Asian Coaltion For Housing Rights in Suva, Fiji

THE INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS OF FIJI.

Muanivatu, a typical squatter settlement in central Suva. Photo by Tee.

Fiji is not commonly associated with urban poverty by those from outside. But over the last 20 years an increasing number of Fijian citizens are moving from rural areas and housing themselves informally in the country’s cities. As of 2007 around 12.5% of Fiji’s population were living in informal settlements. This portion is intensified to around 20% of the population living along the Lami-Suva-Nausori corridor.

Just under 88% of Fiji’s land is owned communally by matangali, the traditional Indigenous Fijian clan structure. In theory, the matangali system ensures that all Fijians have some land to go back to. But over the years many Fijians have lost touch with their ancestral lands after moving to the city for education, employment and health care. Also almost half of Fiji’s population is decended from Indian laborers brought by the british colonial government. These Indo-Fijians had traditionally leased land from the matangali for farming (mostly sugarcane). Recently many of these leases where not renewed due to a campaign by Fijian Nationalist elements within the Native Land Trust Board. As a result many thousands of Indo-Fijian Families where made homeless and left with no option but to seek shelter in the cities like Suva and Lautoka.

The People’s Community Network (PCN) was formed by a local social services NGO, the Ecumenical Centre for Research, Education and Advocacy (ECREA), to support people to find solutions to the problems they face. PCN took the examples of many similar organisations around Asia which are based on uniting communities around activities such as savings, securing land tenure and incremental upgrading. As such they connected with the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR)

In a very short time the PCN has grown rapidly with many savings groups forming across Suva and in other cities like Lautoka and Labasa The PCN has also begun to develop its own housing project in Lagi Lagi, an area of Jittu Estate in Central Suva. As well as a road building project in and existing settlement.

The PCN has now become independent of ECREA and are facing some challenges on how to consolidate the good work of the past few years and find the right direction ahead. To assist them in this process ACHR organised a visit by community members from Thailand and the Philippines who had faced similar problems in their own settlements and had much valuable experience to share on how to overcome them collectively.

ACHR EXCHANGE. GLOBALISATION FROM BELOW.

One of the local PCN members speaks with Pa Chan, a community leader from Bangkok's slum settlements.

Following from a previous visit in 2007 the Asian Coalition For Housing Rights (ACHR) was invited by the local urban poor federation (the People’s Community Network or PCN) to visit and share their knowledge and experience with the community members.

The Asian Coalition for Housing Rights is a network of urban poor people’s organisations operating throughout Asia and the Pacific. They are as diverse as the communities and contexts from which the come but they also share a great deal in common, both in terms of problems and tactics to overcome them. Central to the activities of all members of the network is that it is always the people themselves who set the agenda for change.

One of the most intereseting aspects of ACHR's work are the exchanges they facilitate between urban poor people to share ideas and experiences. So it was that Pa Chan from Bangkok, Pa Nong from Khon Kaen, Ate Ruby and Celia from Payatas (Manila) came to visit Suva and share their stories with the PCN.

A central activity shared by all the groups connected by the ACHR is community savings. Community members deposit a small amount per day or per week to a pool of money which can be used within the community for welfare programs, funeral grants, small low-interest loans for setting up a small enterprise, collective leverage for housing loans and many other things besides. These groups are based locally in each settlement and network with other groups in city-wide and nationally to for federations which can drive larger scale programs.

The discussions centered around very practical concerns with the mechanisms of the savings and it was clear that the visit was coming at a crucial time for the PCN. They had been working at setting up savings groups for two years now and had many questions related to the diificulties they had encountered. A common problem that many groups within the PCN were having was that people were dropping out because they could not see the benefits of participating in the savings. Ruby from the Philippines asked the members pat the meeting about all the activities that the groups were doing in their communities, They answered that so far it was mostly just savings. She then spoke about how important it was that the money from the savings should start to recirculate back into the community in the form of loans and small welfare grants. If people could see the benefits of gaining access to low interest loans they would be more encouraged to join and stick with the savings. The idea of handing out the precious savings was a bit frightening for the members of the PCN but Celia and Pa Nong both explained that although they have such a small amount of money, the only way to grow the money is to get it working in the community. One-way savings will never succeed, people have to see to believe.

