 Good evening, everyone. It's my real great pleasure to welcome Teddy Cruz and Founa Forman to present the work of their San Diego-based practice, Studio Teddy Cruz and Founa Forman. Tonight's lecture sits at the crux of so many of the concerns we have shared and explored over the past month. In particular, the endlessly urgent question of how, as designers, architects, urban thinkers, and actors, we can begin to engage in untangling some of the multi-layered crisis we find ourselves in and move towards greater equity, sustainability, and creativity in the planet that we share. I want in particular to thank Professor Lola Ben-Alon, who will give the response this evening for connecting the material and technological scales and practices to the larger urban, ethical, and environmental implications. Connections that design can undo but also remake in new ways. This evening is, in a way, part of the Tech Talk series, which has been reimagining building science in general and the technology sequence at GSAP in particular. I first met Teddy many, many years ago on the occasion of the 2007 Rotterdam Biennale entitled Capital Cities and curated by Pierre Vittorio Orelli. Already then, Teddy's work was radicalizing architectural practice, expanding it to include the design of everything in the name of sustained, impactful, and transformative engagement in shaping the built environment. Since then, the practice that he now shares with Fona Forman has only grown in impact and capacity to inspire, as demonstrated by this unique partnership. A professor of political theory and the founding director of the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego, Fona Forman brings her own expertise to the practice of architecture and the thinking of cities. And so today, the practice has further eroded disciplinary boundaries by operating as a unique partnership that weaves together political theory, ethics, and public culture together with city-based climate justice interventions under the backdrop of equitable urbanization in the global south. Forman and Cruz are redefining design and empowering it as a practice able to redraw existing social networks. Enable new political agencies, imagine new processes for community participation and partnership, as well as offer exquisitely crafted structures from new housing typologies that exude in the excess of life and willful optimism to redesign border conditions that have become thickened, forced, blurred, and inclusive. As Forman recently noted of their Maxis project, the border then becomes less aligned a thing or an object and more like a tissue of spatial and social ecologies. The tissue is a representation of what both sides share and both sides have an interest in protecting the future. It's been a very productive visual tool to rethink the border less as a line, a stupid 19th century rationalist gesture imposed on territory and instead as an opening to rethinking it as a zone, as a region containing many shared assets. Fona Forman is a professor of political theory and the founding director of the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego. She has written extensively on recuperating the public and social dimensions of modern economic theory. She serves as a vice chair of the University of California Climate Solutions Group and on the Global Citizenship Commission, which is advising UN policy on human rights. Teddy Cruz is a professor of UC San Diego's department of visual arts and director of urban research for the UC San Diego Center on Global Justice. Cruz is a recipient of the Rome Prize in architecture, the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award, the Architecture Award from the U.S. Academy of Arts and Letters and the Vilcek Prize. Together, their work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Das Hauses, their culture and their wealth in Berlin. I'm so thrilled to welcome them to GSAP tonight, and it will be very inspiring to hear them and hear the response from Lola Ben-Alon. Please join me in welcoming Teddy Cruz and Forna Forman. Thank you. So first of all, thanks so much to GSAP and to Amal for that wonderful introduction and to Lola Ben-Alon for joining us in conversation tonight. We're really excited to be here with you to discuss our research-based practice embedded at the San Diego-Tijuana border. We really see this zone as a microcosm of all the injustices and indignities experienced by vulnerable people across the planet, political violence, climate disruption, accelerating migration, rising nationalism, border building everywhere, deepening inequality and the steady decay of public thinking. We live and work a few miles away from the child detention centers that will forever stain this period of American history. San Diego-Tijuana has become a lightning rod for American nativism. And though the news cameras are gone, tens of thousands of Central American migrants wait at the wall for asylum that never comes, reviled by the Mexican public as a nuisance, as an infestation, or they sit in US detention centers as tools of deterrence separated forcibly from their children and exposed to a raging pandemic. It has been particularly devastating witnessing children in recent years, the emotional impact, their fear and the inevitable psychic internalization of being socially and morally marginalized. Hopefully there's relief on the horizon, but the prospect of more border porosity in the coming period is drawing even more people north with information circulating on social media, conditions are intensifying every day. And climate change will inevitably accelerate these flows in the years to come. A recent United Nations survey found that 72% of arriving migrants at our southern border are agricultural workers and that agricultural instability was a major factor in their decision to walk north. Global injustice is an intensely local experience here. Maybe move one slide forward, Teddy just one more, one more forward. Against these local atrocities, border communities and activists on both sides of the wall continue to confront and productively circumvent unjust power. Some of this contestation is about sanctuary and protecting people targeted by the state. Some of it is working through the courts, through the detention centers and other institutions of power to advocate for people ensnared in the net of political violence. Some of it takes the shape of bottom up civic agency that exposes and counters unjust power, confronts hateful political narratives and transgresses boundaries. Much of it arises informally through everyday collective practices of adaptation and resilience in conditions of scarcity and danger. Over the years, we've accompanied much of this bottom up emancipatory transgression in eruptions of democratic will in close partnership with agencies at the front lines. In recent years, these struggles here have attracted artists and cultural producers from around the world to engage in acts of performative protest. And while these gestures are often creative and provocative, we've been mostly critical of this uptick in ephemeral cultural actions that sort of dip in and out of the conflict. They tend to be extractive in their processes and their impacts on public consciousness as fleeting as the Instagram posts they generate. What happens the day after the happening? With our partners, we've been advocating for a longer view of resistance, a more systemic approach to the drivers of injustice and more strategic thinking about cultural, institutional, and spatial transformation in the border region. These commitments over decades have now culminated in a project that we would like to share with you tonight, the UCSD Community Stations. It's a network of public spaces located in vulnerable communities across the border region where universities and communities meet to share knowledges and resources and generally act otherwise together through research, education, policy advocacy, civic and cultural activity and design build projects in the city. So here we are with our team, with some of our community partners in Tijuana just before COVID hit. We have several core commitments that comprise a sort of community stations model, which we think is highly replicable for universities everywhere. I will introduce these commitments. Teddy will then take you on a tour of the UCSD Community Stations, all four of them. And then I will conclude with a few words about our programming at the sites and how they link our local border context with sites of conflict across the world. So to begin, we localized the global. We've always resisted the idea that global justice is sort of something that happens out there in the world somewhere. Living and working where we do, we don't need to send our students far away to learn about territorial conflict, migration, poverty and climate justice. We are minutes away from an international border and crisis and this enables an amazing proximity between campus and field, between theory and practice, what we think of as a critical proximity. Of course, going local here means recognizing ourselves as a region, a site of interdependence. Despite the wall and the ugly political rhetoric that's designed to divide us, we are a binational ecology of flows and circulation and our future is intertwined. Air, water, waste, health, culture, money, hope, love, these things don't stop at walls. We build trust bridges, long-term partnerships between our university and border communities. We're not like flaky university programs that come and go, you know, diagnosing crises, extracting data and then disappearing. We don't disappear, we're there for the long haul. We decolonize knowledge. We're keenly attuned to the power dynamics when universities arrive in communities and are critical of both extractive research methods and humanitarian problem-solving missions. We don't do applied research, we don't do charity and we're not a service learning program. Academic culture is filled with vertical assumptions that we know more, that we're trained to solve the world's problems if only they would listen to us. We're committed to horizontal practices of co-production, engaging communities as partners with knowledges and agency, everyone contributes, everyone learns and we do things together in the city that no one can do on their own. Along these lines, universities really take for granted the resources communities invest when they work with us, time, space, social capital, labor and knowledge. As a matter of epistemic justice and labor equity, these contributions need to be validated and compensated. We curate two-way