geography

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We live and work at the US–Mexico border in the largest binational urban region in the world: the metropolis of San Diego/Tijuana. Over the last decades this border zone has been our laboratory to engage the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequal- ity, dramatic migratory shifts, urban informality, environmen- tal degradation, climate change, the thickening of border walls, and the decline of public thinking. Blurring conven- tional boundaries between theory and practice, and situated at the intersection of architecture, art, and civic engagement, our practice has been committed to exploring the invisible transborder flows and circulations that define the territory and have shaped the transgressive hybrid identities of every- day life in this part of the world. We think of the border less as a militarized jurisdictional line, or as a political artifice, and more as a region defined by interdependence. Our work reimagines the border zone as a transnational environmental commons, an eco-region that demands cross-border col- laboration for the benefit of all. We are activating this vision through a robust collaboration with agencies and universi- ties on both sides of the border that are eager to pursue a new era of partnership to protect shared environmental assets and tackle climate change, the mother of all public problems. A key dimension of this research is to rethink citizenship itself—opposing conventional jurisdictional or identitarian ideas that divide communities and nation-states with a more practical idea focused on the shared social norms, everyday practices, interests, and aspirations that typically flow across boundaries.1

The fortress mentality that once characterized the politi- cal fringe has gone mainstream in the United States and across the world, legitimizing bigotry and the urgency to

build walls that are higher and stronger and to protect national resources from an endless flow of dangerous inter- lopers. In our zone of conflict and increasing militarization, we seek to draw on regional flows, convergences, and interdependencies to construct a more speculative imagi- nary of regional citizenship, one that provokes young people to aspire beyond the political realities of border enclosure to imagine possible futures. In the midst of calls for wall- building, we should call even more loudly for interdependence and transgressive experiments in “unwalling” that allow people to see each other anew and cultivate cross-border public commitment toward a more inclusive, democratic, and environmentally progressive binational region.

The Political Equator

Over the last decade we have been linking border regions around the globe to investigate their differences and similari- ties, and what those regions can learn from each other about civic and environmental interdependence and tactics of transgression. The Political Equator (2005–present) is a visu- alization project that traces an imaginary line along the US–Mexico continental border and extends it directly across a world atlas, forming a corridor of global conflict between thirty and thirty-eight degrees north latitude (fig. 302). Along this imaginary boundary lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds, including the US–Mexico border at San Diego/Tijuana, the most trafficked international border checkpoint in the world and the primary migration route from Latin America into the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, the main funnel of migra- tion from North Africa into Europe through which waves

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Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

Citizenship Culture and the Transnational Environmental Commons

figure 302 Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman The Political Equator, 2005–present

of migrants and refugees from North Africa and Syria flow across “Fortress Europe,” recently thickened to contain the flow of refugees from Lampedusa into Italy and from Lesbos into Greece; the Israeli–Palestinian border that divides the Middle East, emblematized by Israel’s fifty-year military occu- pation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; India/Kashmir, a site of intense and ongoing territorial conflict between Pakistan and India since the British partition of India in 1947; and the border between North and South Korea, which rep- resents decades of intractable conflict, carrying Cold War tensions forward to the present day. Of course, the real politi- cal equator extends beyond this flat line, since border condi- tions are distributed across the globe. Although we tend to think of border walls as physical fortresses, borders are reproduced in peripheral neighborhoods everywhere, where

public divestment, racism, and inequality divide communi- ties and institutions.

Communities most affected by political marginalization likewise often bear the brunt of the accelerating impact of climate change. The collision of geopolitical borders, environ- mental crisis, and human displacement is the great crisis of our age.2 This convergence of environmental and social injus- tice is evident in the experience of African American resi- dents of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; more generally in the conditions of the poorest and most vulnerable across the globe, who tend to settle along lagoons and low-lying coastal zones at the front lines of sea-level rise; and with particular urgency in the Syrian refugee crisis, which arguably began decades ago with a thirty-year drought that drove rural Syrians to cities politically unprepared to integrate

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them and evolved into one of the most horrific political and human catastrophes of the last century.3

Unfortunately, the political rhetoric of hatred and border closures across the world today further marginalizes the most vulnerable among us, criminalizing their movement and dehumanizing their condition. But anti-immigrant senti- ment has been met with irruptions of civic and political resistance, frequently in border regions where the collision is most immediately experienced, demanding new and more inclusive imaginaries of coexistence and sanctuary. How can we, as cultural producers, disrupt the mythologies that have been perpetuated by xenophobic, often racially motivated fears about the other and produce a new conversation? Can we advance new ideas of citizenship that transcend borders, ones based on practical urgencies rather than identitarian categories? Can environmental urgency and climate change become tools for new cross-border thinking?