When some of the PCN members asked about how to select people to participate in the savings Pa Chan from Thailand spoke about how the savings groups should not be used to exclude anyone, even if they cannot participate in the savings to begin with. These people, the poorest, the weakest, the ones with the most problems should be put right in the centre of the group planning and be helped first. No-one should be left behind. Ruby spoke about how in their community in Payatas, they, the community leaders, the volunteers organising and collecting the savings, are always the last to get the benefits of the programs. They have not yet received houses even after 15 years in the group because they must set the example of prioritising the ones with most need. If people see the leaders and commitee members helping themselves first, they will quickly lose trust in the group and leave, making the group weak.

The discussions then moved on to how to identify the problems and the people most in need. Pa Nong from Khon Kean, the metropolis of Thailand’s Isan region, spoke about their experience working with community architects like Nad (Chawanad Luansang) to conduct city wide survey and mappings of all the settlements in Khon Kaen. The community members mapped and surveyed all the households of their own settlements. Through this they were able to gather hard data about all the problems of the city and were they were felt most acutely. They could also begin to map the solutions, by mapping the skills and resources of the people in the settlements. From there they began to plan together ideas for overcoming their problems, exploring ideas of reblocking, land sharing and on-site upgrading. Through this process and with the support of CODI (Community Organistion Development Institute), the communities were able to solve the land and housing issues for all of their settlements in the entire city!

Ruby also stressed that although they, the visitors, had lots to share about the way that things were done in their own community it is crucial that the community members here in Fiji should discuss amongst themsleves about the best approach to take. Together they could make policy about who to include, whether to charge interest, what activities to prioritise, what kind of loans could be taken, what to do when someone doesn’t pay back their loans and so on. These policies can be modified over time. If people are just following the rules set by someone else, there is no deep understanding and real problems can emerge. This was demonstrated by the way the Thai and Filipino federations had developed very different systems, because of their very different circumstances.

Although most of the discussion revolved around the mechanism of saving, Pa Chan was keen to remind people that more than the groups being about collecting money, they are a means of collecting people. Once people have come together on something small like saving they can see the advantages of working collectively and can begin to fight for the positive changes they need.

WAILOKU: A ROAD TO LINK SEVEN SETTLEMENTS

The new road in Wailoku, built by the community themselves with funds from the Asian Coalition for Community Action.

Members of the PCN took us to see the upgrading work already undertaken by the PCN in the Solomoni settlement of Wailoku.

Solomon Islanders (Solomoni) were also brought to Fiji three generations ago by the British to build the roads. In Wailoku the Solomoni have built their own community on land leased from the government as a community lease. Each household pays $60 per year in rent. The community of Wailoku have already begun upgrading their community with a small projects grant from ACCA (Asian Coalition for Community Action) of $3000US. They have combined this money with labour provided by the community themselves to build a new road connecting the 7 settlements which make up Wailoku. The people are now also constructing a community police post.

MUANIVATU. COMMUNITY-LED MAPPING AND SURVEY.

Mesaki, Pa Chan and their group discuss the important information to collect. Photo by Tee

The group from ACHR included four community architects: Nad and Tee from Thailand, Chak Chak from Indonesia and myself from Australia. The PCN requested that we give a demonstration of the people-driven survey and mapping process which has been at the heart of many of the upgrading projects across Asia.

On Friday afternoon, together with many community members from around Suva, we packed in a bus to head down to Muanivatu, a settlement on government land in central Suva. We had already divided into groups to discuss what information was important to know, from this discussion we made a list of questions to ask as a survey form. After being greeted by some Muanivatu residents we were guided into the community and began to speak with the households and draw them as we went. After a presentation of the maps and information gathered by each group we were treated to some Kava and made plans to return the next day to continue the mapping more deeply.

The next morning we gathered with residents from Muanivatu as well as some representatives from other informal settlements across Suva. We began by asking the residents to tell us about Muanivatu and the problems they are facing.

Muanivatu is a mixed community which has increased from 7 houses in 2002 to 72 houses today. Over the years they have been issued with 5 eviction notices from the Suva City Council, one of which gave residents only 24 hours to vacate before the demolition teams moved in. After lobbying from the PCN (people’s Community Network) last year the National government acquired the land from Suva City Council, and allowed the community to stay, at least for the mean time.