flows, inside out and outside in, basically unsilowing the campus and inviting activists and community leaders into the campus to teach with us and ultimately thinking outside the box about, literally about what it means for a university to commit to diversity, cultivating skills of cultural sensitivity, empathy and awesome respect. These are skills that are best learned in situ. Today's challenges demand intersectionality, but everything that we do on migration, climate change, environmental, health, labor, education, urbanization, all of this is refracted through the lens of social transformation. Everything we do is cultural. For us, it's about changing hearts and minds, tackling inequality by increasing public knowledge about the roots and springs of injustice and growing connected, civically engaged border communities capable of collective action, advocacy and productive contestation. Ultimately, we are committed to building a cross-border citizenship culture, a sense of belonging that is not defined by the nation state or the document in one's pocket but by the shared interests and aspirations among people who inhabit a violently and artificially disrupted civic space. Those who benefit from narratives of separation and mistrust prefer that we remain a fragmented public, that the idea of citizenship divides rather than unites. We seek to inspire more inclusive imaginaries of coexistence and cross-border citizenship in this contested territory. Our cultural aspirations are inspired by Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal and a 20th century lineage of Latin American civic experimentation and urban pedagogy. In context of dramatic violence and social fragmentation, cities like Porto Alegre, Brazil and Bogota and Medellin, Colombia sought to heal the wounds of history and mobilize a cohesive civic identity through participatory cultural action. The way in Tennis Mocus and Bogota, for example, used street minds, urban games and theatrical public disruptions to transform urban norms from the bottom up or the way Medellin transformed urban remainders in forgotten zones into vibrant civic spaces that prioritized access and education. Like Medellin's now legendary library parks, our community stations represent a model of urban co-development between public universities and community organizations to fight the creeping gentrification of border neighborhoods. Each station is designed, funded, built, programmed and maintained collaboratively between the campus and the community. And finally, we reject conventional strategies of urban beautification and innovation that turn our public spaces into sites of leisure and consumption. We question the agendas of the creative class and their pop-ups, which too often accelerate gentrification, appropriate arts and culture for private ends and become an apology for the absence of more substantial public investment in the city. We believe public space must be civilized to use James Tully's beautiful concept, a site of dialogue and contestation and infused with resources and tools to increase public knowledge and community capacity for political and environmental action. So now a tour of the UCSD community stations and just a hint about what goes on in these spaces. For us, urban justice is a distributed concept requiring not only the redistribution of resources, but also the redistribution of knowledges. As a distributed system of public spaces transgressing the wall, the community stations to specialize social justice, mobilizing cross-border citizenship through cultural action. The community stations are the social engagement arm of our research-based design lab inside the university. While we designed this reciprocal knowledge system as a platform for collaborative education, we also claimed that the economic and programmatic power of our public university should be leveraged for communities to develop their own public spaces and social housing. With our community partners, we have co-developed four community stations, two in San Diego, two in Tijuana. So let's move from North to South. The UCSD Earth Lab Community Station is a partnership with Grandport San Diego and Environmental Justice Nonprofit located in the low income, primarily black and Latinx neighborhood of Encanto, a community characterized by high unemployment, low educational attainment, food insecurity, and cyclical poverty. The station occupies a four acre vacant parcel owned by the San Diego Unified School District who granted the parcel to our partnership to increase educational capacity for the eight public schools within walking distance of the site. The goal was to promote circulations between traditional classroom-based learning and outdoor experiential learning. This access to municipal land gave us leverage to assemble a unique cross sector collaboration between a major research university, a local school district, and a grassroots organization to co-develop public space, placing education at the center of community development. Before COVID-19 hit, 3,000 kids and their families circulated through the Earth Lab each year and during the current transition, it continues to operate as an outdoor socially distanced classroom. Recently, the school district committed capital monies towards a more refined physical resolution of the site for what has been so far a largely informal effort. While UCSD will invest in sustainable educational programming, research, and management in collaboration with Groundwork, who will steward community participation. Pedagogic zones at the site will focus on habitat restoration through energy, water, food, community all wrapped by indigenous Kuma AI knowledges and environmental practices. Ultimately, the UCSD Earth Lab Community Station will perform as an open-air climate action park designed for environmental education and climate justice. The district has also committed a school bond funding for a new climate action design building to anchor the site and as a pilot for a post COVID porosity in classroom design. This station will break ground in 2022. Moving south, the UCSD Casa Community Station is a partnership with the nonprofit Casa Familiar, a 30-year-old community-based social service organization. It is located in the border neighborhood of San Isidro, site of the BCS land crossing in the Western Hemisphere. The community is 90% LatinX and has one of the highest unemployment rates, lowest median household incomes and worst air quality in San Diego County. The heart of this community station is a beloved historic church that sat for decades in this repair and which we were able to rescue through this project with our partners. During construction, the building had to be lifted for installing new foundations. During the times of so much political violence inflicted on this border community, the surreal image of the church levitating with Tijuana's informal settlements in the distance inspired a sense of hope for the local residents. We designed the UCSD Casa Community Station as a double project. Affordable housing flanks a parcel size social infrastructure made of spaces for cultural and economic activity. The organizational design of the parcel through a system of linear strips with a variety of small scale buildings performing different roles was also a deliberate strategy to mobilize diverse financial streams to fund the different building typologies. Leveraging programmatic investments by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the educational, cultural and research programming between the university and the community, Casa Familiar and UCSD secured capital investments by the Park Foundation and Artplex America to build the social service infrastructure. These investments enabled Casa Familiar to qualify for a $9 million new market tax credit development package facilitated by the local municipality. Casa Familiar has become an alternative developer of affordable housing for its own community of San Isidro and public space was the detonator. We renovated the historic church into a community theater with outdoor stage and this performance space is flanked on one side by a series of small accessory buildings for Casa Familiar social programming and on the other side by an open-air civic classroom pavilion. This social, educational and cultural infrastructure anchors 10 units of affordable housing at both ends of the parcel all mediated by pedestrian walkways. We never imagined that this choreography of indoor and outdoor spaces would become a community asset during a global pandemic. Ultimately, the project advances a reproducible prototype for a small-scale development in low-income neighborhoods where buildings collaborate to transform small lots into social housing infrastructures. We completed construction of this station in February just before COVID-19 hit and the residents moved in. It's all locked down now but it's a site built for social proximity and we cannot wait to return in person. Affordable housing takes on a different meaning when it is deliberately threaded into spaces for social programming, summoning residents to participate in the development of local economy and cultural production, synergizing spaces, programs, resources and people. This is an integrated social spatial system that is programmed between the university and the community. Let's imagine a small coalition of local artists, promotoras and neighborhood youth collaborating with university curators, theater script writers and visual artists who come together periodically to co-produce a play that explores an urgent issue facing the community enacted by local youth in the community theater. These artistic productions are rooted in neighborhood stories and become bottom-up evidentiary material to increase public knowledge and policy transformation. Before moving across the border, allow me to pause for a moment to summarize a couple of concepts here and share how the processes behind our two San Diego-based stations exemplify several core commitments or building blocks in our practice. In conditions of poverty, housing needs to be embedded in an infrastructure of social, economic and cultural support. In other words, we must rethink affordable housing from autonomous units into relational social systems. Housing is public infrastructure. Density should not be measured as an abstract number of objects or people per area. Density must be understood instead as the intensity of social and economic exchanges per area. Migrant neighborhoods have taught us that these exchanges mobilized by bottom-up urbanization is a DNA for democratizing the city into a more inclusive