Spatializing Justice Building Blocks

A manifesto calling for a new kind of architecture that confronts social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth.

Spatializing Justice calls for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Architects should take a position against inequality and practice accordingly. With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture—Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions.
 
These building blocks call for expanded modes of practice, through which architects can imagine new spatial procedures, political and economic strategies, and modalities of sociability. Challenging existing exclusionary policies can advance a more experimental architecture not bound by formal parameters. Architects must think of themselves as designers not only of things but of civic processes, complicate the ideas of ownership and property, and imagine new sites of research, pedagogy, and intervention. As one of the texts advises, “The questions must be different questions if we want different answers.”
 
Copublished with Hatje Cantz Verlag 

Teddy Cruz is Professor of Public Culture and Urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of Urban Research in the UCSD Center on Global Justice.
 
Fonna Forman is Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, San Diego, and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice. Cruz and Forman are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego. They designed El Santuario Frontera (the Border Sanctuary), housing for immigrants on the San Diego–Tijuana border.
 

Return the Body to Democracy 7
For Michael Sorkin

Building Blocks: An Introduction 13

BUILDING BLOCKS 18
01 Confront Inequality 
02 Construct the Political 
03 Recuperate Institutional Memory
04 Decolonize Knowledge
05 Radicalize the Local
06 Visualize Urban Conflict
07 Transgress Borders
08 Reimagine Jurisdiction
09 Complicate Autonomy 
10 Temporalize Infrastructure 
11 Translate the Informal
12 Perform Citizenship
13 Socialize Density
14 Rethink Ownership
15 Resist Privatization
16 Demand Generative Zoning
17 Mobilize Neighborhoods as Political Units
18 Validate Everyday Work
19 Intervene in the Developer's Proforma
20 Co-Develop with Communities
21 Transform Housing Beyond "Units"
22 Transcend Hospitality
23 Democratize Access
24 Activate Public Space
25 Curate New Urban Pedagogies
26 Civicize Platforms
27 Design Meditation
28 Talk to the Enemy Adversary
29 Problematize "Sustainability"
30 Retool Ourselves
Notes 143
Colophon 144