Socializing Architecture (eBook)

Top Down / Bottom Up

Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman (Autoren)

Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman (Herausgeber)

Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman (Text von)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
584 Seiten
Hatje Cantz Verlag
978-3-7757-5409-5 (ISBN)

Infos

At the intersection of architecture, art, public culture, and political theory, Socializing Architecture urges architects and urbanists to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization. Drawn from decades of lived experience, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman engage the San Diego-Tijuana border region as a global laboratory to address the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, explosive urban informality, climate disruption, the thickening of border walls, and the decline of public thinking. Complementing Spatializing Justice, Socializing Architecture is the second part of a two-volume monograph. It continues to build a compelling case for architects and urban designers to intervene in the contested space between public and private interests. Through analysis and diverse case studies, the authors show how to alter the exclusionary policies and instead advance a more equitable and convivial architecture. Professors Cruz and Forman are principals in ESTUDIO TEDDY CRUZ + FONNA FORMAN, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. Serving as directors, they are also invested in the University of California's Center on Global Justice, which advances interdisciplinary research with an emphasis on collective action at community scale.

Inhalt

Cover
Title
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Critical Spatial Practice at the US-Mexico Border
SECTION I: ESSAYS
SECTION II: PROJECTS
Notes
Image Credits
Acknowledgements
Colophon

Textauszug

8

TOP-DOWN / BOTTOM-UP

with communities, who erect barriers in the name of compliance, who denigrate community engagement as “service” rather than “research” and exalt academic publication as the holy grail of “research impact” need to change. They need to align their effusive narratives about “equity, diversity and inclusion” with actual protocols and policies that elevate institutional capacity to make positive change in the communities that surround them.

We see ourselves as urban curators, facilitating the movement of knowledges and resources across sectors and across urban borders. In this era of polarization, fragmentation and unprecedented privatization, we believe architects and urbanists can intervene in the gap between top-down institutions and bottom-up publics. While we understand the vulnerability of thinking dialectically about urban dynamics, for us thinking top-down / bottom-up has always been a point of entry into more experi-mental thinking “across.” In other words, the contested power relations between oppositions has catalyzed fresh political and spatial thinking about horizontally traversing them. In our practice we partner closely with community-based agencies to mobilize bottom-up socio-spatial intelli-gence, to transform top-down policy and redirect institutional resources to support bottom-up agency.

As with any curatorial practice, this work demands epistemic humility and continual reflection on the ethical complexities of joining in solidarity with people struggling against injustice, from the privileged vantage of the academy, the cultural institution or other formal sites of power. We must avoid overconfidence in our capacity to know and say and do things that are relevant and faithful to real experiences. If we aspire even implic-itly to advance justice, fairness and equity on behalf of people who are already marginalized, excluded, dispossessed and exploited, we inflict double harm by assuming that our urban and architectural dreams hold meaning for them, that our wishes for them align with their own.

Here we will demonstrate a model of “co-production” that entails accompanying struggles against urban injustice in real time, and seeking dialogue with people who are receptive to collaboration, weaving diverse skills, knowledges and experiences together into a richer account of struggle and more responsive strategies of resistance, advocacy and urban intervention.1

The Essays: Theoretical Apparatus of a Critical Spatial Practice

The texts, diagrams and images assembled across these two volumes, Spatializing Justice and Socializing Architecture, follow a sequence: from priorities (building blocks), to theories (essays), to projects (project clusters). The priorities we presented in Spatializing Justice ground the theories and projects of our practice, which are elaborated in Socializing Architecture across five essays and six project clusters.

Essay 1 reinterprets urban conflict as a generative framework for design, and an essential backdrop to developing a grounded theoretical and research-based architecture practice. In our case, we radicalized the San Diego–Tijuana border as a global laboratory in which to engage the most intense urban conflicts of our time. Essay 2 investigates ingenious bottom-up practices of urban adaptation and solidarity that spring from conditions...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.3.2023
• Mitarbeit: Designer: NODE Berlin Oslo
• Verlagsort: Berlin
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• Schlagworte: Architektur • Architekturkritik • Architekturtheorie • Bauwesen • Politik • Soziologie • Städtebau
• ISBN-10: 3-7757-5409-1 / 3775754091
• ISBN-13: 978-3-7757-5409-5 / 9783775754095