The people of Muanivatu still face many problems. The owners of the land will not allow them to be connected to electricity, forcing those who can afford to use much more expensive petrol generators. Since the recent privatisation of the water supply the cost of aquiring a water meter (a precursor to water connection) has sky-rocketed from $23FJ to $300FJ, resulting in upwards of 8 families sharing a single tap. Toilets are also shared between multiple families and drain to self-built septic tanks or pit-toilets built out in the mangroves. The land is subject to flooding during each month’s high tide and the problems are compounded during heavy rain.

We then asked about how to record the information that we had already discussed. What was the crucial information to get? How could it be useful in dealing with the land owners and service providers? We suggested to do a mapping excercise: The residents formed groups based on four areas of Muanivatu and sketched out rough arrangements of houses with the names of the families living in each. As they drew the map they added more information, about all the problems we had discussed earlier such as who had toilets, where were families sharing houses, who did not have water and so on. The people were able to do all this very easily because they already knew it so well, it is their home after all! Mostly the groups gathered on a verandah or communal grassy patches to draw, sending out a scout when they needed some extra information.

Residents of Muanivatu map their community. Photo by Chak.

After about an hour or so we all got back together and discussed each map. Each group had done things differently. The people asked each other questions and we discussed what was important to consider when making a map, like having a key and using clear symbols. Altogether the maps presented a wealth of information. The people quickly saw that a community map was a very effective way to gather and organise quite complex information in a way which could be useful not only for understanding the extent of their problems but also to start to plan ways to solve them.

Several community leaders from other settlements around Suva also attended and participated in the day. They had no trouble getting the idea and were keen to implement similar exercises with their own communities.

The crucial thing in all this work is that by being involved in the research on their own community the people own and can use the knowledge produced much more effectively than if it is done by a group of ‘expert’ outsiders. The knowledge remains in the community and can be used many times over: to organise savings, negotiate land and services and plan for the future of the community.

Activist Architecture: Tactics for a people-made city

Creating the conditions for communal life: Comunidad 12 de Octubre, Punto Fijo.

Oil refineries in Punto Fijo. Much of the government’s reform agenda, which has enabled the work of the CTUs, has been funded by oil

In Punto Fijo, a coastal city in the North-West of Venezuela and home to its largest oil refineries, I visited a CTU which has now almost completed the construction of their new houses. The community, Comunidad 12 de Octubre, is now home to a group who have spent the last 15 years fighting for their rights to land and housing. In 1992 they enlisted the help of the local technical university to help them make plans for a new community on a vacant piece of land on the periphery of town. The results of that collaboration are just now being constructed on the land.

Members of Comunidad 12 de Octubre work during the weekend on finishing their new homes.

When the new government signed the decree which officially sanctioned the creation of the CTUs in 2002, Yuraima ‘Tiki’ Fingal and her association of Los Sin Techo ‘those without roofs’ were quick to become registered as the 35th CTU in Venezuela. The administration took special interest in the association and assisted them to get communal title over the land they had been occupying. The communal title grants all the members of the CTU permanent and secure land tenure, which cannot be bought or sold and remains the property of all members in perpetuity. The funding for the construction of the dwellings has been provided by the Ministry of Housing. The community manages the entire process and each family contributes a minimum

Reinaldo and his daughter take a break from painting and tiling. Reinaldo works in the refinery and joined the CTU ‘for the energy of the people’

On first seeing the buildings I was stuck by their unusual ‘space-age’ form, lack of sun shading and the fact that every house was identical, with no apparent consideration of family size or solar orientation. I questioned the residents about why they had opted for this design. Their justifications were interesting. They saw themselves as doing something very new and exciting, the pioneers of a new form of socialism. As such they did not want traditional workers’ homes, rather they wanted something which would symbolise their attitude to community and equality. This also went some way to explaining the homogeneity of design, as the residents were adamant that everyone in the community was equal and thus should get the same house, if the family got too large they could simply get a second house. In this way the design which at first glance had seemed highly inappropriate was now beginning to make sense. For the community of 12 de octubre the symbolism of their houses was at least as important as their basic functionality.

Sketch of ‘Tiki’ Fingal’s new home. She lives upstairs with her husband and 3 children while her elderly mother lives in the ground floor.

The houses are arranged in small clusters, referred to as manzanas (apples). Each manzana consists of four ‘mico-manzanas’. Within each micro-manzana the neighbours share a central garden and playground

Auto-diagnosis and collective action: The Permanent Workshop for Participatory Design.

