Moderator: Hansy Better Barraza

Participants: Teddy Cruz, Dana Cuff, Fonna Forman

Date: May 25, 2023

Books Discussed

Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks, Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman

Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up, Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman

Architectures of Spatial Justice, Dana Cuff

Profiles:

Hansy Better Barraza

Principal and Co-Founder, Studio Luz Architects in Boston, Massachusetts; Professor Emerita of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design

Dana Cuff

Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Director and Founder, cityLAB-UCLA

Teddy Cruz

Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism, University of California, San Diego (UCSD); Director of Urban Research, UCSD Center on Global Justice; Principal, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman 

Fonna Forman

Professor of Political Theory, University of California, San Diego (UCSD); Founding Director, UCSD Center on Global Justice; Principal, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

Hansy Better Barraza

What inspired you to write these books? What was the path that led each of you to that inspiration?

Teddy Cruz

I am a Guatemalan. I started architecture school in Guatemala, continuing my education at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design for my Master of Architecture. I cut the umbilical cord with my culture in the 1980s, at a very difficult period in my life with the Guatemalan Civil War. Moving back and forth between San Diego and Tijuana over the years exposed to me a vast set of conditions and vulnerabilities. The region revealed itself to be a microcosm of injustices suffered by many people across the world—an emblematic zone of radical urban asymmetry, where the most expensive real estate is twenty minutes away from some of the poorest informal settlements in Latin America. Realizing and experiencing this, I was inspired to tackle those conditions, which architecture schools and the profession of architecture have not dealt with for decades. I worked in migrant neighborhoods for a long time and began, incrementally, to weave a critical practice addressing many of those issues. This is how Fonna and I met. Our differing vantage points converged to produce a critical, research-based practice, triangulating between education, practice, and social engagement. 

Hansy Better Barraza

Did you ever practice in a traditional architecture office?

Teddy Cruz

I had to pay my student loans! So yes, I began by practicing in a more conventional way, working for an architect in San Diego. Considering my history, I was dissatisfied with my profession’s lack of engagement with the established hierarchies, between architects, clients, governments, and institutions. I tell students, there are so many issues that demand new types of practices. So, I’ve shaped my own.

Fonna Forman

It’s circuitous how I found my way to architecture and urban design. I was trained as a political scientist—really a historian of political ideas—at the University of Chicago, where I did my PhD on eighteenth-century theories of international development and poverty. My first job was at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in the political science department. As soon as I received tenure, I established the Center on Global Justice, focused on global poverty and development but through a community-based lens. So, we had projects in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and all of the research was done in close collaboration with local communities. I met Teddy early in the center’s history, about fifteen years ago, when a close mutual colleague, Richard Sennet, suggested we all cross the border between San Diego and Tijuana together for the purpose of research—something I had never done. Teddy and I realized our parallel and complementary sensibilities. I was interested in informality and the ways communities navigating scarcity are able to solve economic problems, urban problems, and so forth. But I was thinking theoretically, in terms of democracy, equality, and so forth—not concretely or spatially as Teddy was, working in these neighborhoods that flanked the border, the spaces in which these aspirations and deficits operate. We merged our research enterprises into the center and have been working together ever since.

Dana Cuff

I grew up on a farm in the border region and watched that agricultural area turn into a suburb. It became white and spread out and lost community. Suddenly, I was living in a different place. I struggled through that. Wanting to escape, and being interested in both aesthetics and society, I attended the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) as an art and psychology student. I then did an architecture PhD at UC Berkeley, feeling that architecture might be the place to marry my two interests, but soon realized I would have to carve out my own direction within the profession. I did my dissertation on architectural practice, studying, through an ethnographic lens, the way architects and clients communicate with each other to make form. This led me to consider the larger political context embedded in those relationships of power and privilege I observed. I began studying Los Angeles and the city—public housing in particular, and then suburban sprawl—and thinking about the politics out of which architecture emerges. Perceiving inadequacies in the profession’s ability to respond to certain social issues, I started cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with Roger Sherman, a dear colleague who’s now moved on to do other things. cityLAB has become a platform through which to explore possibilities for new kinds of agency in architecture and to demonstrate new possibilities for architectural practice. We’re fully engaged with communities of color in Los Angeles. We have four people, besides myself, working full-time at cityLAB and hire about twelve to twenty students to work with us every year.

