“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.
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.
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.”
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.
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 Verso
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