Los Comités de Tierra Urbana:

The Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Councils, CTUs) are self-organising federations of families living in the barrios. The CTUs, officially enabled by a presidential decree in 2002, are a direct continuation of the struggle by groups which began to form in the late 1980s around the campaign for rights to water and land.

These CTUs, enabled by government land reforms, gain collective ownership of the land they occupy for housing. By granting security of tenure and removing the threat of eviction a fertile situation is created where incremental improvements of the barrios can occur under the guidance of the communities themselves and with the assistance of a wide range of urban professionals, including architects. The CTUs also form around the creation of new settlements (Campamentos de Pioneros). These settlements offer the chance to create new, customised living environments driven by the ideas and desires of people themselves.

Crucial to the development of the new settlements is the fundamental participation of the community members at every level of the development of the place. The Taller permanente de Diseño Participativo (Permanent Workshop for Participatory Design) are a group of architects and planners drawn from universities and the public sector who are committed to providing communities with the resources they need to collectively develop their new homes.

A group of pioneros visit the site of their future community at Hoyo de La Puerta. Image courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

At Hoyo de la Puerta, a new settlement being developed on the southern outskirts of Caracas, the process of designing new houses for 200 families has expanded to encompass a survey of all aspects of community life. The Taller describes this process as Auto-diagnosis, where the community members themselves research their own problems and situation and generate solutions from that understanding.

At Hoyo de la Puerta the auto-diagnosis began with a thorough analysis of the site, its connections to other parts of the city, as well as its local connections and characteristics (water, slope, orientation, access etc). The participants then began to ask many questions of themselves: How will we move around the new community? what areas do we need? what services? what kinds of production? how will we look after children? What emerged was a complex and richly layered vision for the community, a dense programmatic brief detailing all the requirements for the new community including housing, gas-lines, hostels for visitors, community childcare, workshops, clinics, orchards, chicken-houses, hairdressers, pathways, places for playing dominos and many other things. From this brief they then discussed how much of the site should be used for each purpose, how programs could be combined and spaces shared.

The group then returned to the site to begin to plan how these various functions could be applied to the specific piece of land. During multiple site visits and through the process of constructing a contour model of the land they identified the best locations for building (with low slope and without environmental protection constraints). With the use of the model they then began to arrange the various programs on the site, considering which programs needed to be physically linked, centrally located, public or private and in proximity to transport and services.

Participants plan where the specific parts of their new community will be located. Image courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

With the large scale vision for the entire community now sketched out the workshop shifted focus to the micro-scale, that of the individual house. Continuing with the process of auto-diagnosis the participants began with an analysis of their current living situation. They compiled the demographics of who was in each house, studied what activities those people did, recorded the sizes and characteristics of spaces in which those activities took place and commented on the quality and practicality of those spaces. After this they discussed ways in which things could be done better and what they would change in their houses and surrounding areas. From these exercises the group was able to produce some model house designs drawn from the needs identified by the people themselves.

Participants use an analysis of their existing houses to create plans for some new house types. Images courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

The project is still in its early stages, waiting for approvals and funding to come through complicated bureaucratic channels, but the community now has a concrete plan for the development of their land. It is a plan which they own and understand inside-out because they created it, making it a powerful tool for argument. One participant mentioned to me that through the process she had learned to question everything about her situation. Not just the physical conditions but also social and political ones: “Why are we living in tiny shacks on the edge of a crumbly mountain when others have more than they could possibly use?

Urban Acupuncture: Chacao’s Vertical Gymnasium.

One of Villanueva’s former students and long-time collaborators is Mateo Pinto. Together with his brother Matias and Austrian architect Hubert Klumpner, Mateo designed the Vertical Gymnasium, built on the edge of the small inner-city Barrio Santa Cruz by the municipality of Chacao.

The Vertical Gymnasium draws on the barrio practice of maximising the available resources by taking a single open air basketball court and raising it to the roof thereby creating 3 levels for multiple overlapping programs below. These include: a judo area, an indoor basketball court, an indoor running track, a weights gym, a medical centre, meeting rooms and a rooftop basketball court.

The intention of the Vertical Gymnasium is to provide a dense bundle of services and recreational opportunities to the residents of Barrio Santa Cruz. The centre is used by local schools and sporting teams and even those not actively engaging with the centre are accommodated by the undercroft seating where motorcycle couriers congregate and local men gather to read newspapers shaded from the heat of the midday sun.

