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity

from which an urgent imagination

can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today.

And let me illustrate what I mean

by understanding or engaging sites of conflict

as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you

to the Tijuana-San Diego border region,

which has been the laboratory to
rethink my practice as an architect.

This is the wall, the border wall,

that separates San Diego and Tijuana,

Latin America and the United States,

a physical emblem

of exclusionary planning policies

that have perpetuated the division

of communities, jurisdictions,

and resources across the world.

In this border region, we find

some of the wealthiest real estate,

as I once found in the edges of San Diego,

barely 20 minutes away from the some of

the poorest settlements in Latin America.

And while these two cities have the same population,

San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana

in the last decades,

immediately thrusting us to confront

the tensions and conflicts

between sprawl and density,

which are at the center of today's discussion

about environmental sustainability.

So I've been arguing in the last years

that in fact the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot

to the sprawls of San Diego

when it comes to socio-economic sustainability,

that we should pay attention and learn

from the many migrant communities

on both sides of this border wall

so that we can translate their informal processes

of urbanization.

And what do I mean by the informal in this case?

I'm really just talking about

the compendium of social practices of adaptation

that enable many of these migrant communities

to transgress imposed political and economic recipes

of urbanization.

I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence

of the bottom-up,

whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana

that build themselves in fact
with the waste of San Diego,

or the many migrant neighborhoods
in Southern California

that have begun to be retrofitted with difference

in the last decades.

So I've been interested as an artist

in the measuring, the observation,

of many of the trans-border informal flows

across this border:

in one direction, from south to north,

the flow of immigrants into the United States,

and from north south the flow of waste

from southern California into Tijuana.

I'm referring to the recycling

of these old post-war bungalows

that Mexican contractors bring to the border

as American developers are disposing of them

in the process of building a more inflated version

of suburbia in the last decades.

So these are houses waiting to cross the border.

Not only people cross the border here,

but entire chunks of one city move to the next,

and when these houses are placed
on top of these steel frames,

they leave the first floor to become the second

to be in-filled with more house,

with a small business.

This layering of spaces and economies

is very interesting to notice.

But not only houses, also small debris

from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana.

Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires

that are used in the slums to build retaining walls.

But look at what people have done here in conditions

of socio-economic emergency.

They have figured out how to peel off the tire,

how to thread it and interlock it

to construct a more efficient retaining wall.

Or, the garage doors that are brought

from San Diego in trucks

to become the new skin of emergency housing

in many of these slums

surrounding the edges of Tijuana.

So while, as an architect,

this is a very compelling thing to witness,

this creative intelligence,

I also want to keep myself in check.

I don't want to romanticize poverty.

I just want to suggest

that this informal urbanization

is not just the image of precariousness,

that informality here, the informal,

is really a set of socio-economic
and political procedures

that we could translate as artists,

that this is about a bottom-up urbanization

that performs.

See here, buildings are not important

just for their looks,

but in fact they are important for what they can do.

They truly perform as they transform through time

and as communities negotiate

the spaces and boundaries and resources.

So while waste flows southbound,

people go north in search of dollars,

and most of my research has had to do

with the impact of immigration

in the alteration of the homogeneity

of many neighborhoods in the United States,

particularly in San Diego.

And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest

that the future of Southern California

depends on the retrofitting

of the large urbanization on steroids

with the small programs,

social and economic.

I'm referring to how immigrants,

when they come to these neighborhoods,

they begin to alter the one-dimensionality

of parcels and properties

into more socially and
economically complex systems,

as they begin to plug an
informal economy into a garage,

or as they build an illegal granny flat

to support an extended family.

This socioeconomic entrepreneurship

on the ground within these neighborhoods

really begin to suggest ways of translating that

into new, inclusive, and more equitable

land use policies.

So many stories emerge from these dynamics

of alteration of space,

such as "The Informal Buddha,"

which tells the story of a small house

that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico,

but it was retrofitted in the end

into a Buddhist temple,

and in so doing,

this small house transforms or mutates

from a singular dwelling

into a small or micro socio-economic

and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood.

So these action neighborhoods, as I call them,

really become the inspiration

to imagine other interpretation of citizenship

that has less to do, in fact,

with belonging to the nation-state,

and more with upholding the notion of citizenship

as a creative act

that reorganizes institutional protocols

in the spaces of the city.

As an artist, I've been interested, in fact,

in the visualization of citizenship,

the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories,

in order to narrativize the relationship

between social processes and spaces.

This is a story of a group of teenagers

that one night, a few months ago,

decided to invade this space under the freeway

to begin constructing their own skateboard park.

With shovels in hand, they started to dig.

Two weeks later, the police stopped them.

They barricaded the place,

and the teenagers were evicted,

and the teenagers decided to fight back,

not with placards or slogans

but with constructing a critical process.

The first thing they did was to recognize

the specificity of political jurisdiction

inscribed in that empty space.

They found out that they had been lucky

because they had not begun to dig

under Caltrans territoy.

Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway,

so it would have been very
difficult to negotiate with them.

They were lucky, they said, because they began

to dig under an arm of the freeway

that belongs to the local municipality.

They were also lucky, they said,

because they began to dig in a sort of

Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction,

between port authority, airport authority,

two city districts, and a review board.

All these red lines, are they invisible

political institutions that were inscribed

in that leftover empty space.

With this knowledge, these teenagers

as skaters confronted the city.

They came to the city attorney's office.

The city attorney told them

that in order to continue the negotiation

they had to become an NGO,

and of course they didn't know what an NGO was.

They had to talk to their friends in Seattle

who had gone through the same experience.

And they began to realize the necessity

to organize themselves even deeper

and began to fundraise, to organize budgets,

to really be aware of all the knowledge

embedded in the urban code in San Diego

so that they could begin to redefine

the very meaning of public space in the city,

expanding it to other categories.

At the end, the teenagers won the case

with that evidence, and they were able

to construct their skateboard park

under that freeway.

Now for many of you, this story

might seem trivial or naive.

For me as an architect, it has become

a fundamental narrative,

because it begins to teach me

that this micro-community

not only designed another category of public space

but they also designed the socio-economic protocols

that were necessary to be inscribed in that space

for its long-term sustainability.

They also taught me

that similar to the migrant communities

on both sides of the border,

they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool,

because they had to produce a process

that enabled them to reorganize resources

and the politics of the city.

In that act, that informal,

bottom-up act of transgression,

really began to trickle up

to transform top-down policy.

Now this journey from the bottom up

to the transformation of the top down

is where I find hope today.

And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations

with space and with policies

in many cities of the world

in primarily the urgency

of a collective imagination

as these communities

re-imagine their own forms of governance,

social organization, and infrastructure,

really is at the center

of the new formation

of democratic politics of the urban.

It is, in fact, this that could become the framework

for producing new social

and economic justice in the city.

I want to say this and emphasize it,

because this is the only way I see

that can enable us to move

from urbanizations of consumption

to neighborhoods of production today.

Thank you.

(Applause)