Teddy Cruz: How architectural innovations migrate across borders

49,536 views ・ 2014-02-05

TED


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00:12
The urban explosion
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of the last years of economic boom
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also produced dramatic marginalization,
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resulting in the explosion of slums
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in many parts of the world.
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This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth
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surrounded by sectors of poverty
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and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered
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is really at the center of today's urban crisis.
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But I want to begin tonight
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by suggesting that this urban crisis
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is not only economic or environmental.
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It's particularly a cultural crisis,
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a crisis of the institutions
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unable to reimagine the stupid ways
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which we have been growing,
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unable to challenge the oil-hungry,
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selfish urbanization that have perpetuated
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cities based on consumption,
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from southern California to New York to Dubai.
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So I just really want to share with you a reflection
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that the future of cities today
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depends less on buildings
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and, in fact, depends more
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on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations,
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that the best ideas in the shaping
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of the city in the future
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will not come from enclaves of economic power
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and abundance,
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but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity
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from which an urgent imagination
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can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today.
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And let me illustrate what I mean
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by understanding or engaging sites of conflict
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as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you
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to the Tijuana-San Diego border region,
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which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect.
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This is the wall, the border wall,
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that separates San Diego and Tijuana,
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Latin America and the United States,
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a physical emblem
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of exclusionary planning policies
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that have perpetuated the division
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of communities, jurisdictions
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and resources across the world.
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In this border region, we find
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some of the wealthiest real estate,
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as I once found in the edges of San Diego,
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barely 20 minutes away
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from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America.
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And while these two cities have the same population,
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San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana
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in the last decades,
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immediately thrusting us to confront
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the tensions and conflicts
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between sprawl and density,
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which are at the center of today's discussion
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about environmental sustainability.
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So I've been arguing in the last years
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that, in fact, the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot
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to the sprawls of San Diego
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when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability,
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that we should pay attention and learn
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from the many migrant communities
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on both sides of this border wall
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so that we can translate their informal processes
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of urbanization.
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What do I mean by the informal in this case?
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I'm really just talking about
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the compendium of social practices of adaptation
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that enable many of these migrant communities
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to transgress imposed political and economic recipes
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of urbanization.
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I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence
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of the bottom-up,
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whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana
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that build themselves, in fact, with the waste of San Diego,
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or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California
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that have begun to be retrofitted with difference
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in the last decades.
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So I've been interested as an artist
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in the measuring, the observation,
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of many of the trans-border informal flows
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across this border:
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in one direction, from south to north,
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the flow of immigrants into the United States,
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and from north to south the flow of waste
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from southern California into Tijuana.
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I'm referring to the recycling
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of these old post-war bungalows
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that Mexican contractors bring to the border
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as American developers are disposing of them
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in the process of building a more inflated version
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of suburbia in the last decades.
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So these are houses waiting to cross the border.
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Not only people cross the border here,
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but entire chunks of one city move to the next,
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and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames,
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they leave the first floor to become the second
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to be in-filled with more house,
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with a small business.
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This layering of spaces and economies
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is very interesting to notice.
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But not only houses, also small debris
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from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana.
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Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires
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that are used in the slums to build retaining walls.
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But look at what people have done here in conditions
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of socioeconomic emergency.
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They have figured out how to peel off the tire,
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how to thread it and interlock it
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to construct a more efficient retaining wall.
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Or the garage doors that are brought
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from San Diego in trucks
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to become the new skin of emergency housing
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in many of these slums
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surrounding the edges of Tijuana.
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So while, as an architect,
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this is a very compelling thing to witness,
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this creative intelligence,
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I also want to keep myself in check.
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I don't want to romanticize poverty.
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I just want to suggest
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that this informal urbanization
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is not just the image of precariousness,
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that informality here, the informal,
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is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures
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that we could translate as artists,
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that this is about a bottom-up urbanization
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that performs.
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See here, buildings are not important
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just for their looks,
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but, in fact, they are important for what they can do.
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They truly perform as they transform through time
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and as communities negotiate
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the spaces and boundaries and resources.
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So while waste flows southbound,
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people go north in search of dollars,
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and most of my research has had to do
