Comments on: Teddy Cruz – What adaptive architecture can learn from Shantytowns

By: Water Rules Over Development Hopes | Green Economy

Water Rules Over Development Hopes | Green Economy — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:24:54 +0000

[...] Teddy Cruz, whose practice focuses on the informal urban life around the San Diego- Tijuana border, was addressing the Van Alen Institute about how we should construe and outfit national borders. Van Alen is now in its 106th year of airing how design can promote social equity and healthy cities. (I’ve talked to Van Alen about possible collaborations but have never worked for the organization.) Its purpose includes a drive to harmonize architectural practice with progressive policy. In our cultural moment, when the federal government has created a setaside for high design, I expected the forum to talk about lighting and GIS. But Cruz played up something starker. [...]

By: OMG! Forget American Idols, these are International Idols « The World. The Future. The City.

Sat, 31 May 2008 02:33:14 +0000

[...] Cruz …� Resilience Science Blog and here: New York [...]

By: databeautiful » Blog Archive » “intelligent design” hotel - Condesa SF @mexico city

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:32:24 +0000

[...] by Javier Sanchez (whom I hope to meet while I am in Mexico City – he is a friend of my colleague Teddy Cruz), but for now, these are the pictures of my room and the lovely private terrace [...]

By: william c. knutsen

william c. knutsen — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:05:01 +0000

As a US citizen having lived in Baja, Mexico, I think that much of their culture is superior to the USA. However, Teddy Cruz’s fine ideas on Tijuana’s shanty towns over looks the fact that these towns are largely the result of over-population. Not that California, for one example, is not over populated, but Mexico clearly cannot take care of its population because that is why so many there want to come to the USA. I met unemployed men in Baja who thought that if you did not have sex every day (every day!) you were not a real man. If a married man did not have a child nearly every year they thought it had to be because something was wrong. I saw poverty-stricken Indios walking in Baja; the young barefoot wife held a child in each hand, had one on her back, and she was pregnant! These kids are going to have a really rough life. Mexican society has got to start a program to adjust social attitudes to sex and child bearing. Mexico is a wonderful country full of marvelous food, but it is over populating itself into starvation. Opening American borders, which in theory I agree with, will not stop the real problem at home in Mexico. I have watched Mexican workers (in a cafe in Indio) in California call US immigration to report newly arrived “wetbacks” willing to work for less than the callers were getting. You see the problem.

By: J. B. Mollitt

J. B. Mollitt — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 17:33:57 +0000

Co-opting slum ingenuity, or the genius loci of “micro utopias”, to redress the alleged failures of top-down urban planning suggests that Cruz’s thinking is perhaps unnaturally tithed to the conceit that architecture remains disproportionately responsible for the supposed alienation frequently cited as the bane of contemporary urban/suburban society.

While he seems cognizant of the falsity that “complexity can be manufactured” through gentrification, he goes on to state that “the ultimate site of intervention is planning regulation itself”, and, typical of all aspiring theorists, stamps his chosen intervention strategies with radical overtones such as �contamination of zoning�, �social choreography�, �practices of encroachment�, �tactics of invasion�, �urban acupuncture� and “urbanism of transgression”. This is the language of insurgency and
cold war polemics, no doubt inspired in part by Mike Davis, the eminence grise of strident social criticism.

Cruz’s James Stirling Memorial Lecture reads like an extended blurb for a future monograph, Learning from Tijuana: A Squatter’s Manifesto. The danger with such breathless hyperbole lies in its ability to radically polarize public opinion on complex issues related to immigration, identity and economics. His theories come across as viral urbanism for the disenfranchised, micro-financed sans-culottisme that erects a lean-to on the back of the Bastille and calls it �Relational Aesthetics�.

I sincerely hope that if and when his ideas percolate through North American cities they don’t appear as a new urban trend called favela-chic, or worse, the cause of further ethnic strife.

By: Xeelee

Xeelee — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:01:50 +0000

What I think he’s trying to achieve is a balance between the extreme organization of suburbia and the unorganized growth of most mexican cities.

All the more congrats to him for trying. Having lived in both environments, I know there are ways to get the best from both without having to make people uncomfortable with the change.

By: Claude Peloquin

Claude Peloquin — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 02:41:58 +0000

I always found an appealing quality in the organic nature of such unplanned building patterns, at least when dealing with self-made, relatively smaller structures that affect a restricted amount of space, e.g. at the scale of a house lot.

I find interesting the ways in which these small and independent stuctures add up and form patterns at larger scales in a way that just seems to work. Especially when contrasted with some of the dysfunctional outcomes of the modernist approach to urban planning.