The Meyer & Renee Luskin Lecture series brings you Just Urban Design: A Conversation with Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman. The lecture series will explore the meaning or theoretical conceptions of citizenship. In our increasingly walled world, and the surge of anti-immigrant sentiment everywhere, can the idea of citizenship be recuperated for more emancipatory and inclusive urban and political agendas? Cruz and Forman will discuss their inspiration for MEXUS, exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, among other projects.
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Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman
Teddy Cruz (MDes Harvard), UCSD Department of Visual Arts. He is known internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana/San Diego border, advancing border neighborhoods as sites of cultural production from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing, and public space. Recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture in 1991, his honors include the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, the 2013 Architecture Award from the US Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2018 Vilcek Prize in Architecture.
Fonna Forman (PhD Chicago) UCSD Department of Political Science; Founding Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice. A theorist of ethics and public culture, her work focuses on human rights at the urban scale, border ethics and climate justice. She is known intrernationally for her revisionist research on Adam Smith, recuperating the ethical and public dimensions of modern economic theory. She is Vice-Chair of the University of California’s Bending the Curve report on climate change solutions; and serves on the Global Citizenship Commission, advising United Nations policy on human rights in the 21st century.
Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, investigating issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture, with a special emphasis on Latin American cities. Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, Cruz + Forman lead variety of urban research agendas and civic / public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. From 2012-13 they served as special advisors on civic and urban initiatives for the City of San Diego and led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. Together they lead the UCSD Community Stations, a platform for engaged research and teaching on poverty and social equity in the border region.
Their work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and M+ Hong Kong. They represented the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. They co-edited Informal Market Worlds Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure (Rotterdam: nai010); and have two forthcoming monographs: Top-Down / Bottom-Up: The Research and Practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Berlin: Hatje Cantz); and The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship (London: Verso).
RSVP at https://uclaluskinlecturejusturbandesign.eventbrite.com/