Hansy Better Barraza

Dana, you just published Architectures of Spatial Justice. Teddy and Fonna, you cowrote two volumes, Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks and Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up. Based on the topics of these books, I am interested in examining how architecture can embody principles of spatial justice, as well as the partnerships and financial structures that support social justice projects at this intersection. Additionally, how do you strike a balance between academia and the profession of architecture when crafting an original design practice? 

Dana Cuff

The practice that is cityLAB was invented as a means of educating students to become different forms of practitioners. So, I see everything I’m doing from an educator’s role, with theory and practice being integrated equally.

Architecture can embody spatial justice. I’ve been asked to act as a justice specialist in design studios, where faculty and students are trying to grapple with a social justice issue, and I come in and am asked how to address it. It’s a ridiculous role precisely because that’s such a serious and complicated question. These issues can’t be solved by dedicating a conceptual building to “justice and equality,” for instance. Confronting social justice through architecture requires an entire ethic that you must bring to the work you’re doing, that understands the world as not solely from your own perspective but from a multiplicity. It requires moral zeal, thinking comprehensively about the world and breaking down hierarchies. And then with this ethic, you also need new methods. You can’t do that with the idea of the architect as auteur, working alone. I know all three of us speaking here today have developed practices with co-creation with communities at the heart of them. Reparations are needed because there’s been really significant harm done. There’s a duty to try to undo just the tiniest bits of those harms in every project we have. I hear from my students—and I think this is who the readers of my book will be—that they work in some big corporate firm, where this ethos is nonexistent, in order to pay off their student debt. So, how do you bring spatial justice to a particular project and a particular practice within your life? Giving agency to the next generation of architects—that is of interest to me.

Fonna Forman

Changing our architectural and design education is essential. For us, spatializing justice or socializing architecture has always meant asking different questions when thinking about designing something. What is the history of this place? Who owns it? What are the political and economic vectors that run through this space? Our own practice positions architects and designers as the facilitators of conversation, about the histories and possible futures of space. We see ourselves as navigating this sort of space between the bottom-up—this incredible reservoir of knowledge and history and aspiration—and the top-down institutions that often make decisions and allocate resources without any genuine understanding of the constituencies they purport to serve. We’ve also always found the city to be an amazing canvas for summoning collective agency and recognizing collective injustices that have been embedded in the way people live. Sometimes the injustice of spatial organization goes missing because it is inured into the everyday, and communities lose a sense of the histories that have produced the challenges they face daily. There’s a reason why your community has been divided by freeway infrastructure. There’s a reason why your child’s school is placed in these northward flows of exhaust coming from the US–Mexico border and why your children have higher rates of lung disease. We believe architects can play that role of helping to expose histories of injustice and open new horizons of urban possibility. Architects have too long been absent in the struggles for justice in the city, but our students want their lives and careers to matter. We feel like we’re answering a call that’s really coming from this generation.

Teddy Cruz

It is important to articulate that just because urban policy or law exists, it doesn’t mean that it is just. Bottom-up, or informal, urbanization—the extra-urban practices we find in many of the migrant neighborhoods we work with—many of those strategies are a counter-condition to power, developed to resist and challenge the imposition of unjust urban policy and marginalizing political and economic models. Those everyday practices are filled with the DNA for democratizing the city and producing more forms of urban solidarity and inclusion. That information needs translation and political representation, and we serve that mediatory role of bringing that information to the doorsteps of top-down institutions, so that policy can be transformed. We like the idea of intervening in that interface between the top-down resources and the bottom-up creative intelligence found in many of those of these neighborhoods. For us, urban justice is not only about redistributing resources but, for us as academics, redistributing knowledge. Advocating for a different political economy is really at the heart of our project. We’re witnessing Native American land acknowledgments in our universities, for example. Recognizing those histories of marginalization is fundamental, but this symbolic act is not enough. As Dana was saying, we need to engage a more robust project of reparations. And that cannot happen until we redirect resources to those communities that have been disenfranchised and underrepresented. So, the idea that communities on the margins can become developers of their own housing and public space gets to the root of what we understand as spatial justice.

