SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT:

The Case for Participatory Urbanization

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman

Estudio Teddy Cruz + Forman

UC San Diego Center on Global Justice

MESCI, University of Rome, Tor Vergata

April 26-8, 2017

Overview

This 12-hour module will consider the impact of deepening privatization on a dramatically urbanizing world, and will draw on a variety of primarily Latin American case studies to suggest that designing sustainable and equitable cities today requires a new civic imagination that:

-stimulates an ethical imperative among citizens to reclaim their “right to the city”;

-cultivates a new “citizenship culture” to inspire collective thinking and collective action;

-restores our commitment to public goods, as well as more inclusive models of collective urban existence;

-embraces a pluralistic public culture and the inclusion of marginalized voices through new strategies of community particpation;

-experiments with new models of economic development driven not by developers who design for consumption, but by cross-sector coalitions who design for neighborhood scale economic productivity and climate action, and enable local forms of shared property ownership.

-repairs public trust in institutions; and

-enables new interfaces between “top-down” and “bottom-up” publics – between the knowledges and capacities of institutions and community-based organizations

Seminar Organization:

The course will take the form of a seminar, balancing lecture, readings and discussion drawn from the central urgencies and projects that inform the urban and political practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Forman.

Evaluation:

Evaluation will consist of a final written project (80%) (prompt distributed at the beginning of seminar) and participation in discussion and debate (20%)

Bibliography:

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “Changing Practices: Engaging Informal Public Demands” and “The Informal Public Demands a New Conversation: A Virtual Roundtable (with Alejandro Echeverri and Jean-Philipe Vassal)” in Informal Markets Worlds – Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, eds. Helge Mooshammer, Peter Mörtenböck, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman. Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers, 2015.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “The Wall: The San Diego-Tijuana Border,” ArtForum (Summer 2016): 370-375.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “Latin America and a New Political Leadership:

Experimental Acts of Co-Existence,” in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, eds. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson and Dominic Wilsdon, Boston, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming 2017.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “Global Justice at the Municipal Scale: the Case of Medellín, Colombia,” in Institutional Cosmopolitanism, ed. Luis Cabrera. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017.

David Harvey, “The Right to the City.” The New Left Review 53 (Sept-Oct 2008): 23-40.

Antanas Mockus, Bogotá's Capacity for Self-transformation and Citizenship-Building.

Chantal Mouffe, “Art as Agnostic Intervention into Public Space,” in OPEN (#14: NAI, Rotterdam, 2008)

Schedule

Wednesday, April 26:

Introductory Lecture:

The Political Equator: Localizing Global Inequality

Topics:

1. Tijuana – San Diego Border: The Cross-Borer CItizen

2. The Public / Private Divide

3. Top Down / Bottom Up

READ:

Cruz/Forman, Changing Practices

Cruz/Forman, The Wall

Thursday, April 27:

A New Civic Imagination

Topic 1:

Rethinking the “top-down public”: (the Medellín and Bogotá cases)

READ:

-Mockus, Bogotá's Capacity

-Cruz and Forman, Global Justice at the Municipal Scale

-Cruz and Forman, Latin American and a New Political Leadership

FILM: Cities on Speed: Bogotá Change (selections)

Topic 2:

Rethinking the “bottom-up public” (the case for participatory urbanization)

READ:

-Harvey, Right to the City

-Mouffe, Art as Agonistic Intervention

Friday, April 28:

Co-producing the City:

Rethinking Economic Development and Climate Action at Neighborhood Scale

Cases:

-Casa Familiar, Living Rooms at the Border, San Ysidro, California.

-Cross-Border Community Station, Laureles Canyon, B.C, Mexico

-EarthLab + Hilltop + EPIC, San Diego, California

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