Spatial Justice

For us global is less a place “out there”, and more a way of thinking about and engaging the world’s greatest challenges, which always happen somewhere, and impact diverse people and communities in particular ways.

The Center on Global Justice is led by urbanist/architect Teddy Cruz and political theorist Fonna Forman. Our work blurs theory and practice, and merges the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture. Our creative output takes many shapes: critical research, urban and architectural design, cultural exhibition and performance, urban pedagogy, consultancy at various institutional scales, cross-border civic engagement and spatial intervention in the city, including social housing, public space, green infrastructure and environmental conservancy.

Our work is “embedded” in the binational metropolis of San Diego, California and Tijuana, BC, Mexico. We engage this region as a global laboratory for investigating the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, the thickening of border walls everywhere, urban informality, the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations, and the decline of public thinking. Ultimately we see the border region is a zone of rich urban and political creativity, that challenges dominant public narratives that criminalize and marginalize immigrant communities. We have been amplifying border communities as sites of urban and political experimentation, intensely active urban agents who challenge the dominant models of growth that have excluded them.

Our work is inspired by the bottom-up ingenuity and resilience of communities navigating conditions of scarcity in sites of struggle. We engage informal environments not as sites of charity, or as sites of institutional alienation, neglect and exploitation—which of course they are—but as laboratories for reimagining the city. While we condemn the economic forces that marginalize people into slums, we believe that the most compelling examples of inclusive urbanization are emerging from within these peripheral sites of scarcity. The revelation for us is that the future of the city will not be led by buildings but by a fundamental re-organization of social and economic relations.

The following sequence presents the territorial scaffold of our practice, a nested ecology that descends in geographic scales from the global border to the neighborhoods that flank the US-Mexico border at San Diego–Tijuana.

Global

Political Equator

Extending a line from the San Diego–Tijuana border across a world atlas, between latitudes 30° and 38° north, we discover a corridor of a global conflict that links some of the world’s most contested border zones. Regions most affected by poverty, violence, accelerating climate vulnerability and migration are situated between the Political Equator and the Climatic Equator. The collision of nationalism, environmental crisis, political violence and human displacement is the great crisis of our age.

The Political Equator links San Diego–Tijuana, the most-trafficked international border checkpoint in the Western hemisphere, with the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, where waves of migrants and refugees from North Africa and Syria flow across “Fortress Europe”; the Israeli-Palestinian border that divides the Middle East; the ongoing territorial conflict between Pakistan and India at Kashmir; and the border between North and South Korea, representing decades of intractable conflict and carrying Cold War tensions forward to the present day.

Continental

MEXUS

MEXUS is a visualization of the continental border region without the jurisdictional line, presented instead as a bioregion comprised of eight watershed systems shared by Mexico and the United States. By unwalling this thickened system of interdependencies, MEXUS provokes a pragmatic idea of citizenship based on coexistence, shared assets and cooperative opportunities across divided communities. MEXUS visualizes the conditions that a physical barrier wall along the political border cannot contain: watersheds, indigenous lands, ecological corridors and migratory patterns. This unrecognized geography of interdependence invites us to visualize the disruption that a jurisdictional border inflicts on the continental environmental commons.

MEXUS: A Geography of Interdependence was exhibited in Dimensions of Citizenship, in the US Pavilion at 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

National

The Nation Against Nature

Descending from the Political Equator to the continental border between the US and Mexico, the global border is physicalized as a solid wall that bisects eight watershed systems shared by both countries, generating a collision between nature and politics that damages social, economic and environmental assets on both sides.

The Nation Against Nature is a visualization project that documents, through aerial images, precise moments when the jurisdictional line of the nation collides with natural systems along the entire trajectory of the continental border, transforming the wall into a self-inflicted environmental wound. At these junctures, the border wall disappears momentarily as the complexity of these topographic systems challenges the one-dimensionality of the political artifact.

Regional

Cross-Border Commons

The Cross-Border Commons is an ambitious transnational environmental conservancy initiative that links the Tijuana River Estuary in San Diego with the Los Laureles Canyon settlements in Tijuana in a continuous political, social and ecological zone to protect the water and environmental resources shared by these border cities. To steward The Cross-Border Commons, we are summoning a coalition of state and municipal agencies, grassroots organizations and universities on both sides of the border to collectively invest in sustainable environmental programming.

This unorthodox binational land conservancy expands notions of conservation beyond protection, activating them as green infrastructure with specific environmental, pedagogical and social programming. With local community groups, we are co-developing some of these slivers as public spaces with a double function: water-waste management infrastructure and pedagogical nodes, to protect the shared hydrological-environmental resources of the bioregion. This has included bottom-up socio-ecological planning to inject many of the archipelago’s islands with nature-based solutions, eco-strategies and eco-technologies to restore the habitat and support biodiversity. These include: native plant restoration, reforestation and deep root planting on slopes, water catchment and stream daylighting, erosion control along water routes, constructed mini-wetlands, gray water hydro-filtration channels, swales and kumeyaay rock drop infrastructure, rewilding through revegetation, gabion terracing and eco-technologies for slope stabilization, topsoil regeneration and activation, native plants seed propagation for pollinators, removal of high-risk non-native species, establishing and reinforcing biodiversity corridors and support systems for bird and animal migration.

Local

60 Linear Miles

From this geography of conflict, where informal settlement, border wall, and estuary collide, we trace a geographic cross-section between these border cities to visualize how the border wall and its jurisdictional rigidity is reproduced inland. Along this “local equator” trajectory lie a sequence of urban collisions, critical junctures, between natural and artificial ecologies, top-down forces of urban development and bottom-up social and ecological systems. Our sixty-mile transborder cut begins thirty miles north of the border, at the periphery of San Diego, and descends sequentially southbound, ending with a thirty-mile dérive through Tijuana and its periphery.

The 60 Linear Miles of Cross-Border Conflict visual narrative was installed on the facade of the US Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, the very month the global economy collapsed and the Bush administration enforced its final wave of border securitization.

Citizen

Cross-Border Citizens

Our descent from the global border to the border neighborhoods, across planetary, continental, regional and local scales, culminates in the communities themselves that are divided by the border wall. To visualize this cross-border conflict and raise awareness about the need for a binational approach to conservation and investment to protect bioregional assets in Los Laureles Canyon, in 2011 we curated the Border-Drain Performance, an unprecedented cross-border public action, in collaboration with grassroots organizations that flank the border wall, at the intersection of the informal settlement in Tijuana and the estuary in San Diego. This public action consisted of two acts: a Forum and a Border Crossing.

We pitched a tent-forum in the middle of a surveillance corridor on the US side, a few meters from a newly built segment of the border wall. We summoned diverse local and global actors from civil society, academia, government, arts and culture to discuss the impacts of wall building on local communities and the entire bioregion. After the forum, we moved toward the wall to collectively witness the conditions we had debated, exposing conditions that remain invisible, too often unaccounted for in public narratives about the border wall. We then led a caravan across the border, traveling southbound through a sewage drain underneath a new section of the border wall located at the precise juncture where the informal settlement of Los Laureles in Tijuana collides with the estuary on the US side. With our community partners, we negotiated a special permit with US Homeland Security to transform the drain into an official port of entry for twenty-four hours.

The strange juxtaposition of pollution traveling northward and the passage from pristine estuary to informal settlement under a militarized culvert amplified the region’s most profound contradictions and interdependencies. Can border regions be the laboratories for reimagining citizenship beyond the nation-state? Can citizenship be organized around shared interests in communities divided by a wall?

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