and rural environments. Zoning must stop being punitive, preventing socialization. Instead, it should be conceptualized as a generative tool that anticipates, stimulates and organizes social and economic activity in neighborhoods. The developer performer is architectures financial plastic inside the mathematics of this spreadsheet. Our services as architects amounts to 15% of the project's construction costs. These undercapitalized assets can be mobilized as collateral for development. Nothing should prevent us as architects from becoming developers of our own projects and by association, nothing should prevent communities from doing the same. The sweat equity of architects, cultural producers and community leaders, the economic equity of public universities and municipal protocols for accessing public parcels can be bundled, aggregated to enable communities to develop their own neighborhoods. That's been our story. So moving across the border, our two community stations in Tijuana are located in the Laurettes Canyon, an informal settlement adjacent to the border wall. I will take a few moments to describe this very dramatic site. This location is at an important juncture of conflict. Here, the topography of Tijuana's canyons clash with the border wall before spilling northbound into an environmentally protected estuary in San Diego. Now, this estuary has been layered with security infrastructure. At these hotspots, the conflict between natural and jurisdictional systems and between ecological and political priorities is profound. As we zoom further, we witness a collision between the estuary in the US, the border wall and the informality of Laurettes Canyon home to 92,000 people. This site sits 30 minutes from our campus and demonstrates the dramatic proximity of wealth and extreme poverty in our region. This aerial video shows Laurettes Canyon and the precarious condition of the informal settlement that has a sprawl on the slopes. These environments are impacted by dump sites and are highly susceptible to erosion and flooding, especially when the canals get clogged with trash, as well as landslides, all exacerbated by the dramatic precipitation fluctuations of climate change. Laurettes Canyon lacks water and waste management infrastructure. So much of the trash along with tons of sediment flows upstream ending in the estuary, contaminating these by original and by national asset. Here, the border wall is an artifact of environmental insecurity. These impacts have intensified in recent years because of a profound lack of collaboration between San Diego and Tijuana to manage these cross border flows. In the last decades, 70% of the open lands in Laurettes Canyon have been lost to irregular urban growth. With our partners in Tijuana and a coalition of state and municipal agencies, grassroots organizations and universities on both sides of the border wall, we are identifying and bundling unsquadded lands in the settlement and protecting them within an archipelago of conservation. We are advancing an ambitious regional project called the Cross Border Commons, an environmental conservation initiative that links the estuary in the U.S. with the informal settlement in Mexico forming a continuous social and ecological envelope that transgresses the wall and protects the environmental systems shared between these two border cities. With our Tijuana based activist partners, the Border Project for Environmental Education, we are negotiating with the municipality for access to the remaining public lands inside the informal settlement. Another important contextual note before I introduce you to the stations in Laurettes, in the Laurettes Canyon, has also been, it is the fact that Laurettes Canyon has also been the site where we have advanced our research on informal urbanization. As we have written about over many years, the informal settlements of Tijuana are built with urban waste from San Diego, recycling architectural parts to construct habitation and infrastructure. We have learned a great deal from these incremental building practices as people construct their own shelter in layers over time. In a case study we documented a metal frame appeared from one day to another in a couple of months recycled materials began to thread the spaces in the next weeks an informal house emerged. We have also taken note that multinational maquiladoras surrounding these informal settlements typically benefit from easy access to cheap labor. Over the years, we have experimented with factory made material systems speculating how they might be adapted into acupunctural frames to structural mediate the recycling of waste acting as scaffolds for transitional densities becoming small scale anticipatory infrastructures to support informal building processes. We have advanced these agendas more concretely in recent years by proposing an ethical loop between factories and communities. Here we are inside meca loops, Spanish maquiladora that produces lightweight metal shelving systems for global export. Adapting is prefabricated systems into structural scaffolds as armatures for informal housing. We designed a catalog with the factories engineers to test the variety of prototypes and configurations. One of those prototypes is shown here with adapted urban debris from San Diego illustrating how top down institutional resources can support the bottom up creative intelligence of informal organization. A couple of years ago, we built the first prototype to tell the truth for us being inside the factory redirecting its material systems and surplus value to size of emergency was one of the most important milestones in our research based practice. With our community partners then we started to build early applications to demonstrate to the community the adaptability of the system such as this small bus stop to shelter Laurel's workers from the sun. Our two community stations in Tijuana then operate within this rich ecology of social, environmental, economic and material relations and partnerships. The UCSD Alaclan Community Station is located in the most rugged precarious and polluted soil basin in the canyon. It is a partnership with Embajadores de Jesús, a religious organization led by activist pastor economist Gustavo Banda and pastor psychologist Saida Vien. With limited resources, Embajadores began construction of a refugee camp to provide shelter, food and basic services to hundreds of Haitian and Central American refugees while they navigate unjust asylum processes in the US and Mexico. And with the help of skilled migrants they began building their own emergency housing. We have established a long-term partnership to co-develop a community station here to increase refugee housing capacity. We are accelerating production of meca-lux frames to install them on vernacular post and beam concrete systems into housing infrastructures. The housing scaffolds will be built first leaving the interiors as planned open systems equipped with the utilities to support incremental live-war configurations. These envelopes are the seeds for an evolving sanctuary neighborhood to be infilled through time by the immigrant residents themselves. We see migrant housing as a mechanism for generating jobs. To sustain the construction process over time, we are designing a sanctuary economy. We embed refugee housing in spaces of fabrication, training, small-scale economic development. With the support of the Park Foundation we have assembled a community-owned business, the Little Haiti Construction Cooperative with the tool library, wood and metal machines and a couple of trucks and tractors. They will complete construction of the site and remain operational for future construction jobs across the canyon. The UCSD Alacran Community Station began construction last summer with seed capital provided by New York-based philanthropist Robert Rubin and Stéphane Samuel whose collaboration on this project expands their commitment to the prefabricated social housing logics of post-war French architect Jean Prouvé. And finally, our UCSD Divina Community Station. This station is a partnership with Colonos de la Divina Providencia, a Tijuana NGO that is rooted in the community of Divina. The nonprofit facilitates a variety of social services including meals for youth, senior services, medical assistance and environmental awareness. Using Mecca Luke's parts, the station takes the shape of a flexible scaffold to accommodate a variety of informal programs including flea markets, cultural events and a series of multi-level spaces to accommodate a small high school all curated between our university and our partners. At the Divina station, we work with community leaders, students and researchers on social protection from landslides, floods and estuary health beyond the wall. We lead educational programming through which young people understand zones of vulnerability in their own neighborhoods, emphasizing ecological conservation of species and habitat restoration. It's never too late to begin. We have committed to elevating children here as the cross-border citizens of the future. Our two Tijuana based stations have also advanced important building blocks for our practice. Two in particular I would like to mention. For us, the informal is not an aesthetic category but a praxis, a dynamic set of functional urban operations from below that counter and transgress the imposition of top-down political power and exclusionary economic models. And hospitality is the first gesture when the immigrant arrives. An essential charitable opening, a first step in creating a more welcoming society. But as needs become more complex over time, charity is not the appropriate model to build an inclusive society. We need to move from hospitality to inclusion. Thinking beyond shelter is the foundation for rethinking refugee camps everywhere from places of short-term habitation and service provision to durable infrastructures for inclusion. Migrant shelters can be agile for negotiating both transition and rootedness, the ephemeral and the permanent. So those are the four UCSD community stations. There's so much more to say about them, about our amazing partners and what we do together in these spaces. While the stations all focus on different issues reflecting the priorities of each community, they're all richly curated for dialogue, collaborative research, urban pedagogy, participatory design build and cultural production. They all aspire to increasing public knowledge, challenging divisive political narratives, fostering solidarity and collective agency and advancing strategies to counter exploitation, dispossession, deportation