Building Borderland Resources with Each Other in Mind

The UC San Diego Community Stations’ approach to architecture and community building is so layered and so nuanced that urban planning barely describes the scope of their mission. “Conventional planning is about black and white,” says Teddy Cruz, a Professor of Public Culture and Urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. “In fact, land use and density maps are always about buildings, one color without understanding the gray zones. Our work is about designing cultural tools to produce new sensibilities about that gray.”

This methodology transforms continuously as the project investigates informal urbanization, civic infrastructure, and public culture in thoughtfully designed hubs that the university co-developed with communities along the California-Mexico border. 

Under the aegis of UCSD Center on Global Justice, the Community Stations program is a cross-pollination that merges the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, as well as visual arts and the humanities, nurturing a fresh dialogue between researchers and residents of the communities in which the stations are located. These ongoing conversations are cultivating potential solutions for issues as varied as labor equity, environmental justice, and political/economic displacement. 

Fonna Forman—a Professor of Political Theory and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice at UC San Diego and project co-lead—goes on to say: “It's a process. The incremental quality of all of our work is a really big part of it; it's not a finished snapshot. What's interesting to us is the evolutionary momentum of the projects, because that's what collaborative work is. We don't go and build houses for the poor. That's not what this is. We're not coming in, top-down building, rearranging the furniture, and disappearing. It's slow and messy, and ugly and beautiful and all of these things.”

Built on the premise that communities and research universities can partner to solve pressing issues, the program has currently activated four vibrant sites, or stations, that evolve with the needs of their respective populations—two in San Diego, two in Tijuana. The stations are within a short distance of UC San Diego’s campus in La Jolla, California. 

“This is about really opening up new channels of recognition and the co-production of knowledge,” Cruz says. For each station, a constellation of local partners informs the programming, focus, and needs areas that exist for a given community. The relationships must be built on trust, a model that disrupts the historical relationship between a major resourced university, local communities, and residents. Conflict is a product of this work that Forman says is welcome. 

“When a university does one-off projects, the ethnographic model has to hold that. [In this model], when you communicate, you show utmost respect: you listen, you keep your hands off, you don't touch, and then you ascend back to the university and you write up your papers,” Forman explains. “A collaborative model is different because it's not vertical; it's horizontal. When you're coming from different worlds with different knowledges and different experiences, there can be conflict that we're trained in ethnography to avoid. We have conflict. Nobody's conceding to the other. Respect means listening, conflicting, working through the rough terrain of coming to a resolution or a plan of action together.” 

Each site’s focus has developed organically based on the relationship of the people who inhabit the specific geography, with research agendas and dynamics organized through the priorities of the location’s community partners. The most northern is the UC San Diego–EarthLab Community Station. Established in partnership with Groundwork San Diego, it is located in San Diego’s diverse Encanto neighborhood at the epicenter of red-lining that took place in the 1930s. One hundred years later, the area is still a zone of cyclical poverty and dramatic disinvestment. It is also in the heart of the Chollas Creek watershed—a highly polluted waterway. Factors such as this allow the stations to act as entry-points in researching bio-regional dynamics and the relationship of watersheds to environmental justice. “This station particularly is an illustration of co-development between university and communities—we act as facilitators of cross-sector negotiations and possibilities,” Cruz says. “There is a circulation here between indoor-outdoor education, bringing students to engage nature, seeing nature as a mirror, because to care for nature is to care for themselves and their own communities. We designed the physical and we also designed the programmatic: the physical green infrastructure will become the backdrop for experiential climate education.” 

Southeast of EarthLab sits the UC San Diego–Casa Community Station, co-developed with the non-profit Casa Familiar, in the San Ysidro neighborhood less than a mile away from the San Diego border checkpoint that is the busiest land crossing in the Western Hemisphere. San Ysidro is a community primarily composed of migrants from Mexico living below the poverty line. The first station was built reflecting Mellon’s investment in collaborative education and research; its progress has been leveraged to allow the program to build flexible community housing. Flanked by a public space made up of a communal theater that was adapted from a 1920s church and that has become a symbol of civic pride, the station also features an open-air classroom, pavilions with technology infrastructure provided by the university that fosters long distance learning, and a series of accessory buildings that contain programming for citizenship, orientation, community services, and art-making.

The Casa station is a cooperative effort in increasing community capacities for political action via a public space that is programmed with collaborative productions of theater, music, and visual arts. The goal is to use these humanities-based practices to change public perceptions and public policy, where community members (particularly children) become stewards of amplifying the injustices that they face every day, becoming politically aware and agile in the process.

A case study that exemplifies how creative, compassionate thinking is being utilized to spark civic advocacy: San Ysidro has the worst air quality in San Diego County because of its proximity to the border—thousands of idling cars waiting to cross create exhaust that is contributing to higher rates of lung disease and emphysema. To facilitate the community’s involvement in the conversation around this health crisis, UCSD students were invited to the backyard of a local resident whose lemon trees were coated with black silt accumulated from the daily pollution. Recognizing the lemons as biosensors, the students used the silt on the lemons to create placards with Spanish words that could then be used to communicate what is being faced by inhabitants of this area. The incredible connection between science, climate change, urban design practices, and activism all culminated in a story that the people of the station call “the black lemons”, a recurring theme in cultural productions of the community. “The lemons have become a way to communicate to policymakers in the border region that we are being left out, that our health concerns are a function of political decision and we need to change it. Here's an example of how art can be used to communicate the injustices that the community is facing, a different way of cognitively processing the challenge,” says Forman.