Dana Cuff

That’s why Teddy and Fonna’s Casa Familiar or “Living Rooms at the Border” has been such a central project in my thinking and teaching. Their project is in my book because it resituates what it means to do architecture. It’s not just the production of a building or space but the production of what I call a “generative demonstration,” meaning the project as well as the way of doing it, so it can be prototyped, and that goes to their whole network, across the border and in the university. Often, we use the term “community” to mean those who haven’t had a voice, but the people who have a voice are also part of the community and dominate all politics related to the city. So, we’ve shifted our focus at cityLAB toward state legislation and limiting the power that entrenched community interests wield against those who are not yet part of the community. We’ve made housing-insecure student hubs and models of secondary units or accessory dwelling units (ADUs)—ways of densifying and making more affordable housing. But we’ve also written legislation to figure out how we can take design research and design demonstrations and carry that forward to state law, to then trickle back to the people. Most recently, we drafted zoning legislation so that K-12 public school grounds could build up to three stories of affordable housing for their workforce without special approval. I fully expect that legislation, just like the ADU legislation we wrote, will continue in its iterations as we learn more from the communities that try to implement those laws. This kind of restructuring, beyond community service, is critical to changing systemic inequity.

Hansy Better Barraza

Can we imagine architecture without privilege or without its patrons?—without wealthy clients, well-endowed cultural institutions and universities?

Fonna Forman

There’s the neoliberal lie that individuals are responsible for the conditions that they find themselves in, which completely undermines structural responses to injustice in the city, as well as collective answers. Through our work, Teddy and I are trying to restitch a sense of collective ownership over the city, for communities with power as well as communities who’ve been historically marginalized. Where communities are pitted against one another, we miss opportunities for convergence. For example, the conservative business community in San Diego finds the border as onerous as the human rights community does, because the fortified border wall prevents the free flow of goods and services and undermines economic development in the border region. So, we find ourselves on the same side of this argument! We’ve been trying to demonstrate that cities on both sides of the border need to be working together on the flows of waste and water management. Interest in this issue benefits all, but it has been framed as a Mexican problem. So, we’ve been committed to the spatial innovation but also the normative and pedagogic innovation that allow us to reimagine ourselves as a region and as a city.

Dana Cuff

The autonomous argument in architecture was a formal, modernist project that ended up separating aesthetics and beauty and form from the actual people that we were trying to serve, because it led to us creating architecture for ourselves. I think beauty belongs to the people, and architecture doesn’t have to only be about privilege. We’re working hard to make a practical architecture that people grasp, so that they have the kind of agency Fonna is talking about—so people can say, we deserve this, and this is where we belong.

Teddy Cruz

There have been periods in history where public interests organized and synergized across sectors of power, across top-down and bottom-up, contributing robust investments in public infrastructure and public goods. The city was always and will forever be, I think, at the mercy of contested power relations, whether power is being directed toward public goods and social justice and equity, or toward privatization, marginalization, disinvestment, and so forth. Often, we say that inequality results from the war between public interest and private interest. Our advocacy is about how to reemerge from these last decades, which were dominated by neoliberal and neoconservative politics and economics that exerted incredible pressure and wreaked havoc upon our social, environmental, and economic resources. How do we advocate for a new political economy? How we reorganize and redirect priorities, I think, is at the core of the question. 

Hansy Better Barraza

Can we embark on social investment projects without institutional support? For those who are in conventional practice and want to transform their practice, what might the financial model look like?

Teddy Cruz

We believe in institutions, and we also want to hold them accountable. So, this will always be an institutional project for us. In Colombia, in order to address inequality, a new civic conversation was summoned, calling for a sort of New Deal—a collective commitment, creating coalitions across sectors, rich and poor, to invest in public infrastructure. Not only did this demonstrate a different set of values, but that public space now depends on a sense of reciprocity and shared responsibility across government, industry, the private sector, grassroots groups, and so on. 