and environmental calamity. These activities often invite encounters with formal institutions of power that govern the border zone. Sometimes these meetings facilitate neutral recognition and cooperation, sometimes they don't. For us, the goal is less about resolving conflict than about understanding, recognizing and democratizing it. We see democracy in the border zone as a fundamentally agonistic process of exposing and rendering more accessible the complex histories and mechanisms of injustice that are too often hidden with an official accounts of who we are in this region. Racist political narratives in the US portray the border as a site of rupture and criminality but we've been committed to generating counter narratives about life in this region, grounded in the experiences of those who inhabit it. We are a region of flows and circulations, shared practices and aspirations, alliances of hearts and minds, regardless of the wall that restricts the movement of our bodies. In this sense, the community stations become a cross-border observatory, a platform for constructing an elastic civic identity from the bottom up across border race publica. With our partners, we curate unwalling experiments that dissolve the wall using visual tools like diagrams and radical cartographies to situate border neighborhoods within broader spatial ecologies of circulation and interdependence from local to regional to continental and ultimately to global scales. We see elasticity as a civic skill, the ability to kind of stretch and return between local and more expansive ways of thinking over and again, to understand one's challenges within broader global dynamics and processes and to envision opportunities for solidarity and collective action beyond walls. Here at the border, the idea of the bio region, right? The bi-national watershed system has been a powerful imaginary for cultivating a more elastic civic imagination here. Several years ago, we curated a cross-border public action through one of the sewage drains, Homeland Security carved into the wall between Lorela's Canyon and the estuary that Teddy introduced to you earlier. We negotiated a permit with US Homeland Security to transform the drain into an official port of entry southbound for 24 hours. They agreed, disarmed by our self description as just artists, as long as Mexican immigration officials were waiting at the other end of the tunnel in Mexican territory to stamp our passports. Our convoy was comprised of 300 local community activists and residents, representatives from the municipalities of San Diego and Tijuana and artists and border activists from around the world. We understood the event as an agonistic intervention because we summoned agencies who are typically at odds with one another. As we moved together southbound under the wall, we witnessed slum wastewater flowing northbound toward the estuary beneath our feet. This strange crossing from estuary to slum under a militarized culvert and the stamping of passports inside this liminal space amplified the most profound contradictions and interdependencies of our border region. The great insight was that protecting the vulnerable US estuary demands shared investment in the informal Mexican settlement. So we went under, but sometimes nurturing civic elasticity entails ascending above the familiar. In the early 20th century, Patrick Gettis designed the Cama Obscura in the center of Edinburgh, a five story observation tower that enabled people to look out across the region. He coined the term regionalism and comprehend the environmental systems that comprise it. For Gettis, this was essential for constructing a civic identity and a collective political will. Now, imagine a Mexican child standing on a narrow sliver of land along the eastern rim of Lorealis Canyon, hundreds of feet above the border wall, right here at a place called Mirador. Imagine she plants her feet facing due west with the vast blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean in front of her, Mexico to her left, the US to her right. Below to her immediate left, she sees the dense informal settlement where she lives. She can spot her house, her school and experience their proximity to a country that she and her family are not allowed to enter. Below to her immediate right, almost beneath her feet, she sees the border wall with, which from this vantage looks like a flimsy and ridiculous strip inserted onto a vast and powerful natural system. Lifting her eyes, she sees the green expanse of the Tijuana River Estuary and its vulnerable wetland habitats. And further beyond still, you can't see it in this photo, she can see San Diego rising vertically into the sky. From this vantage, all the characters of this contested zone come to life. We've witnessed this moment of recognition again and again over the years among children, our students, policymakers and even foundation presidents. There are few places on earth, I would argue where the collision of informality, militarization, environmental vulnerability and the proximity of wealth and poverty can be so vividly experienced. But in reality, the conflicts we experience here locally between nation and nature are reproduced again and again along the entire trajectory of the continental border between the United States and Mexico. Over the years, we've collected aerial photos that document precise moments when the jurisdictional line collides with natural systems, powerfully illustrating what dumb sovereignty looks like when it hits the ground in a complex bio region. Our MEXUS project stretches our elastic civic aspirations to the continental scale. MEXUS visualizes the entire border zone without the line. It dissolves the border into a bio region whose shape is defined by the eight by national watershed systems bisected by the international border. MEXUS also exposes other systems and flows across this bio regional territory, tribal nations, protected lands, crop lands, urban crossings, many more informal ones, 15 million people and much more. Ultimately, MEXUS counters America's wall building fantasies with more expansive imaginaries of belonging and cooperation beyond the nation state. Here it is in 2018 at the Venice architecture Biennale. In community stations programming, MEXUS becomes a provocation for dialogue about a shared bio regional civic identity among Mexicans, Americans and diverse tribal nations who inhabit this contested space. Now, the final civic stretch literally is a visualization project we call the political equator which traces an imaginary line from San Diego, Tijuana across the planet forming a corridor of global conflict between the 30th and 38th parallels north. Along this trajectory lie some of the world's most contested and violent thresholds. Now, visualizing this political equator alongside the climatic equator in green was an astonishing discovery for us because this ribbon between them, give or take a few degrees contains our planet's most populous slums, its sites of greatest natural resource extraction and export and its zones of greatest political instability, climate vulnerability and human displacement. And when these parallel equators are applied to the Pierce Quinconceal projection, the Arctic becomes protagonist. Look at this with its melting ice caps detonating hemispheric conflicts through sea level rise, dramatic coastal vulnerability and human displacement. The collision of nationalism, climate catastrophe and forced migration is the global trifecta of our time. But as we said at the beginning, these dynamics always hit the ground somewhere and are experienced by people locally in everyday places like ours. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bonantetti Trudi for an inspiring lecture and I'm astonished by the additional amount of work made by your lab and practice in the past year even during or due to the pandemic, it's only one year since we last met. It's really interesting to look at your work from nature's viewpoint. I thought to myself over the weekend that nature has no borders, no discrimination on basis of one's nation culture. There's no separation of waste. It does not stop in the border as you said, Bonant. And these old words belong to humans, waste, nation, borders and in nature everything that dies becomes essentially a fertilizer for new life. And we often look at reutilizing biological and electronic nutrients that can become fertilizers. This is how we look at in environmental life cycle, LCA studies, we look at biology and electronics and we try to encompass social life cycle impacts related to circularity, related to job creation, to labor practices, to community engagement, to health, to equity. And it really seems that your work enriches and invokes the underlying social complexities of what we call environmental and social life cycle and upcycle concepts. And one of the things I thought about were maybe that perhaps you're adding a new layer of political nutrients, kind of composting old political byproducts to fertilize new grounds for the growth of new systems, really using productive visual tools to rethink the 19th century rationalist gestures imposed on the territory as you mentioned. You also reimagine and rethink border zones as regions as you've shown here, really containing all these shared assets and intelligence that should not be thrown away and injected with new systems but rather building a politically closed loop systems. One of the things that you critically identified here towards the end of the lecture was the political equator. This corridor of border zones all concentrated along a horizontal global line from Tijuana San Diego border. And really your work with students is geared towards developing these methodological tools, conflict diagrams to transform participatory development of community engagements and community stations. And I'm really intrigued about how would you suggest utilizing this practical and scholarly agency or methodology that you developed in your practice perhaps encompassing your nine core commitments that you showed in the yellow slides and apply it to other conflict border tissues. I'm of course concerned and part of my work is around the Israeli-Palestinian border. Are there procedures you find most useful to encompass political intelligence regardless of sight and would your future work expand out to other border zones across the globe? What are they want to begin? Well, thank you so much Lola for that set of reflections which are huge questions each in their own way. I think I'll pick up just quickly something you said at the end about the