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with the impact of immigration
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in the alteration of the homogeneity
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of many neighborhoods in the United States,
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particularly in San Diego.
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And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest
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that the future of Southern California
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depends on the retrofitting
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of the large urbanization -- I mean, on steroids --
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with the small programs,
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social and economic.
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I'm referring to how immigrants,
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when they come to these neighborhoods,
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they begin to alter the one-dimensionality
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of parcels and properties
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into more socially and economically complex systems,
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as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage,
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or as they build an illegal granny flat
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to support an extended family.
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This socioeconomic entrepreneurship
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on the ground within these neighborhoods
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really begins to suggest ways of translating that
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into new, inclusive and more equitable
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land use policies.
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So many stories emerge from these dynamics
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of alteration of space,
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such as "the informal Buddha,"
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which tells the story of a small house
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that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico,
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but it was retrofitted in the end
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into a Buddhist temple,
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and in so doing,
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this small house transforms or mutates
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from a singular dwelling
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into a small, or a micro, socioeconomic
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and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood.
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So these action neighborhoods, as I call them,
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really become the inspiration
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to imagine other interpretations of citizenship
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that have less to do, in fact,
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with belonging to the nation-state,
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and more with upholding the notion of citizenship
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as a creative act
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that reorganizes institutional protocols
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in the spaces of the city.
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As an artist, I've been interested, in fact,
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in the visualization of citizenship,
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the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories,
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in order to narrativize the relationship
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between social processes and spaces.
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This is a story of a group of teenagers
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that one night, a few months ago,
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decided to invade this space under the freeway
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to begin constructing their own skateboard park.
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With shovels in hand, they started to dig.
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Two weeks later, the police stopped them.
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They barricaded the place,
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and the teenagers were evicted,
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and the teenagers decided to fight back,
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not with bank cards or slogans
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but with constructing a critical process.
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The first thing they did was to recognize
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the specificity of political jurisdiction
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inscribed in that empty space.
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They found out that they had been lucky
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because they had not begun to dig
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under Caltrans territoy.
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Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway,
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so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them.
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They were lucky, they said, because they began
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to dig under an arm of the freeway
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that belongs to the local municipality.
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They were also lucky, they said,
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because they began to dig in a sort of
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Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction,
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between port authority, airport authority,
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two city districts, and a review board.
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All these red lines are the invisible
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political institutions that were inscribed
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in that leftover empty space.
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With this knowledge, these teenagers
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as skaters confronted the city.
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They came to the city attorney's office.
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The city attorney told them
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that in order to continue the negotiation
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they had to become an NGO,
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and of course they didn't know what an NGO was.
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They had to talk to their friends in Seattle
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who had gone through the same experience.
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And they began to realize the necessity
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to organize themselves even deeper
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and began to fundraise, to organize budgets,
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to really be aware of all the knowledge
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embedded in the urban code in San Diego
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so that they could begin to redefine
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the very meaning of public space in the city,
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expanding it to other categories.
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At the end, the teenagers won the case
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with that evidence, and they were able
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to construct their skateboard park
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under that freeway.
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Now for many of you, this story
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might seem trivial or naive.
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For me as an architect, it has become
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a fundamental narrative,
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because it begins to teach me
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that this micro-community
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not only designed another category of public space
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but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols
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that were necessary to be inscribed in that space
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for its long-term sustainability.
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They also taught me
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that similar to the migrant communities
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on both sides of the border,
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they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool,
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because they had to produce a process
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that enabled them to reorganize resources
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and the politics of the city.
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In that act, that informal,
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bottom-up act of transgression,
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really began to trickle up
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to transform top-down policy.
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Now this journey from the bottom-up
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to the transformation of the top-down
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is where I find hope today.
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And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations
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with space and with policy
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in many cities in the world,
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in primarily the urgency
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of a collective imagination
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as these communities
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reimagine their own forms of governance,
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social organization, and infrastructure,
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really is at the center
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of the new formation
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of democratic politics of the urban.
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It is, in fact, this that could become the framework
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for producing new social
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and economic justice in the city.
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I want to say this and emphasize it,
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because this is the only way I see
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that can enable us to move
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from urbanizations of consumption
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to neighborhoods of production today.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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