It took us forever to build Casa Familiar, “Living Rooms at the Border,” but we did it because we discovered that our own sweat equity as architects was an underutilized asset. So, 15 percent of the construction cost of any project is already an incredible leverage. Nothing should prevent us as architects from being developers of our own projects. And if we get together with the community and others to buy land, that increases our own capacity. In some cases, we have also partnered with municipalities to have access to underutilized public lands and to bring them into development. Finally, mobilizing the economic and programmatic power of our public university, as leverage for our community partners to develop their own housing, has been critical.

Hansy Better Barraza

Dana has put forth five principles of the theory of design for spatial justice. To summarize, these are: 1) initiatives rather than projects; 2) immersed engagement with community, for example, the designer acting as a mediator for flows of knowledge; 3) leveraging design on behalf of spatial justice requires resources that are always insufficient; 4) justice initiatives carry a burden of legibility and must be made public, so they can be built on by others; and 5) spatial justice initiatives are built by constituencies rather than by individual clients. I’d like to hear all of your observations on these, in terms of the future for yourselves and your own evolving practices and research, and the future of education and social justice issues in architecture.

Fonna Forman

Community needs are urgent. Injustice is urgent. Yet the pace at which we can address those urgencies is very slow. The projects that Teddy and I present in these books have taken a decade or more, to mobilize the communities and various funding streams and for the policy changes necessary to make the work happen. So, we have an ethical responsibility to respond to students’ demands for work that matters, but there are also issues in educating them in this kind of work, and the same temporality applies. We do a disservice to these young people if we communicate that these jobs are waiting for them. We also can’t agree to send thousands of these enthusiastic architecture and design school students to work at our community sites. With the rise of edu-tourism, we’re careful not to overburden our community partners. There are infinite ways in which architects can get involved in urban dynamics, that may not be on the payroll but that can satisfy this urge to make a difference. With migration trends and climate change, the challenges are only going to multiply. These problems are not going away.

Teddy Cruz

At our core, we are romantic modernists, yearning for systemic change and, really, a utopian vision of transforming the world, though I think our practical expectations for transformation are more tame. The modalities by which we seek to attain this utopia presently involve infiltrating institutions incrementally, stitching upwards. For the students, it’s about internalizing a new value system altogether. How do we do that? When I came out of architecture school, I returned to the border because I didn’t want to go to a large corporate firm like Gensler or Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Maybe it was masochistic, but I wanted to partner with nonprofits and be in the trenches! Our mission as educators is to make our students think socially and politically, to disrupt the norms that have us voting against our own interests within a system established and perpetuated by institutions since the ascendancy of neoliberalism. If we maintain neutrality, if we don’t shift the horizon of development from domination by private interests and logics of financialization that exclude communities, it will be very difficult to advance, and we will remain accomplices of institutional violence. Students need to be better politically positioned to really advocate for what is morally and ethically right. Structural and systemic change is required, but at this moment, it’s difficult to imagine.

Hansy Better Barraza

Teddy and Fonna, I really appreciate that you dedicate your book Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks to the late architect and educator Michael Sorkin, who was also a colleague and friend of mine. I liked the references to some of his ideas that were included in the dedication, and I think this specifically is something to think about in striving toward justice and a radically public architecture:

For Michael “being together physically,” bodies in space, was essential to the practice of deliberative democracy—and it was radically opposed to the American version of democracy, born on the frontier, understood as the right to be left alone. Michael valued an urbanity of propinquity—equitable linkages, connections, flows and exchanges, where freedom is a collective and civic concept—active, positive, participatory. At bottom, propinquity summarized Michael’s determination to coexist with others in urban space. We cannot possibly imagine freedom, he wrote, outside of a structure of interaction with others. “City air makes people free.”¹

Thank you all for a rich discussion and for putting your important work into the world with these three books.

 _{1. Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 7.}