applicability and the way we see kind of these systems operate. We're deeply embedded in a particular place and I think that's one of the reasons why the work is very slow. We've sort of developed long-term relationships over time and generated sort of momentum with particular partners and the transferability of many of these things always makes us nervous. I mean, so we were asked not too long ago by our friend Michael Sorkin. It was the last project we worked on together with him. He asked us to reflect on dynamics at our border in the context of Gaza and Israel. We said, Michael, we can't do that. That just is terrifying to us because there's always danger in kind of comparing two different contexts and exporting ideas from one place to the other but he insisted that we try. And so we did because he was Michael. So we focused on watershed dynamics and the shared aquifers and watershed systems within the territory and how in that sense it opened opportunities for thinking in more collaborative ways about water management because if the more powerful country doesn't do that all of the waste comes back and affects them anyway. So it may not be driven by kind of an ethical imperative. Here in the San Diego Tijuana border region, it's the same. Most San Diegans are driven by a kind of ethical imperative to engage what's going on on the other side of the wall. But when they come to understand that there are shared interests that make their destinies intertwined, it wakes people up and suddenly there are more opportunities for connection. I think I'll stop there and let Teddy. And he said, it's a very interesting challenge obviously, even though we truly believe in the potential of knowledge transference. I mean, after all, we learned so much from cities that really suffer from huge conflict and institutional sort of weakness and the alienation of society, the rampant social and economic inequalities that have defined many cities in Latin America. And the cases that we researched and collaborate ended up collaborating with the former mayors of Bogotá and Medellín. It's precisely because we needed to begin making sense of how to transfer some of those knowledges into new forms again of organization. Obviously this cannot be transferred one to one, but truly we believe that there is a DNA in some of our practices that can really be deployed in very different ways. Now, one thing is this, it's like we were trying to figure out if a community stations model might be an organizing system, let's say, for rethinking Gaza under reconstruction because that was Michael's beautiful ideas as he always did. He would try to see opportunity, obviously, within a conflict and strife. So part of the agenda was to really be projective in what might be devices to rethink, you know, the Gaza in the future. One thing that came to mind though in that conversation was also when we had the privilege to go to Ramallah years ago. And I took a field trip just in the outskirts of Ramallah and I ended up, they were showing some of the housing that was being built on the hills. And I was just completely devastated when I saw that some of the Palestinian developers were actually reproducing master plan, sort of gated communities that looked like Israeli settlements. So for a moment I realized, my God, society that is trying to really build self-determination, can we reinvent the tools? Can we reinvent the recipes that in the kinds of symbols of progress, right, that end up, you know, controlling or defining the terms? So I began to imagine, can sovereignty be understood at the scale of a housing project? Can a community be free until it rethinks, you know, the way housing might be developed from the bottom up? And so all these transferences, I think are very important in terms of your question and obviously it's very delicate because the moment we might mention citizenship culture within the Israeli-Palestinian, you know, it might be almost an insult in the condition of a stateless sort of situation. But nevertheless, what we carry through the project in this context within our beautiful last conversation with Michael is that potentially, just potentially, empathy could be a political tool in that the kinds of, in the fact, just like we are doing in Tijuana San Diego, the border wall becomes a self-inflicted wound because we are not only separating ourselves from the other, we are damaging our own shared environmental systems. And this is what is happening in Gaza, right? The contamination, by non-investing and collaboratively in infrastructure, those aquifers are being polluted and that water is flowing into Israel. You see what I'm saying? So this sort of counter-intuitive process. Now finally, your question also has to do about the preparing of the ground. For us, it has been essential to say that that is in fact what architects, all of us should be doing at this moment, preparing the political ground. And the first site of intervention is our own practices. The obsession with autonomy and self-referentiality in architecture has produced a huge havoc, I think, for preventing us from contacting the many other domains that have remained peripheral to design. So when we talk about the green new deal, everybody's talking about the green and how we're going to cover buildings with green self-organizing and morphogenetic sort of skins are supposed to understanding that what we really need to be talking about is the new deal, that we need to invest in producing a new public imagination and that requires cross-sectorial alliances and collaborations. It requires to rethink the political itself. So many times we say that we're interested not in political architectures, we are interested in the construction of the political itself. And I think that's to begin with what really will determine everything that you were saying, Lola, everything will follow. But to begin with, we need to really reorganize our institutions. And that really echoes with the first question that was asked by one of the students by Thomas. Maybe I could read the question because it really deals with, you know, how do you address? So he asks, in dealing with public space or land in general, how do you address the normative relationship between governments and local communities, which is often plagued and with mistrust and a reluctance by authoritative powers to abdicate power and control? What a beautiful question. And it's really obviously one of the barriers. We didn't talk much about it tonight, but Teddy and I have always seen our practice as serving it as a kind of mediating function, a way of bridging knowledges between communities from the bottom up and institutions from the top down. We've actually worked from the base of a municipality and we've seen up close how dysfunctional they are. And we've worked deeply embedded in communities and understand their incredible resilience and agency. And there's just a breakdown in communication so often between these dynamics in the city. And so we've always seen ourselves in a kind of translational function. One of the sort of really, one of the things that drives our research practice is interpreting and communicating the ingenuity of informal logics of development, the kind of upcycle that you described at the beginning, Lola, the way people are navigating scarcity. It's just astonishing. And we think there's so much of value in those processes that are completely off the radar of formal institutions of power that govern urban development and policy and so forth. And so we've tried very hard to kind of bridge those worlds through dialogue and a lot of the programming that happens in the community station. But that mistrust that's there is there for a reason. And it actually gets at one of the other questions that I saw in the chat, like why aren't we naming the culprit? And the culprit is the kind of neoliberalization of development in our cities. Like why aren't we just being explicit about that? And I realized that we really weren't here. We weren't explicit about that, sort of naming the culprit. But that's a whole other area of conversation that we need to have. I mean, we see so much of what we're doing as mobilizing a kind of bottom-up public in the absence of a robust top-down investment in sites of need and opportunity. So anyway. I will, this is fundamental. And we just shared a few building blocks. We are in fact lucky to be finally working on our monograph that we will bring a lot of these processes into one publication that it's been a long time. And we're working with our design team on that. And we have a variety of building blocks. This is where it's just what is it eight or seven, but they're like maybe 26 plus. But the first one is in fact that confronting inequality and obviously confronting the institutional violence that really undermine our collective social, economic and environmental assets or resources, the concentration of economic and political power. And the fact that in fact, one of the building blocks is that conflict must be our creative tool. So the visualization of conflict, the understanding, the specificity of the knowledge of the conditions that have produced the conflict. Obviously the institutional mechanisms that produce such a stupidity, such violence. Those are the materials for the architects we argue as a kind of building block. So conflict is our generative creative tool to reorganize obviously ways of intervention into the city. So definitely it's an institutional project. That's the reason we call it different to the notions of the avant-garde of a critical distance from the institutions. We call it a critical proximity to infiltrate into the institutions. That's the reason that moment when we said, we were inside the factory, even though for many people might not recognize the power of that moment for us, we wanted to say it because we need to infiltrate into institutions somehow to reorganize and redirect a surplus value that has obviously been concentrated from the many to the very few. And in that sense, to tell you the truth, architects begin to maybe play a variety of roles as usual because our profession tends to be one of those very schizophrenic, you know, all the impossibly comprehensive fields is that we need to also inject or intervene into shaping new forms of political representation. And I think that when we talk about the bottom up and when we talk about the creative intelligence of informal, you know, migrant communities, retrofitting neighborhoods from homogeneous, monocultural and mono-use environments to complex social and economic systems. All of that is stealth