Perhaps no one has posed the issue of climate justice more eloquently and powerfully than Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’. Pope Francis has become a great ally in the simultaneous fight against poverty, the fight for tolerance and human dignity, and the fight against climate change. He wrote: “Today . . . we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”4

Localizing Action

Effective strategies to promote social inclusion and environ- mental justice together require widespread and pervasive cultural shifts in attitude and behavior.5 Policy and planning are essential but not enough without genuine buy-in from the bottom up, at all scales—from the vast canvas of public opinion to collective and individual attitudes and behavior at neighborhood or village scales, where the rubber hits the road, so to speak.

This is particularly true of disadvantaged neighborhoods plagued by poverty, violence, failing schools, and failing infrastructure, where environmental concerns can seem remote from the acute challenges of everyday life. Proximity matters. Research shows that disadvantaged urban popula- tions, for example, are more likely to become engaged in climate action when they understand the linkages between

quality of life for the poor. His use of street mimes, games, and theatrical street disruptions has inspired civic actors, urbanists, and artists across Latin America and the world to think more creatively about upsetting civic dysfunction and transforming urban norms and behavior.

Shifting social norms and renewing public trust paved the way in Bogotá for succeeding mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s renowned multinodal and egalitarian transportation agenda, consisting of a network of bus rapid transit, bicycle hubs, cyclovias, and dedicated walking paths that literally stitched that troubled city together and revolutionized public transportation in Latin America.8 In other words, shifting social norms came first; the environmental interventions followed. As Peñalosa stated in 2013, “An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars,  but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”9

Mockus and Peñalosa emerged from a long tradition of participatory urbanization across Latin America, stewarded by environmentally forward mayors who were inspired by the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire and his “critical pedagogy” for reclaiming the humanity of the colonized.10 These mayors committed to robust agendas of civic engagement, from the Workers’ Party mayors in Porto Alegre, Brazil, who experimented with participatory budget- ing in the 1970s, to the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, Jaime Lerner, who pioneered bus rapid transit and dozens of green interventions in the 1980s, to the “social urbanism” of Sergio Fajardo when he was mayor of Medellín, Colombia, in the early 2000s that transformed public spaces and green infrastructure into sites of education and citizenship- building, elevating Medellín into a global model of urban social justice (fig. 304).11 This tradition still thrives in cities across the continent, from La Paz in Bolivia to Quito in Ecuador to Mexico City, and carries important lessons for equitable green urbanization in cities across the world today.

Cross-Border Community Stations: Cultural Platforms for Participatory Climate Action

Inspired by our research in Bogotá and Medellín, where citi- zenship was mobilized through cultural action in public space, we founded the UCSD Cross-Border Community Stations at the University of California, San Diego. They are field-based hubs in underserved neighborhoods on both sides of the San Diego–Tijuana border, where experiential learning,

climate and poverty in their own neighborhoods, and when local opportunities for participatory action with neighborhood-scale impact are made available to them.6 When the negative effects of climate change are made tangible and present for people, rather than something far- off like melting icecaps and polar bears—when they under- stand, for instance, precisely how sea-level rise will affect one’s city or neighborhood—individuals are more likely to be receptive to the concept of global climate change generally and supportive of climate-friendly public policy.

All this research is confirmed by powerful examples across the world. In our practice we have been inspired by Latin American cities that have been particularly successful in recent decades at transforming local attitudes and behavior around environment and climate while producing more equitable outcomes in the city. A long lineage of climate-forward mayors across the region committed their administrations to bold environmental agendas that were combined with participatory strategies designed to promote dignity and agency among the poor, and ultimately to produce greener, more equitable cities.7