The Vertical Gymnasium could be seen in a number of ways. On one hand it is the generous gesture of the formal city stepping into the barrio to provide it with services. On the other hand, given that Barrio Santa Cruz is a relatively small barrio completely surrounded by formal development and that the Vertical Gymnasium presents a hard wall and opaque screens to the barrio, opening to and connecting more strongly with the formal street, it could equally be seen as the formal city encroaching on the barrio as providing services for it.

This raises questions more generally about the often non-participatory projects of ‘urban acupuncture’, which aim to connect the informal city more strongly with the formal city by inserting formal elements into it. But is it a connection or an invasion? Is it acupuncture or just a jab with a pin?

Informal Inventories: the tactics of Federico Villanueva:

Federico Villanueva is an architect, educator and activist. Together with his partner, Josefina Baldo, he has been researching and working on projects in the barrios for over 30 years. Together they oversaw CONAVI (Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda - National Housing Council) from 1999-2002.

The following is a summary of Villanueva’s ideas and tactics for architects working in the barrios. It is based on an interview with Federico Villanueva at his home in Caracas. Through our conversation I was able to learn some of the knowledge and tactics which he has developed through his long experience.

The barrio is more common, more successful and more efficient: The barrio is often viewed as an aberration, but it is the barrios where more than half the people of Venezuela live. In reality it is the formal city which is strange. The barrios are also much more productive. Over the last 20 years the barrios have grown each year by an average of 3.1% almost double the growth rate of housing in the formal city of 1.6%!

Getting many horses to run together: The key to successful projects is to get government, community movements and trained professions such as architects to all go in the same direction at the same time. This requires delicate negotiation and careful combining of often very different agendas.

The Architect and the Community: The architect brings the knowledge of alternative structures, materials and processes and the skills to analyse technical factors, manage multiple agendas, to see the big picture and coordinate individual actions. The community brings the knowledge of local conditions and relationships as well as the skills derived from constantly reconstructing their homes and facilities. Neither of these should be underestimated.

Architects at invasion: If it is possible the best time for the architect to get involved is during the initial land invasion. If the architect can have input at this initial stage then things will not need to be redone later.

Counting the stairs: The basis of any work must be a detailed study. Analyse the area, record the dimensions of every house, the slope of every road and path, the number of streetlights and stairs, the width and length of all the drainage channels. Then, when proposing improvements everything can be calculated and budgeted for: the length of electric cable required for new street lights, the amount of concrete to pave new pathways and so on.

Starting small: After the detailed study, begin with a small project: one house, one day-care centre. The people may be dubious at first but once they begin to see results they will be much more open to get involved. A successful small project can create an explosion in community participation.

Staying separate: When working with a community is it important to remain professional, don’t try to become part of the community. Treat them as you would any other client, explain the alternatives then leave the room. If you get too involved you may start to influence the outcome.

Build before you demolish: If relocation or rehousing is unavoidable, make sure you build the substitution house before you tear the old one down.

Building the City Twice: An Introduction to Venezuela’s Barrios.

View to Barrio San Agustín from Parque Central  in the centre of Caracas.

In Venezuela more than 50% of the population lives in the barrios, those sectors of the city built by residents themselves without official rights or provision of services, on unstable land, under constant threat of eviction and with no legal rights to the homes which they have, in many cases, occupied for generations.*

Barrio Mamera as seen from the Metro station.

The barrios are the spatial expression of a deep segregation within Venezuelan society. They contain within them many other types of exclusion; unemployment, lack of access to medical services and education, exposure to crime and violence.

The official city has always had an ambiguous relationship with the barrios. The barrios are home to the builders, drivers, nurses, teachers, cooks and cleaners on which the official city depends. It is a vast pool of cheap labour. Yet the official city refuses to recognise the crucial function of the barrio, referring to it only as a problem, a source of crime, an eyesore, and an urban blight. On most official maps the barrios do not exist at all, they are depicted as blank ‘green zones’.

A view from central Caracas towards the surrounding barrio

In Caracas they say the residents of the barrios had to build the city two times. First, brought into the city as cheap labour, they came as the construction workers who built the highways, stadiums and apartment buildings of the official city. Secondly, on finding no place for themselves in that city, they also worked by night, in solidarity, with rough materials and much imagination, to make their own city - the barrios.

