‘Buildings won’t determine the future of cities’, says architect Teddy Cruz from San Diego, who will exemplify his ideas about conflict zones as the drivers for progress at WDCD14.
‘The future of cities today depends less on buildings but more on the fundamental reorganization of socio-economic relations,’ says Guatemalan-American architect Teddy Cruz. And the best ideas for this renewal, he says, ‘will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but from sectors of conflict and scarcity. There an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today.’
Cruz, a Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, can tell from his experience researching the urban area of the Tijuana-San Diego border. Through his investigation and practice he has been advancing border immigrant neighbourhoods as sites of cultural production, from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing and civic infrastructure.
Teddy Cruz studied architecture at Rafael Landivar University in his native Guatemala City and at California State Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo. He completed his education at Harvard University and established his San Diego research-based architectural practice, estudio teddy cruz, in 2000.
While working as an Associate Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University between 2000 and 2005, he began the Border Institute (BI) to further research on cross-border urban dynamics in the San Diego-Tijuana region. In 2010 he co-founded the Center for Urban Ecologies and in 2013 he established the Blum Cross-Border Initiative with political theorist Fonna Forman.
Recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture in 1991, his honours include the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, and the 2013 Architecture Award from the US Academy of Arts and Letters. His architectural and artistic work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including representing the US in the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale and ‘Small Scale Big Change’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010.