When the philosopher Antanas Mockus (fig. 303) became mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, in 1995, the city was in a free fall of violence, poverty, infrastructural failure, and choking air quality, the worst anywhere on the continent. At that time it was often referred to as “the most dangerous city on the planet.” Rejecting the conventional law-and-order response to urban violence, Mockus came up with a very different idea, one based on transforming societal norms—changing the hearts and minds of citizens—to repair patterns of pub- lic trust and social cooperation. Provoking architects and urbanists, Mockus asserted that before improving the city physically, it was first necessary to intervene into the belief systems that perpetuate an acceptance of poverty and dramatic inequality. He focused not only on those with resources and |power but also, more essentially, on the mar- ginalized and the poor, with the goal of restoring urban dignity, reclaiming neighborhoods, and fostering collective agency. He became legendary for the distinctive ways he intervened into the behavioral dysfunction of urban Bogotá, using arts and culture and sometimes outrageous perfor- mative interventions to dramatically reduce violence and lawlessness, reconnect citizens with their government and with each other, increase tax collection, reduce water con- sumption, reduce vehicle emissions, and ultimately improve

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figure 304 Centro de Desarrollo Cultural de Moravia, Medellín, Colombia Courtesy of Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman

figure 303 Antanas Mockus in Tijuana, 2015 Courtesy of Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman

research, and teaching are conducted with community-based nonprofits, advancing a new model of community-university partnership and reciprocal knowledge production.12 Social and environmental justice today not only is about redistributing resources and technologies but also depends on redistribut- ing knowledges and capabilities. The UCSD Cross-Border Community Stations employ innovative models of environ- mental education at community scale to transform hearts and

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minds about climate change and environmental health and to foster participatory, bottom-up responses.

We do this by converting vacant and neglected sites and spaces into active civic classrooms—spaces of knowledge, cultural production, small-scale participatory design and con- struction projects, environmental research, and display that are curated collaboratively between community and univer- sity, and where environmental literacy can stimulate climate action and political agency in marginalized neighborhoods. Access to arts education and cultural production has been compromised everywhere in recent years, particularly in mar- ginalized contexts, by significant reduction in public spend- ing and the budget cuts faced by local community-based nonprofits. Retraction in cultural activity can produce apathy among residents and a lack of neighborhood participation in the planning of the community’s future. In the UCSD Cross-Border Community Stations, arts and culture programs become summoners, instruments for civic participation, as well as engines to incentivize new neighborhood-based economies to improve the quality of life across these under- served, demographically diverse immigrant neighborhoods.

In recent years we have built strong relationships with two communities adjacent to the border wall and cultivated long- term partnerships with the most rooted and active nonprofit organizations based there. The UCSD/Divina Community Station (fig. 305) — one of two stations in operation13 — is located in the informal settlement of Los Laureles Canyon on the western periphery of Tijuana, in partnership with the nonprofit Los Colonos de Divina Providencia. Los Laureles is geographically the last slum of Latin America, literally crash- ing against the border wall and home to eighty-five thousand people. The Laureles station is focused on environmental education (fig. 306), participatory climate action, cross-border environmental and urban policy, and informal urbanization, with an emphasis on the intersection of water management, dust management, and cross-border citizenship.

Our Cross-Border Community Station in Los Laureles Canyon is unique because it is directly adjacent to the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve on the US side, the tip end of our binational watershed system, which has been impacted by the flow of wastewater and trash from the slum, exacerbated by the truncation of the canyon systems as the border wall has been fortified in the last decade. Preventing the further degradation of this essential binational environmental asset has been among

the chief priorities of our work in the canyon. We are cultivat- ing cross-border, cross-sector relationships to mobilize shared water management capabilities between the canyon and the estuary (fig. 307). Simultaneously we have devel- oped a “distributed system” of small public spaces that radi- ate from the UCSD/Divina Community Station and function as water management infrastructures as well as contexts for pedagogical-cultural experiments. In other words, this unique network of microbasins operates not only as func- tional waste management infrastructure, to prevent pollu- tion from reaching the estuary, but also as pedagogic and cultural spaces that teach children about food harvesting, nutrition, waste, soil, and water.

Here, classrooms become nomadic cultural stages and conduits for itinerant community planning workshops. We have long argued that public spaces cannot remain as mono-use physical amenities, but must be curated with support systems for community engagement, promoting social participation for cultural action. In collaboration with our nonprofit partners, we develop visualization tools that enable comprehension of complex cross-border issues and the policies necessary to protect binational social and environmental assets. Our community workshops involve speculative cartography and mapping, in the form of videog- raphy experiments conducted by community residents and students to interpret everyday practices and aspirations and to advance fictional scenarios of spatial and urban trans- formation. In this way, art becomes a cognitive tool to enable the visualization and recognition of regional ecolo- gies beyond walls. These exercises help to expose the missing information that often disrupts the organic relation- ship a community has to its immediate environment.