information. It's a creative information that as architects, we've been trying to translate the power of that information to knock on the doors of the institutions so that we can transform, you know, top down policy. This is a space of operation that not many of us has. In other words, some of us throughout the years have been focusing on the bottom up, some on really top down, you know, luxury kind of the role of architect architects to serve those very few, but very seldom we have really intervening the interface between the top down and the bottom up, how to really facilitate the knowledge transference in order to transform, in order, how should I say it? Even though we have said forever that informal settlements are incredibly incredible environments of creativity, by saying that, we don't want to give the excuse to institutions to leave them off the hook that they don't have to support those communities, right? We need to demand accountability from institutions to really invest the resources to support that creative intelligence. And I think that there is not enough, how should I say it? Architects can be interlocutors of a new type of relationship between the top down and the bottom up. So that interface, in fact, our book is called Top Down Bottom Up. We're very much interested in that journey from the bottom up to the top down. And I'm saying this very quickly, just last thing, I'm saying this is because unfortunately, in recent years, and we hear it from our students, at times there is a dissatisfaction, a kind of disappointment about institutions, about government. So I said, we say, this is the moment where we need to not get rid of government as much as bureaucracy has become impossible, or the kind of alienation, the kind of retraction of public institutions from the commitments. This is the moment to reinvent government, to make it more collaborative, more inclusive, and more accountable. And so I think more and more working on the ground for us, it's clear that even though our heart is on the ground with our community partners and our investigation, more and more we see this as an institutional project, as I was saying. We believe in institutions, and today they need to be made more accountable. They need to be reformed in order to really enter into a new period to reconstruct solidarity and a civic imagination. So, and that really echoes with how I would also suggest your role not only as designers and scholars, but also of curators of civic agency and public processes. I would like to dive a little bit into the technicalities of your work. There's a question here by Eric. How do your proposed upcycled metal amateurs account for the typical tectonic challenges of thermal comfort and weather protection? Is there a method for identifying urban debris that will be integrated? And I would like to add maybe because materials, you know, is my really point of passion and interest, I'm curious to hear your agenda really concerning health and indoor air quality as Eric suggested for thermal comfort and weather protection and really about the supply chains of reclaimed materials, especially what you mentioned with the San Diego building construction debris and the flow to the Mexican territory and vice versa. And how do you account for the ecology of materials used in your construction projects? I can elaborate on that. I mean, in reality, obviously, we have to understand the availability, right? The processes that are indulging us to these environments to understand and sort of demystify a bit our aspirations for high technological or the kinds of levels of resolution that we might enjoy in other contexts to begin with. Okay, we're talking about places of drastic poverty and also projects that are just developed through a political economy of waste, of a political economy that is really constructed through, as you already saw, the kind of equal is schizophrenic and multi-dimensional forms of financialization and so on. So that's not to suggest that we should not invest time in resolving some of those challenges. Now there is one thing that has to do in terms of air quality with very common sensical aspects of modulating space. Like the project in San Ysidro in the immigrant neighborhood of San Ysidro, our buildings are very narrow. So we don't never do depth deep sort of floor plates so that we can immediately capitalize on cross ventilation. So one building is 16 feet wide, for example. Another might be no more than 30 and so on. But in Tijuana, obviously we are talking about already learning from the low cost, layering of the informal organization that there is something in that layering that might enable us to imagine buildings within buildings within buildings. We have been so inspired by our friend Jean-Philippe Vassal like in Anglac aton in Paris who brought up the idea that we have been witnessing in our own environment for years, right? That we can use very affordable plastic envelopes supported by advancements in shading and other layered sort of skins in order to produce comfort without really having to resolve everything, waterproofing that are super expensive in one volume, right? So I think that a lot of these buildings are layered with very low-tech materials. We have someone in that case, as we already showed, many of the factories that surround these informal settlements with their own material capability. So we have been researching how that, which is great because we have air pockets that really are able to really modulate temperature and so on. And finally, I think we have been also figuring out how the recycling of waste, as we didn't have time to really deepen into that aspect in our presentation, but garage doors, rubber tires, entire houses from San Diego are brought into Tijuana to build new environments in these informal settlements. But we have witnessed incredibly sophisticated, for example, systems to produce retaining walls made of rubber tires that are incredibly sophisticated by cutting and threading and the tires into a very efficient system. But of course the tires, how to say, have toxins that really ultimately undermine the health of the ground, which is already hugely ravaged by the depletion of topsoil performance. And so we have been, even though obviously we love to see this recollage, that's what we were saying. For those informal, and it's just an aesthetic category, we are trying to really extract from these procedures the political economy aspect, not so much the pictorial sort of image of the recycling of the waste. Nevertheless, there is something about the supply chain as sort of the networks where a lot of recycling is being stored in factories and places. In fact, that's the reason people build with waste because it's hugely affordable. So garage doors from San Diego are used for creating the skins for the buildings and so on. So the effort that we are trying to advance is how to make more sense to take some of those materials of waste, but also take them through an equally more curated process of transformation into more performative assemblages. So in the construction workshop that we are developing in the refugee camp, there are machines that really will transform aspects of waste and plastic into new sort of potentially new layers that can be used for shading or for other purposes. So it's a whole, the question is fantastic. And I think it's obviously we are rushing to sort of tackle the issues, but we have not necessarily advanced in many of these other dimensions of the research that needs to be brought into the conversation. I mean, it's always, sorry. It's always a tension between responding to the urgency of human need and struggle and developing systems that protect the earth. And sometimes these imperatives come into conflict, but we have been doing some research and through a donor, it's wonderful. We'll be using photovoltaic systems at the Alikran site, which is very exciting. We hope that it, you know, to really create a sort of a zero net environment there. Very quickly, one essential thing is a, oh, sorry, what did you finish? No, no, no. Go ahead. No, it's relevant to talk about the material systems not only for the buildings, but for the reconstruction of the topsoil and of the green infrastructure that we are building because we didn't have the time, obviously we rushed and we have never said so many words in 40 minutes. We were happy with the, I hope people followed, but the cross-border environmental commons where we're trying to recuperate these still available lands in the informal settlement that are rescuable environmentally. We're trying to inject into them environmental systems that will require interesting processes to hybridize materials, natural and artificial, you know, to construct and secure some of those environmental systems basically. So it's a larger question. We've been so critical by the way of architecture practices at times, including ours maybe, but that have rushed to sites of emergency just to build housing for the poor. And we end up and people end up just building boxes instead of building communities. And I think that at that point is when we need to really, you know, produce a project that is so much more comprehensive. So material systems connected to the local ecology is an incredible challenge for this informal settlement. So yes, it's a beautiful question, something that we need to advance further. And I saw in one of the images, some of the infrastructure or foundation work that you did with this large blocks of stone, probably good for the infiltration of water. And of course, if you're ever interested in doing some work with earthen materials, I would be more than glad and intrigued to do so. There's a question here by Thomas in dealing with public space and land in general. How do you address the normative relationship between governments and local communities, which is often, oh, sorry. It's okay. So by Ibu Junha, what are the hierarchical necessities of housing that makes a space hospitable when you talk about hospitality when one of the last core commitments? How do you beyond hospitality? How do you adapt these resources to transition to an inclusive and more durable infrastructure? So what are the hierarchical necessities of housing that makes a space hospitable? I mean, there's obviously the physical sort of infrastructural answer to that question, but we've been really addressing that question in terms of the sort of civic activity of the space and transitioning from something that's ephemeral and transitional into a place that's home. So the ability to educate one's children, the ability to develop a