Andrea Torreblanca (AT) Teddy, I would like to begin this talk with something you say in one of your texts, which is: to do architecture you have to move away from architecture, and this distancing has to do with entering much more complex civic, ethical, and social processes of the city. What does this mean?

Teddy Cruz (TC) I think it’s nice to start with that question, because obviously for many years I have been interested in being able to reconfigure my own practice, precisely by taking detours from the specific, because I was not really satisfied with the self-referential situation of architecture. And I realized that many of the conditions that I was living in crossing [the San Diego-Tijuana border] were not being discussed within the architectural profession. So, what emerges is wanting to take a detour from this isolated situation. In the last decades of an economic and political neoconservatism, of urban policies, and the marginalization of exclusionary urbanisms, I was interested in how can we, as architects, stop being decorators of the mistakes of others?

I am interested in being an architect, obviously, but to be able to go back to architecture ready, I am very interested in thinking through processes. What we have lost is the notion of thinking less in fixed images; [what if] we open it to a more performative, more operative situation. Because every image and every object have a praxis. And that is perhaps what has sometimes been misunderstood about Christopher Alexander’s work.

AT This conversation, as you know, is called “The City Is Not a Tree” [like Alexander’s renowned text] and there always seems to be a confusion with the use of “not” in “is not a tree”—why couldn’t the city be a tree? Because Alexander is referring to the synthetic image of a city, the way cities are normally organized through symmetry, and proposes instead to build through semi-lattices, interweaving, and intersectionality.

Exactly, I’ve been confused about it, because when I read that title I wanted TC to say no, actually the city is a tree, but what I think was happening is that maybe Christopher Alexander was establishing a critique of the way urban planning kept perpetuating a fixed metaphor, but as we all know the tree is not something static, the social dimension of the tree opens the fixed metaphor to a much more complex system of unpredictable relationships, unpredictable and rhizomatic. I think this was at the center of the theories of Christopher Alexander, which in the end is the beauty of Christopher Alexander, which is oscillating between those who perpetuate architecture as stylistic, historical, decorative pattern, and, on the other hand, as the guru of computational theory, algorithms, and self-management systems that begin to create much more rhizomatic situations. Yes, I think that returning to the metaphor of the tree is something more complex, operative, and performative—I would say the city is a tree.

AT At one point you also wrote about porosity, the elasticity of the border, and how everything from the US down to Mexico is porous, and how we have created this stigmatised image of garbage architecture (what is built in Mexico with the leftovers from the US). You are interested in demystifying this image.

TC Yes, for me the informal is a series of strategies that, from below, resist the imposition of policies and excluding economies. And those strategies are not material at the beginning but are ways of forming solidarity. They are ways of forming governance at a local scale, of forming sustainable economies, that is, they are processes. I was interested in the processes behind the informal, not in the figure of the informal. I still believe in institutions, even though stupid institutions have perpetuated the colonialist system of infrastructure.

Part of what has inspired me about the informal, for example, is that the definition of urban density has again been kept under a reductive interpretation. Density is nothing more than a quantity of things, of objects per area, or the number of people per area. What we have learned through informal urbanization is that in many of the marginalized, migrant neighborhoods where we work, density can be measured in a different way, as a quantity of social exchanges per area that implies another way of visualizing the urban, which is more sociological and anthropological. So, what I mean is that we have to rethink the language.

AT Are we not romanticizing a little bit the idea of living in community? Of everyone living together around a courtyard? Because the idea of living in common is also political, it is a negotiation. I often wonder how much of these projects have to do with a desire to live in community, for people to live in community, or are we doing it all wrong?

TC It’s also part of this misunderstanding, I think. I’ve been part of that problem myself. At some point in a lecture we gave, someone stood up in the audience and said to me: but what does community mean? And it took me by surprise because I hadn’t really thought it through very well and for me, eventually, I began to understand that community is about not just doing, convening the group of people who already agrees. We romanticize that the community knows everything and that as architects we only get to listen.

AT Another term you use is hospitality. In areas like Tijuana and the borderlands, with the emergence of camps, asylums, marginalised zones, how is the idea of hospitality integrated?

TC I think that sometimes we complicate ourselves by wanting to challenge those notions. We have to transcend the notion of hospitality and talk more about inclusion. How do we include the migrant and their children in the co-production of the city? The artist or the architect becomes a mediator and facilitator between the resources from above, to support the creative intelligence from below. So, for me it has been important to inscribe in the fact that housing is not being seen as autonomous units, but as a relational-social system inscribed in a space of production.

AT There is also something about working from the bottom up which has to do with imagination, with civic imagination, with political imagination, and in that sense, there are also these invisible structures that can be modified from all these social processes, from all these processes that are carried out from below.

TC How, as architects, can we intervene first in reorganizing those social norms of behavior? How can we return to open sensibilities in relation to a public imagination and especially in border issues? I am talking about investing in the reconstruction of a trans-border citizenship.