We believe that raising awareness about unrecognized envi- ronmental and social assets helps to recuperate a communi- ty’s agency for political action, and in our region ultimately helps to construct a more grounded, cross-border sense of belonging. Sometimes these nomadic actions are “agonistic interventions” through which we summon institutions and agencies that are at odds with one another—whether border patrol and activists or maquiladoras (NAFTA factories) and NGOs—to enter into dialogue and debate about the implica- tions of their actions and agendas, as well as the potential for mutual recognition and collaboration. One example, discussed below, is a border-drain crossing organized with US Homeland Security and our community partners.

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figure 305 (top left) Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Rendering of the UCSD/Divina Community Station, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, 2016

figure 306 (top right) Children in the garden at Los Colonos de Divina Providencia, 2017 Courtesy Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

figure 307 (left) Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Diagram of the coalition of binational partners, 2018

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We also cocurate participatory design workshops and hands-on small-scale environmental and agricultural interven- tions to stimulate both community awareness of urban chal- lenges that can seem remote or secondary to communities living in conditions of scarcity and a sense of completion and community capacity. One ongoing participatory design project is our Mecalux Retrofit begun in 2013. For many years we have been documenting how informal environments such as Los

Laureles Canyon grow incrementally as people build their own housing by recycling the urban waste of Southern California. We have been studying the relation of these informal pro- cesses to the dynamics of cheap labor, as multinational maqui- ladoras typically settle at the edges of these slums.

In the first period of research we began to engage these issues, proposing a model of “reciprocal urban develop- ment” whereby factory-made systems could help stabilize

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figures 308 a, b Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Mecalux Retrofit, multiple uses, 2014

figure 309 (opposite) Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Map and panorama of the border- drain crossing, 2011

the temporal evolution of precarious housing in the slums. The project evolved into the Mecalux Retrofit, a social housing research collaboration with Mecalux, a Spanish maquiladora in Tijuana that produces lightweight metal pallet rack sys- tems for global export and employs many of its workers from adjacent informal neighborhoods. We began negotiat- ing with this factory to adapt and retrofit its prefab shelving systems into new microinfrastructures to support informal housing and waste recycling practices in the slums of Tijuana, suggesting an act of reciprocity between factories and marginalized communities surrounding them.14

These maquiladora “parts” become the material of our community design workshops in the UCSD/Divina Community Station, where we and our students work closely with community members to stitch these pieces together with existing structures to design and construct small and large infrastructures alike (figs. 308 a, b). For example, we worked with community members to design and build a bus stop from Mecalux parts, to shelter maquiladora workers from the sun as they await erratic shuttles to factory sites. At a larger scale, we are also designing a mixed-use housing project that will surround an economic incubator, as well as a new UCSD/Divina Community Station that will integrate spaces for environmental research and education, sport, arts and culture production and display (including a black- box theater), and the first “prepa” (middle and high school) in Los Laureles Canyon.

A Transnational Environmental Commons

In recent years the activities of US Homeland Security and the installation of more invasive infrastructures of surveil- lance and control have had a devastating impact on the sensitive environmental systems that flank the border wall as it descends into the Pacific Ocean. New border wall infrastructure post–9/11 has truncated the many canyons that travel north and south as part of the binational water- shed between Tijuana and San Diego. Los Laureles sits in one of these canyons, at an elevation higher than the estuary. The carving of concrete dams and drains into the new border wall has accelerated the northbound flow of waste from the slum into the estuary, siphoning tons of trash and sediment with each rainy season and contami- nating one of the most important environmental zones, the “lungs” of the bioregion.

