This week I attended a lecture by AbdouMaliq Simone, an urbanist and geographer who studies the forms of sociality that are sprouting up in the extreme environments of today’s global cities. In the dense, dirty, and diverse cityscapes of Asia and Africa, social capital and trust have gone the way of family ties, trade unions, and subprime loans. Yet people keep wheeling and dealing, tricking and coaxing, inventing and recycling their way through cities of trash, rough and ragged regions devoid of street addresses and hence sublimely open to experiments in micro-rezoning.
Maliq’s talk reminded me of another extreme urbanist, architect Teddy Cruz. Based in San Diego with an active practice in the border town of Tijuana, Cruz studies both Mexican and California suburbs in order to learn from the place-making strategies that are transforming the rims of global cities. Resourceful Tijuanans salvage building materials from the dismantled suburbs of San Diego. Studying the negative spaces and positive energy of these temporary structures, Cruz adapts the style and ethos of these “informal architects” to new building projects for lower-income people in US and Mexican communities. (See picture above.)
The extreme urbanism of today’s megacities resembles the meandering mess of medieval cities:these new environments are both super-modern and pre-modern. So are my closets, for that matter.
— Julia Lupton · 2009-04-18
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THE BOOK