kind of economic plan for oneself, right? Being invited into the civic kind of activity of the community and getting involved in democratic and civic activity, opportunities for not only health, but emotional and spiritual health as well. I mean, I think it's really, it's about the host city, right? The host city, the city of arrival, transforming along with the migrant. So hospitality means that the city that you've arrived to is actually changing along with you and your arrival. So for us, it's really been a kind of a social and performative concept. Petty, maybe you wanna say something? No, this is great. I'm glad that you, by mistake, began to read the previous question because I think the two thread really nicely in trying to address this question. Is in fact the reason we are threading public space and housing? And is in fact the reason we said housing cannot just be units on their own. They need to be embedded in a set of protocols that might advance interpersonal relations or might advance interventions into social norms and behavioral norms, empathy. I mean, let us not forget. I mean, these spaces, they cannot just be designed as just static physical things. We're interested in designing the protocols that would enable them to be nurtured or nurturing. That's what we learned by the way by Antanas Mocos from Antanas Mocos when we collaborated with him when we brought him to the border and Fona mentioned it in the earlier. We learned so much from him. When he provoked us, he said, before intervening physically in the city, we need to intervene in reorganizing social norms. You know, to build up a project of a sense of mutual recognition and responsibility. A citizenship culture, he ended up calling it. So when we think of housing, in this case, the housing is embedded in activities, in spaces that blur public and private potentially, but really some of these residents who receive others, right? But also end up aggregating to the collective sort of sensibility that these more norms of empathy and respect are how they are being nurtured and developed. So yeah, we cannot separate in that sense, the kind of programming that we are designing. That's the reason we've been so maybe masochistic about this, because we're trying to design both the physical and the programmatic to do a sure inclusion and to assure that these projects really as housing, let's say, act more like social systems rather than just a bunch of objects as beautiful as they might look like. Can I say one more thing just to respond to this question? I mean, we really wanna move away, at least in our sort of narrative, we've really tried to move away from the language of hospitality toward a language of inclusion, because hospitality is a very, it sort of, it comes out of a 17th, you know, early European discourse about charity toward the stranger, which is a kind of top-down idea that you provide care. And that's important. I mean, and that's, you know, we have to be hospitable when the stranger arrives, but that just, you know, that falls apart very quickly when, you know, you reflect on what the long-term relationship between, you know, a society and it's arriving, you know, migrant population is going to be. And so it's about moving, for us, it's about moving from hospitality to, you know, equity and a more inclusive civic realm. Right. Which is really why I want to ask this, maybe concluding question about your vision for architectural pedagogy. So about really how your critical work influences architectural pedagogy at the university and your vision towards inserting those toolkits, not toolkits, as you mentioned, it's all site-specific, but still the conflict maps, the design of political processes, the leadership of civic agency. How do you envision these as tools for architecture students? You did previously workshops, you're teaching at the university, but connected to the School of Architecture, but have your own labs of how does that all integrate to become, you know, prerequisites, not prerequisites, but part of the curriculum. How can we all learn from you to embed that in our educational programs to enrich architectural practice? Well, we don't have an architecture school at UC San Diego, so we love arriving in architecture schools and get to, you know, and get to engage with architecture students, but, you know, just our practice, the kind of knowledges and, you know, what we're bringing together, we're linking two sides of the campus that never really talked to each other. So that in itself, you know, we bring an entirely different vantage to an architectural intervention. And every time we've had, you know, an opportunity to teach an architectural studio together, we always begin with, you know, understanding the vectors that define that space, right? Before you even think about anything physical, really understanding how that space is constituted, by who and why and what are the temporalities in that space and the histories of that space and the, you know, the institutions that have jurisdiction and conflicting jurisdiction over that space. This is really how we begin any intervention ourselves. And we have the opportunity to work with architecture students. Half the studio is focused on these questions before we ever get to, you know, to a single drawing. It's all about diagramming reality and understanding opportunities through the conflicts that diagramming reality can bring out. There are a variety of strategies. Obviously, we've been very interested in this question. I think that not only the extrapolation, let's say of the creative intelligence of the bottom map when it comes to rethinking systems of urbanization, even political, well, policy itself, really. That's the reason we always have felt and defended the idea that immigrants are really the leaders in this case. I mean, to really learn from those logic. So that requires a pedagogical process of transference as we said before, but can institutions learn, right? From that, can institutions be, what Fona calls epistemic humility? Let's say to understand and to transfer some of those logics to contaminate our own procedures. One thing that we've been doing, and we just started the studio at Yale, like a year ago, we're teaching one right now at the Fay School of Architecture. And once in a while we do it, but whenever we've been lucky to do it, we bring a tool that we call the 5Ws, which is really pretty much very simple questions, right? Where, why, who, what, when. And we develop through that what we call a conflict diagram. And we are trying to really constantly push into this process. It's very, you know, it would take a long time to explain the whole methodological sort of procedure about it, but it's about being comprehensive in a way. And departing from the controversies, right? And beginning to expose, and through many of those mechanisms, but also understanding who are the culprits, but who have been affected by the problem? Who are the jurisdictions, the constituencies that need to be rallied? The, you know, for example, if you're going to address housing design, right? Public housing. We don't begin with designing the building. We're building with designing or critiquing tax credit-based financing, which is incredibly or so lit in a sense. We, of critiquing housing and economic policy. Can we intervene into designing civic and political process? So, yes, we have a method to that because it's really an extension of what we do. We don't begin a project without understanding conflicts. When we arrived to this canyon in Tijuana, what brought us there was the conflict between factories, emergency housing, and politics of labor. And in that triad, there is a variety of institutional mechanisms and processes that began to emerge. So, yes, there is that. And finally, I would say, yes, coming up with methods. But the other one is that through the community stations, we have been able to really act as we call them cultural coyotes or coyotes, or, you know, where we are really interlocutors between communities in need and the university, circulations, right? And this is what we do in the community stations. So we had been lucky to get funding primarily from the Melon Foundation, really, to bring activists to co-teach with us, who might not have the credentials according to the protocols of the big university, but we represent that. We are the hosts. And then they begin to help us to reorganize our research and educational agendas. So I think bringing the creative intelligence of communities into the university is as fundamental as bringing resources to them to increase their own capacities for political action. So there are a series of devices that really we could think of that have been held up. It's very difficult for us to do if we teach somewhere other than our own sort of home base, because, you know, again, universities need to be very careful before they sort of go monkeying around in the delicate, you know, ecologies of community-based work and so on. So it's always a possibility, right? Yeah, that's right, that's right. Yes. For Christina, how do you see the visibility of a cross-border planning agenda, working with local planning and urban development authorities to bridge this gap between top and bottom and provide a comprehensive multilevel approach to ecological and social regeneration? And I would add another question because it seems that we did discuss these aspects. David just asked to please also describe your analytical process. It seems like the drawings themselves are a means to reveal or exploit relationships that are not necessarily evident. So... That's great. Yeah, those questions are connected. I mean, so if you look at a planning map in the city of Tijuana or if you look at a planning map in the city of San Diego, everything stops at the line. Think that on the other side, there's nothing there. It's just sort of blank white space, right? And so this is an issue we've been struggling with for years to try to get the municipalities to talk to one another. And usually when they do, at least in last decades, it's always oriented around economic development, right? So it's a strange part of the world where even the business community here, it's a very strange kind of conservatism in this part of the country. Even the business community finds the wall really onerous. And so you often find sort of business leaders on both sides of the border working with the municipalities to figure out how to make the border itself more porous for an easier flow of goods and services and movement of people for the sake of building economic development across the