A major project of the UCSD Cross-Border Community Stations is the development of an environmental commons, a transnational land conservancy to encompass the San Diego estuary and the Tijuana informal settlement in a con- tinuous cross-border political, social, and environmental system. The project began in 2011, when we curated a cross- border public action through a sewage drain underneath a section of the border wall recently built by Homeland Security, located at the precise point where the informal settlement in Mexico collides with the estuary on the US side (fig. 309). We negotiated a permit with US Homeland Security to transform a drain under the wall into an official port of entry for twenty-four hours. They agreed, as long as Mexican immigration officials were waiting on the other side to stamp our passports. As participants moved south- bound under the wall against the natural northbound flow of slum wastewater headed toward the estuary, we reached Mexican immigration officers who had pitched an improvisational tent on the south side of the drain, inside Mexican territory (fig. 310). The strange juxtaposition of pollution seeping into the environmental zone, the stamp- ing of passports inside this liminal space, and the passage from pristine estuary to slum under a militarized culvert amplified the region’s most profound contradictions and interdependencies.

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Although the border wall is regularly presented to the American public as a structure of national security, it is a self-inflicted environmental wound, violently bisecting and damaging regional resources. The wall undermines vital regional ecosystems that are essential to the survival of the communities on both sides. Can a more just cross-border public be mobilized to steward the shared environmental interests between two divided cities? As the development economist Amartya Sen argues, global justice requires a “cross-border public framework” that includes not only voices within our own jurisdictional and territorial boundar- ies but also the voices of those beyond our borders whom we impact through our decisions and actions.15 Can border regions with shared environmental assets become labora- tories to reimagine citizenship beyond the nation-state?

Anticipating the vaster social and environmental dam- ages that will be inflicted by the new proposed border wall— whose prototypes have already been constructed a few miles east of San Diego16—we embarked in 2017 on a new phase of our cross-border citizenship agenda with a project called MEXUS: A Geography of Interdependence.17 While the Mexico–US border has been publicly maligned, again, as a site of violence and crime, division and fear, MEXUS

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figure 310 (opposite) Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Border-drain crossing public action, June 3–4, 2011

figure 311 Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman MEXUS: A Geography of Interdependence, 2018

presents the national threshold as a site of urban and politi- cal creativity and experimentation, characterized by grass- roots dynamics and the invisible cross-border flows that our practice has been documenting.

MEXUS is a visualization of the continental border region without the line, presented instead as a transnational envi- ronmental zone composed of eight watershed systems shared by Mexico and the United States (fig. 311). By unwall- ing this thickened system of interdependencies, MEXUS provokes a more inclusive idea of citizenship based on coexistence, shared assets, and cooperative opportunities between divided communities. MEXUS visualizes those things that a physical barrier wall along the political border cannot contain: watersheds, Indigenous lands, ecological corridors, and migratory patterns. The drama of this unrec- ognized geography of interdependence is that it invites the viewer to imagine the disruption that a jurisdictional border inflicts on the continental environmental commons.

MEXUS gets particular at the Tijuana River Watershed, our region—the westernmost tip of MEXUS, at the precise juncture between the informal settlement of Los Laureles Canyon and the Tijuana River estuary, bisected by the wall. There, the project has inspired an ambitious coalition of

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state and municipal governments, communities, and univer- sities to steward a cross-border environmental commons (fig. 312), a land conservancy that identifies slivers of land in the Mexican slum, bundles them, and connects them with the American estuary to form a continuous political, social, and ecological zone that transgresses the line. MEXUS visu- alizes “Nature’s Nation” in the US–Mexico border region and challenges the legitimacy of a jurisdictional wall that truncates the social and environmental systems that bridge divided nations.

In the 1970s the renowned urbanists Donald Appleyard and Kevin Lynch drafted a vision plan for San Diego called Temporary Paradise?18 The title is punctuated by a question mark, as if to prefigure a warning: that the future of San Diego depends on the future of Tijuana, that the destinies of these two border cities are intertwined. Appleyard and Lynch proposed that the binational system of canyons should be the armature for regional planning in the future, and urged

Notes Our great thanks to Alan Braddock and Karl Kusserow for including our work in Nature’s Nation. We would like to thank our partners on the transnational environmental commons: Delia Castellanos Armendariz, Ana Eguiarte, Rebeca Ramirez, Kyle Haines, and Kristen Goodrich. Our gratitude to Mimi Zeiger, Ann Lok Lui, and Niall Atkinson, the curatorial team for Dimensions of Citizenship in the United States pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, for inviting our work, and to Cliff Curry and Delight Stone for generously supporting this stage of our research. Endless thanks to our MEXUS project team: Jonathan Maier, Marcello Maltagliati, and Benjamin Notkin, and to Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon. Finally, the UCSD Cross-Border Community Stations presented here would have been impossible without the support of Richard C. Blum and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

1 We explore this subject in our forthcoming monograph The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship (London: Verso).

