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.