Alternative Visions of Urban Planning

The phenomena of international immigration have never been so prominent as in the last few decades on a global scale. Motivations of immigration vary. But the predominant reason for people to move from rural area to urban city, from third-world countries to first-world countries, is the economic incentive. This type of immigration is a chain reaction. It generates a series of sequential problems politically, socially, psychologically, and geographically. On the individual lever, immigrating means displacement and relocation. On a social level, urban transformations are inevitable in terms of generating or reshaping the fabric of the residential neighborhoods where they settle. New communities and alternative social spaces are formed. There is a mutual interplay between immigration and urbanization. When urbanization serves as impetus of immigration, immigration expedites the urban expansion.

While these phenomena are general on a global level, it is extreme remarkable in the city of San Diego. As an immigration-based country, America’s economic is greatly supported by its immigrants. For California, Latin American migrants’ cheap labor is an indispensable element. The border between San Diego and Tijuana is not merely a geographic boundary but a symbol of a newly reconstituted global border between the first and third worlds both economically and politically after 9/11.

Teddy Cruz is a San Diego-based architect who researches and analyzes the urban transformation occurring on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Unable to afford the high rents of downtown area or the new suburbs’ housing, immigrants choose to settle in the first ring of suburbanization in San Diego which has long been ignored by developers and city officials. As Cruz observed, “alternative social spaces spring up in large parking lots; informal economies such as flea markets and street vendors appear in vacant properties and housing additions in the shape of illegal companion units plug into existing suburban dwellings to provide affordable living.” These inspired him to question the efficiency and function of “grotesquely over-scaled” houses such as the expensive “McMansions” of the new suburbs. McMansion Retrofitted is a proposal – presented through videos, photographs, drawings, models and maps – to transform an existing 8,000 square foot single-family suburban house into a mixed-use multifamily dwelling. This work is currently presented in the exhibition Conflict Resolution – Teddy Cruz and Pedro Reyes in the Walter and Mcbean Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute.

According to Cruz, this strategy of conventional American suburbs retrofit will eventually go through a similar process across the country because of the rapid densification of urban area. It is a recycle of not only existing materials but also existing conditions. "It's the next ring of densification," Mr. Cruz said confidently of the mega-McMansions, "so we thought it might make a perfect test case. How do you retrofit them?"

Instead of reflecting or criticizing the problem through artistic expression, Cruz has pushed forward the practice to a problem-solving level. Just as other architecture or urban planning project that might not be realized in a short term, his practice at least offers us possibilities and alternative resolutions towards the specific problem.

With the intervention of social engagement, boundaries between visual arts, daily life, social issue and other disciplines become increasingly invisible. The interdisciplinary strategies seem to gradually become a cliché. However, this generates another question and maybe hard to find a concrete answer. How to balance the relationship between visual representation and the complex social context behind it? For me, this question at least has two layers. Firstly, there is a certain level of compromise that exists. Will the visual display of this type of work be too dry because of the overwhelming context it tries to convey? Secondly is the exhibition context of displaying and interpreting these works. Is there an information gap between the visual output and the actual complexities?

Cruz's earnestness in placing his architecture outside the profession endows a sensatory effect to his work besides the architectural aesthetic. The plastic model displayed in the exhibition is embraced by mirrors. The infinite reflections of the house create a spatial illusion and visualize the future neighborhood based on this model. Although vague, there is something about Cruz’s Utopian envision and an ideal of distributive justice. Different from modernism era, Cruz’s strategy is based on sustainability. He chooses to recycle the materials as well as re-plan the existed neighborhoods instead of conducting new construction that expands the city even further outwards. On the other hand, owning a big house in the suburb is somehow a very important part of the American Dream. By dividing single-family house into multifamily house, Cruz suggests an openness to the traditions of other cultures as well as a subversion of the bourgeois version of the American Dream.

The term “socialism” has repeatedly appeared during the discussion of new economic strategy in recent presidential campaign. Although the desire of a fundamental reform of America’s current social and economic structure is urgent, the fear of the potential to shift from capitalism to socialism is apparent (although this is not necessarily the case). Teddy Cruz’s envision faces challenges, but by focusing his attention narrowly on the border area, he has created a mutable template that could be applied far beyond the suburbs of San Diego. For him, these nascent melting pots are rich laboratories not only for architectural experimentation but also for social critique.

- text by Xiaoyu Weng