Students respond to this way of learning and working. Art and creativity offer energizing new ways to research and engage, and open channels for students to co-create research with the community members who stand to benefit from their work. Forman proudly relays: “We do longitudinal studies of our students, and we see that their involvement with our project during college has an impact on their career trajectories, what they want to study after they graduate, what kind of jobs they dream of pursuing. So many of them want to go into public interest work after they graduate because this exposure to it during college was so important to them.”

Given the university’s location just minutes away from a border in crisis, the case has been made that the project and its stations localize issues of global gravity. Dynamics witnessed across the world of disinvestment, populism, border closure, accelerating climate disruption can be witnessed in the field by UC San Diego students in the morning and they can be back in the classroom only a few hours later. This amazing proximity between theory and practice has brought a large, research institution to the epicenter of these issues in meaningful long-term ways.

The UC San Diego–Alacrán Community Station is south of the border wall in the Los Laureles Canyon, adjacent to the critical Tijuana River watershed system—the most polluted waterway in the bio region. The station is inside an informal settlement of more than 100,000 people, with a population that has been largely displaced from Haiti, Central America, and other parts of Mexico. The site has become an incredible laboratory for exploring social, environmental, and ecological interdependence. In partnership with Embajadores de Jesús—a religious organization deeply rooted in the area run by activist-pastor-economist Gustavo Banda Aceves—Alacrán has become a proto-typical example of the program’s commitment to blurring the lines between research, teaching, and service. 

“The Alacrán Community Station became an experiment with our partners—nonprofits that really are rooted in those environments. We tell our students in the arts and beyond, you cannot just parachute into these environments. The idea is to collaborate so that there's a point of entry. Those agencies, those grassroots organizations are the sums of the community,” says Cruz.

These partnerships provide integral context for the communities’ unique needs and tensions. Fostering connections that develop mutual understanding, Forman and Cruz and UCSD students have not only been able to study the maquiladoras (or global factories) that surround informal settlements to take advantage of cheap labor but have also been able to work directly with these companies to subsidize building materials for the on-site housing in the station constructed by the occupants themselves. Modular shelving system products have been transformed into the framework for incremental habitation, which has led to the co-development of a larger project—an entire sanctuary neighborhood. Already, the location features a collective food hub, an industrial kitchen showcasing food justice programming. 

In the community stations, the local is global. Learning from their partnership with Embajadores de Jesús, the program has recognized priorities such as enabling and fostering local economies that benefit migrants who are facing arduous and inaccessible asylum processes. What they are finding is that their case studies can be used as clear illustrations of how refugees can move from transitional living sites to more permanent housing—knowledge that will be more necessary as migration increases around the world due to displacement driven by climate change, among other factors. 

“We're going to continue seeing this across the world no matter how much we slow the warming. The frontline communities will continue to feel impacts at least through the middle of the century, if not further beyond,” Forman says. “We need to be thinking about regional resilience and what it looks like now. When California and the southwest talks about what it means to be climate resilient, too often that vision stops at our borders. There's this fantasy in the American mind that the border means we don't have to worry about anything that goes on on the other side.”

Forman and Cruz urge a re-imagining of national boundaries for occupants of both sides. Referencing a map they’ve created, Forman declares excitedly: “We've erased the line visually. The border simply becomes a set of watersheds. Imagine what the entire continental US border looks like when it's reconceptualized as watersheds instead of a metal fence. It opens questions about our interdependence.” 

Innovation within the program therefore goes beyond material details of responsive architectural or urban design. The layered complexities of the stories witnessed and woven into programming and activities translate to thought innovation, especially for the children who inhabit the sites. Understanding that the decisions, studies, and programming that they are participating in belongs to them rather than something that is done to them is a paradigm shift that leads to empowerment.

“Citizenship is more a way of inhabiting a place together and sharing interests and aspirations. We're always rethinking citizenship with these young people. How can we reimagine the space that we're inhabiting and how we share it? Children are going to be thinking differently about borders and interconnection in the future simply because our world cannot tolerate the current geopolitical pattern. They're the new thinkers. They're experiencing reality differently in new ways,” says Forman. The UCSD Community Stations platform sees children as the cross-border citizens of the future, focusing on the educational access of the youth populations of each site. 

With this top of mind, the station furthest south, UC San Diego–Divina, is situated on the periphery of Tijuana in a more consolidated neighborhood of an informal settlement, set up in partnership with Colonos de la Divina Providencia. The station is maturing into the only high school in the entire region, home to more than 85,000 people. Highly focused on the environment, the school’s orientation is intended to give the university strong links to the young people of the community.  

Varied in purpose, community, and geography, what unites the stations? Cruz explains: “Each community station is a laboratory for thinking of alternative programming. Bringing youth in the neighborhoods to bear witness to the vulnerability of their hotspots provides recognition that a lot of the societal infrastructure damage being done in that informal settlement is also damaging that beautiful operative environmental system that is important to the livability of the entire bio region. This connection between the local and what happens beyond the wall is what really opens up our work with youth.” 

Cruz is emphatic that the connection necessary to see beyond the limiting linear paths that keep us from fresh solutions can be unlocked with imagination. For him, this revelation began when he realized that the problems of the world cannot be solved by the vantage of his architectural design specialization alone, leading him to formulate a practice with Forman, a political theorist, that Cruz says equates collaboration with empathy and thinks beyond traditional academic pathways.

He relays this anecdote as an example: “We did a project with Steve Schick, who is a world-renowned percussionist and composer and professor in the music department here with the CASA Community Station. During one of the initial meetings with the social workers from the site we were warned that if the compositions did not have lyrics, the community would not understand it. We decided: let's prove that wrong. At the workshops, we began to open up ideas that are complex, such as music can be about touching the earth, or music can be about silence. That access to other forms of imagination and perception began to really produce incredible feedback. That circulation is beautiful.”