region. But outside of that, there's been very little collaboration between the cities on issues of equity and environmental health. We've been trying to help the region reinterpret the idea of resilience. Everybody talks about resilience now. You can't do that on both sides of the wall and not be talking to each other. So the most important way to define resilience in a region like ours is to create infrastructures for collaboration, right? It's really been an uphill battle, but I think it's gaining more traction, I think. And I saw there was a question in the chat as well about whether changes in our federal government may open new possibilities. And I think I hope that it will. I mean, I hope things are about to change for the better. They can't get much worse than they've been in the last four years. So hopefully, you know, that will sort of stimulate more collaborative thinking in this region as well. I can just add to that very quickly. I mean, there were so many things that we wanted to share, but, you know, years ago, we brought Antanas Mokus, who we talked about already many times, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, who, you know, coined and expanded and elaborated on this idea of constructing a new citizenship culture. And we invited him to come to work with us on precedented sort of elaboration, let's say of his project of citizenship culture, that he had been applying to Latin American cities because he said he developed a system that was articulated by the local municipalities in many cities to understand the kind of resilience or the kind of capacity of cities for social coordination and the relationship between institutions and communities. It's a beautiful document and it's a survey. It's called the Citizenship Culture Survey, but they had applied it on cities themselves. Then we invited Antanas to apply it in our San Diego-Tijuana border, which became, by the way, in terms of our practice, a foundational document. So we performed this survey between the two cities to try to understand if there were sensibilities beyond the world that constructed a kind of cross-border citizenship culture, right? The kind of cross-border public that understood the urgency and the importance of public goods that needed to be respected and visualized. And one of the major data that emerged from the survey was in fact that, responding to the question, the need to engage. If we don't see the problem, how can we tackle it? So they talked about education, obviously. The data, it was that more needs to be done to nurture and to construct that cross-border public sensibility where images could really be detonators, visual literacy, images as political tools. And that's when, in fact, the MEXUS project also emerged from, because when we drew the border, not like a stupid administrative line, but the shape that you saw is the eight most important shared watershed systems between the regional, between the US and Mexico creating this shape. And we have done many others. And you are right, I think our predilection has been that, that many drawings and cartographies we create is trying to visualize the agency, obviously, of bottom-up urbanization, but also of environmental, again, flows and systems. And even jurisdiction, by the way, one project that we developed with our community partners in San Isidro was a land-use map between San Diego and Tijuana because as Fona said, they don't exist, right? And when we saw Tijuana being more pixelated by more alternative compacted uses, right? We created this sort of confetti, we called it, of colors. And we saw San Diego being made of these large swaths of large colors, yellow bedroom communities, sleevers of red, but we began to talk about how immigrants moving north had begun to alter neighborhoods, injecting into them that confetti of alternative uses. And so we created a map that was dynamic looking at the confetti of Tijuana entering into San Diego, altering the largeness of exclusionary zoning policy. So when a city council member saw that image, he got it, right? And so I think that sometimes this image has become really the summoners and the organizing tools to mediate a more complex and important conversation about the altering of policy and also really transferring the knowledge of activists really and so on. So yes, images for us in this case and visualization, we call it the visualization of the political. And I think that has inspired us so much to rethink the protocols. The next question was great, it's about visualizing what's not visible as a way of creating a new civic commitment. Which for planning across the board is necessary because documents do not exist. So as Fona said, we cannot begin this project without curating a cross-border, cross-sector institutional project, but a much needs to be done to really stitch together the cartographies and planning agents. Fona and I worked for the mayor of San Diego in 1912 for a year in actually curating some of these possibilities. And that was the aspiration. Let's just connect the dots because policies, budgets, institutions, again, the reason our cities are fragmented is because we unfortunately suffer from institutional fragmentation and at the border it gets even worse. So we need more urban curators, connecting and linking what has been divided. So June is asking here two additional questions about the difference between the 30 and 38 parallel. You first asked, they first asked, do they reveal more resources-driven conflicts? And second, they're asking, what are the roles of technologies and what kind of technologies that are used to facilitate programmatic agendas, create opportunities for civic activity and transform citizen culture. How is technology used to identify problems between the 30 and 38? I would say, I mean, so we, what we know about what goes on in that ribbon of conflict across the world is because of good old fashioned human communication. We've connected with activist practices in those zones, truly in the hotspot border zones across the world to learn from each other and share practices and share strategies. And so, what we've learned really is through dialogue, conversation, visiting, and so forth. We've experimented a little bit in our own region with the role that technology can play in bridging divides. As the border wall has thickened and become more militarized over the last period, we needed to figure out ways to communicate with our community partners, particularly those who once could travel north and now suddenly couldn't. And it became more difficult for some of our students, for DACA students, when they began to feel in danger, they didn't want to get anywhere near the border. So we had to figure out mechanisms of communication and a technology sort of institute at our university gave us these massive optiportable units that could actually be transported to allow us to communicate through satellite across the wall. So the technology, we often called it sort of transgressive technology because it enabled us to erase the border and to communicate with our partners without having to deal with the military without having to deal with Homeland Security. And so we've tinkered a little. Yeah, and in that sense, we've been really interested in designing nomadic classrooms, nomadic sort of technology hubs. Obviously, we are lucky that we have the university behind us in this project. And so they have been essential in supporting us, but it is difficult to transfer at this moment obviously and before even. And so with our partners during COVID, we continued our programming in Tijuana precisely because of that. And they are able to have workshops so long distance learning in this case, again, probably in your university, you're feeling the same, I don't know, pressures about MOOCs, about like this long distance learning that are being packaged as profit driven systems. But when we, and also perpetuating individual at times, which is what bothers me, atomization of education where everybody's in their room obviously that we're doing right now potentially. But when you begin to think that these community agencies become informal city halls, that in fact they could by having this technology of information and visualization and long distance learning, some of the community to take advantage of those university courses. You know what I mean? In some capacity, we begin to truly democratize technology in that sense. But also that depends on the precarity of the environment where we work, I mean, across this political equator and so on. So yes, I think the transfer and see, in fact, the political equator began as a practice atlas as an atlas of practice because we wanted to link further with many of the groups that throughout the years, we've been in one way or another really in communication across these sites of conflict. So potential, you know, we have some friends in Buenos Aires, for example, N7 Red who have been doing incredible work at the intersection of watershed systems and marginalized communities. And we were wondering how we could activate their practice by actually becoming one of our classrooms so that maybe many universities in the US could send students to really station themselves there to really advance their own agendas. So I think that technology is a tool, but I think that more than anything, the content, right? The issues, the urgencies that organize those technologies needs to be first, you know, vetted or at least move forward. So technology can be at service, not as a in terms of, you know, in control, but anyway. So good question about that. This resonates very much with my own approach and work. And that really leads me to, I wish we could, I wish next time I would be able to shake your hand, hug you or at least, you know, build something together, maybe in the field but at the very minimum, the silver line is that we can at least interact in here and be inspired by your work. So thank you again for inspiring our students and our faculty and coming to our school virtually today and wonderful lecture. Thank you, we truly thank you. We thank Amal and everybody involved and you Lola for hosting us as everybody, you know, we've been, you know, trying to focus on advancing things and it was such a treat to, you know, that you invited us to share the work with many friends who were not able to see but faculty at Columbia and, you know, long-term friendships and advancing many of these issues together. And so it's good to reconnect. And so thank you to Amal from both of us and her very generous introduction. Thank you. Well, until later. Yes. Bye, take care everyone.