SOUTH-NORTH. Transgressing Borders & Emerging Forms of Activist Architecture in the Americas.

In the second part of Working with the Informal, Learning from the Informal the exploration of ways that architects engage with and learn from communities broadens to encompass case studies from three very different contexts accross South, Central and North America. What is interesting is that despite the very different approaches taken by the practices described here, common threads emerge. Despite being situated on different ends of the old first world/third world, formal/informal spectrum of ‘development’, they are able to influence and inform one another - often not as one would expect.

Venezuela, particularly its capital Caracas, provides a clear example of the forces which give rise to informal settlements and which perpetuate the dynamic of simultaneous neglect and exploitation which take place in almost any city, made more potent by the fact that more than half the population are housing themselves informally in the precarious, self-built settlements know locally as barrios. This ongoing situation has given rise to two concurrent movements which are resetting the way residents of the barrios relate to their city. On one hand architects are becoming more interested in the barrios, in the way they form and operate and in the way that architecture can be used to provide a better living situation for their residents. On the other hand the residents of the barrios themselves, through collective organisation and with the support of government reforms, are taking a central role in how their communities develop and relate to the rest of the city. These two movements have produced an wealth of ideas and models of participation, becoming particularly interesting where they intersect.

The divided city of Tijuana/San Diego is split by the border of Mexico and the USA. As such it is a microcosm of the unequal exchange which occurs between the nations more generally of North and South. It is also the site of a much more fruitful exchange: between individuals and communities coming from very different contexts but sharing the same physical landscape. On one side of the border waves of Latino immigrants are transforming mundane Anglo-American suburbia into something more dense, lively and communal. On the other side, the exploitative practices of transnational corporations are being used to fuel new, pre-fabricated housing solutions. Perhaps most interesting is the way tactics are drawn from the informal settlements of Tijuana to inform proposals for the improvement of San Diego, a reversal of the traditional ‘knowledge flows’. Architects and artists such as Teddy Cruz working in this bi-polar context have developed some very potent tactics for revealing the contradictions of their context and harnessing them to create proposals for change. The nature of the city is such that by commenting on local conditions they are simultaneously commenting on much broader, global concerns.

If Caracas is the archetypal informal city then New York City is perhaps the archetypal formal city. Yet architects in both contexts are working with local communities toward strikingly similar aims. In fact the questions of ‘how-to-engage’ become even more pressing in a context where the majority of people live out their lives without having the smallest involvement in how their environment is created around them. In this context the tactics of participatory design, developed and refined by practitioners working mainly in informal settlements worldwide, take on a new flavour as they are imported into the very different context of the formal city. As such they are another interesting example of the reversal of the traditional view of knowledge flows between the ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’ worlds. The practices working in New York are also interesting in that, through their determination to pass maximum autonomy to the ordinary citizen, that they have shifted their role from the design of physical places into the design of the tools-of-change themselves.

Although superficially employing very different strategies to address very different problems, all these practices can be regarded as examples of a new kind of ‘activist architecture’. A way of practicing architecture which takes the whole city as a client. A practice which pairs the skills and resources of architects, artists and designers with the motivation and drive of strong community organisations to change the places we live our lives, working towards better cities for all.