2 See Fonna Forman and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, “Climate Change, Mass Migration, and Sustainability: A Probabilistic Case for Urgent Action,” in Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis, ed. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).

3 Colin P. Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager, and Yochanan Kushnir, “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 11 (March 17, 2015): 3241–46, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi /10.1073/pnas.1421533112.

4 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, encyclical letter, Vatican website, May 24, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents /papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html, chap. 1, sec. V (emphasis in the original).

5 See Fonna Forman, Gina Solomon, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Keith Pezzoli, “Bending the Curve and Closing the Gap: Climate Justice and Public Health,” Collabra 2, no. 1:22 (December 12, 2016), http://doi.org/10.1525 /collabra.67.

6 Forman et al., “Bending the Curve.”

7 For a summary, see Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, “Latin America and a New Political Leadership: Experimental Acts of Co-Existence,” in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, ed. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon (Boston: MIT Press, 2016), 71–90. See also Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (London: Verso, 2014).

8 Fonna Forman, “Social Norms and the Cross-Border Citizen: From Adam Smith to Antanas Mockus,” in Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus, ed. Carlo Tognato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 335–58.

9 Enrique Peñalosa, “Why Buses Represent Democracy in Action,” TED talk, September 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/enrique_penalosa_why _buses_represent_democracy_in_action.

10 See, notably, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).

11 On Medellín, see Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, “Global Justice at the Municipal Scale: The Case of Medellín, Colombia,” in Institutional Cosmopolitanism, ed. Luis Cabrera (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See also The Medellín Diagram, a project by Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman, Alejandro Echeverri, and Matthias Görlich, commissioned by the Medellín Museum of Modern Art for the 2014 World Urban Forum and additionally presented at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in September 2014, the 2016 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, March 2017.

12 Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “The Cross-Border Community Stations: Eight Notes on Redistributing Knowledge Beyond Walls,” in Back to the Sandbox: Art and Radical Pedagogy, ed. Jaroslav Andĕl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).

13 The second, the UCSD/Casa Community Station, is located in the border neighborhood of San Ysidro, California, in partnership with the nonprofit Casa Familiar. San Ysidro is the first immigrant neighborhood into the United States, after the checkpoint. This station focuses on immigration, public space, affordable housing, and equitable urban development.

14 We built the first prototypes as part of Wohnungsfrage, a major interna- tional exhibition on the global housing crisis presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin in 2015. The project highlights the role of architects in engaging institutions, and negotiating the redistribution of resources and knowledges to reorient surplus value toward social and public priorities.

15 Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

16 For further discussion, see Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “The Wall: The San Diego–Tijuana Border,” Artforum 54, no. 10 (Summer 2016): 370 –75; and Cruz and Forman, “Un-walling Citizenship,” Avery Review: Critical Essays on Architecture, no. 21 (Winter 2017): 98–109, http://www .averyreview.com/issues/21/unwalling-citizenship.

17 MEXUS, by Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, was presented for the first time at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, commissioned by the United States pavilion for the exhibition Dimensions of Citizenship.

18 Donald Appleyard and Kevin Lynch, Temporary Paradise? A Look at the Special Landscape of the San Diego Region: A Report to the City of San Diego (Cambridge, MA: Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1974).

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figure 312 Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Diagram of the transnational environmental commons, 2018

collaboration to reimagine the border wall as a shared infra- structure with civic projects along its trajectory.

Fifty years later we remain inspired by this ecological vision for our binational region. US policy toward the bor- der has always prioritized physical security over environ- mental security, and is presently regurgitating uniquely ugly rhetorics of fear, division, and national identity to justify its mandates. This moment has triggered a great uptick of artistic and cultural interventions by local artists to mobi- lize public protest at the wall. While we are inspired by these important and often hugely creative gestures of cul- tural resistance right now, they tend to be ephemeral in their impact. Drawing on the very practical impulses of Appleyard and Lynch, we have been focusing our efforts instead on cultivating cross-border partnerships to mobilize longer-term spatial, environmental, and cultural interven- tions that can deepen public knowledge and sustain meaningful cross-border citizenship culture over time.