In such a way the barrios are on one hand the expression of segregation and on the other the expression of the fight against that segregation. The residents of the barrios have had to fight over many generations to claim their right to occupy land, their rights to clean water, sewerage and electricity, their rights to medical care, to affordable, good quality food, to education and employment. This struggle continues in Venezuela today with growing support from the government as well as many urban professionals, including architects. 

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.

Border Poetry: La Mona and the Writing on the Wall

La Mona (the Doll), or Tijuana III Millenium, a 17 metre high sculpture built by
Armando Muñoz Garcia in his backyard in Colonia Aeropuerto as a tribute to his city
on the occasion of Tijuana's first centenary in 1989,and a tribute to the strength and beauty
of Tijuana's women.

The following are 3 excerts from texts found pinned and written on the walls of Estudio Teddy Cruz:

Refugees inhabit a divided world, between a country in which they cannot live and a country which they cannot enter.

- Eyal Weissman.

- Ann Micheals, 1958.




Pobre mexico, tan lejos de dios
y tan cerca de los estados unidos

- Porfrio Diaz

translation:
Poor mexico, too far from God
and too close to the united states.

Borderlands: San Ysidro

I took the Blue line trolley from San Diego Old Town to Beyer Blvd in San Ysidro, one stop before the international border. I was going to meet with Casa Familiar, South San Diego's most important community-based organisation and one of Estudio Teddy Cruz's longest standing collaborators.











Casa Familiar officially began in 1973, serving the monolingual Spanish-speaking residents of San Ysidro, it has since expanded to serve all of South San Diego's residents, regardless of background, although the demographics of the area guarantee that their clientelle is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Casa Familiar provides a wide variety of services to the community, from assistance with immigration, tax preparation, financial and family counselling to computer literacy, aerobics-for-seniors and Aztec dance classes (for more information see Casa Familiar's home page).

Tonight Casa Familiar is holding a Thanksgiving dinner for the community. Andrea Skorepa, Casa Familiar's heart and CEO, tells me that the Anglo tradition, with it's rather doubtful of native-pilgrim friendship, is a kind of 'exotic cultural experience' for the mainly Hispanic attendees. It is an impressive sight, over 1200 people will be fed tonight, over 4 sittings, served by an army of volunteers.

Andrea draws the raffle.

The volunteer waiters include a large presence from the local border patrol. I wonder how the community here feels about close proximity of the force whose illuminated sign at the Mexican border 2km away boasts of 1200 'wanted felons' aprehended in their neighbourhood, coincidentally the same number of people they are helping to feed tonight.

Tonight is also a celebration of the centenary of San Ysidro's founding in 1908. Today San Ysidro is probably known best for being home to the world's busiest border crossing.

Andrea welcomes me heartily and when I mention my association with ETC she responds 'Teddy Cruz! We made Teddy Cruz!". We discuss Casa Familiar's housing program in the community hall kitchen while volunteers scoop cranberry sauce into tiny plastic cups.

She tells the story of the of the Casitas de las Florecitas, a complex of 8 affordable houses for first time home owners, to illustrate the disriminatory, anti-logic of many official housing regulations. A common feature in many Latin American homes is a sink, built at ground level, by the back door for use in mopping, washing feet after the beach and party ice-buckets. The San Diego City Council had not seen such an item before and labelled it illegal. After some negotiation the SDCC agreed to recognise the legitimacy of such an item (now refered to as a 'janitorial sink') but still refused to allow it's construction, flagging it as a potential problem of mixing sewerage and storm water. Accordingly the architect, David Flores, designed a movable rain cover for the sink. The SDCC also rejected this, as it could be left open during rain. Finally Flores designed a fixed awning for the entire area, which met with the SDCC's approval despite Flores' own contention that rain rarely falls straight down. 'As we get more civilised, sometimes we don't get any smarter' Andrea concludes.

Later I continue the discussions with Flores himself who became involved with Casa Familiar in 2001 by being awarded the Rose Fellowship to fund his work with the organisation. He outlines the numerous mismatches between the planning regulations, the structures of grants and subsidies for affordable housing and the reality of people on the ground.

Such issues have been central to ETC's collaboration with Casa Familiar. Teddy has also been working with the organisation since 2001 and the results are two highly innovative projects currently in the pipeline: Living Rooms at the Border and Abuelitos (Senior Gardens) these projects will be the subject of the next post.

