Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman

Teddy Cruz is recognized internationally for his urban and architectural research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, advancing border immigrant neighborhoods as sites of cultural production, from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing and civic infrastructure. His investigation of this geography of conflict has inspired a practice and pedagogy that emerges from the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research, pedagogy and design production. He is currently a Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department, and Director of Urban Research in the UCSD Center on Global Justice. With long-time research partner, UCSD political theorist, Fonna Forman, he is a principal in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice, based in San Diego.

Fonna Forman is founding Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice. Her research engages issues at the intersection of ethics, public culture, urban policy and the city – including human rights at the urban scale, climate justice, border ethics and equitable urbanization. Recent publications include a volume with Amartya Sen on critical interventions in global justice theory, a research collaboration on “grounded normative theory” (working with similarly grounded theorists to develop a set of empirical methods for political theory), and thematic papers on ‘municipal cosmopolitanism’, ‘cross-border citizenship’, ‘climate migration’, and ‘participatory urbanization’. She is also the author of Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy (Cambridge, 2010), a reevaluation of the ethical, social, spatial and public dimensions of Smith’s work. Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and transgressing the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, Forman partners closely with UCSD urbanist and architect Teddy Cruz on a variety of urban research agendas and civic / public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond.

Speakers