This church, built in 1927 was bought by Casa Familiar in order to preserve an important piece of local heritage. It is the site for their collaboration with Estudio Teddy Cruz; Living Rooms at the Border.

Estudio Teddy Cruz: Manufactured Sites

While the border condition of San Diego/Tijuana is central to all of ETC's projects, the majority have been focused on gleaning from the informal settlements tactics of invasion and organisational strategies by which catalytic projects can be inserted into San Diego's suburban homogeneity, variously challenging notions of public space (InfoSite 05) and pairing with grassroots organisations to 'contaminate the planning code' (Houses on the Border, Senior Gardens, Hudson 2+4).

Manufactured Sites is ETC's first major proposal for intervening in Tijuana's informal settlements. Cruz describes the proposal as follows:

MANUFACTURED SITES:

The most trafficked border in the world is mainly characterized by a series of illegal 'off the radar' two-way border crossings.  While 'human-flow' mobilizes Northbound in search of dollars, 'infrastructural waste' moves in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency. 





















Taking advantage of NAFTA generated free economic zones, large maquiladora (assembly) factories position themselves in close proximity with the emerging slums in Tijuana in order to easily extract cheap labor from these informal settlements.  Can the maquiladora industry contribute with its own logics and processes of prefabrication to produce surplus, micro-infrastructural support systems that can reinforce the transitional, informal housing environments that dot the periphery of Tijuana?




a maquiladora produced frame : micro-infrastructure for housing in the informal urbanism of tijuana

How Mecalux can use their exisitng processes to produce a 'surplus piece'

The Manufactured Sites proposal consists of a maquiladora produced prefabricated frame that acts as a hinge mechanism to mediate across the multiplicity of recycled materials and systems brought from San Diego and re-assembled in Tijuana.  By giving primacy to the layered complexities of these informal sites over the singularity of the object, this small piece is also the first step in the construction of a larger, interwoven and open-ended scaffold that helps strengthen an otherwise precarious terrain, without compromising the temporal dynamics of these self-made environments.  By bridging between the planned and the unplanned, the legal and the illegal, the object and the ground, as well as man-made and factory processes of construction, this frame questions the meaning of manufacturing and of housing in the context of the building community.

Materials can be delivered to the site

The frames can be set up by community members themselves

And added to, using commonly available material and typical building processes

The design is a scaffold system comprised of metal frames manufactured by Mecalux, a maquiladora of heavy-duty industrial pallets.  The components are produced by lightly altering existing factory methods and systems of production in order to create, in a sense, a ‘surplus piece’ that is given to the informal communities that are the industries’ surrounding support infrastructure.  The scaffold is built, in turn, on top of an artificial pad bulwarked by recycled rubber tires that are interwoven to create a highly functional retaining system.  Overall, Manufactured Sites is a transitional architectural system made of PARTS – not an architectural object – that can support and better the unavoidable recycling and improvisational realities of low-income environments.  The notion of prefabrication here depends on a triangulation of human and material resources, agencies and institutions.  The relationship produced by community based activists in charge of distributing the frame, the community’s participation in building their own housing stock, the architect’s collaboration in designing and facilitating the process, the municipality’s efforts in mediating between the maquiladora industry and the informal sector, and the factory’s support in providing the infrastructure, all suggest an expanding concept of mass-production methodologies.

A vision of how the 'surplus piece' could become a stabilised site for further development by the community

The proposal has been in circulation for some time now, being exhibited from Istanbul to New York. ETC now sees its task as making it work on the ground. An upcoming exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art is an opportunity to build a firm coalition: community, NGO, maquiladora, municipal government, media, art agencies and philanthropic foundations needed to take the project from the Utopian to the Real.

This project represents a 'perfect' example of how, with only minimal effort, a maquiladora can positively contribute to the communities on which it depends. How can this story create a momentum, encouraging other maquiladoras to sponsor micro-infrastructure projects for their own workers? What part can the municipality play to encourage this 'scaling up'? To what extent can the media be used to offer positive PR incentives to those maquiladoras who participate?

The strength of ETC's approach is its grounding in the real situation, based in a thorough understanding of the economic forces at play (from those encouraging factories to set up in Tijuana to those encouraging small enterprises to import used materials from San Diego). It is an example of 'urban acupuncture', seeking maximum effect from minimal change. It is a nimble and light form of activism: engaging with the maquiladoras rather than opposing their presence, reimagining their exploitative relationship with their workers from the inside out.