The urban explosion of the last years of economic boom also produced dramatic marginalization, resulting in the explosion of slums in many parts of the world. This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth surrounded by sectors of poverty and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered is really at the center of today's urban crisis. But I want to begin tonight by suggesting that this urban crisis is not only economic or environmental. It's particularly a cultural crisis, a crisis of the institutions unable to reimagine the stupid ways which we have been growing, unable to challenge the oil-hungry, selfish urbanization that have perpetuated cities based on consumption, from southern California to New York to Dubai. So I just really want to share with you a reflection that the future of cities today depends less on buildings and, in fact, depends more on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations, that the best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today.
由于过去这几年由于经济快速发展 导致了过度城市化, 也带来了严重的边缘化问题, 造成了世界各地 贫民窟的爆炸性增长。 超级富有的飞地周围 则是各种贫困区, 这种两极分化和由此造成的社会经济上的不平等 正是今天的城市危机的重要内容。 不过今晚我要指出的是, 城市危机 不仅仅是经济或者环境因素造成的, 它更多的是一场文化的危机, 在这场危机中, 社会机制无法改变 我们一直以来所选择的不明智的增长方式, 不敢挑战这种渴望石油的、 自私的,基于消费的 不断扩张的城市化进程, 从南加州,到纽约,到迪拜。 所以我只是想跟大家分享我的思考和体会—— 当今城市的未来 不再取决于高楼大厦 而事实上,更多地取决于 社会经济关系的全新重组; 塑造未来城市的 好点子 不会来自于经济实力强大 和富有的飞地, 而实际上会来自于那些有矛盾和资源稀缺的区域, 那里有着迫切的想象力, 可以真正启发我们重新思考今天的城市增长。
And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region, which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect.
现在让我来具体解释一下 为什么说那些有着矛盾的地方 充满了创造力,下面我给大家简单介绍一下 靠近蒂华纳(墨西哥城市)和圣地亚哥(美国城市)的 边境地区, 那是我重新思考如何做好一个建筑设计师的实验室。
This is the wall, the border wall, that separates San Diego and Tijuana, Latin America and the United States, a physical emblem of exclusionary planning policies that have perpetuated the division of communities, jurisdictions and resources across the world. In this border region, we find some of the wealthiest real estate, as I once found in the edges of San Diego, barely 20 minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America. And while these two cities have the same population, San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana in the last decades, immediately thrusting us to confront the tensions and conflicts between sprawl and density, which are at the center of today's discussion about environmental sustainability. So I've been arguing in the last years that, in fact, the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawls of San Diego when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability, that we should pay attention and learn from the many migrant communities on both sides of this border wall so that we can translate their informal processes of urbanization.
这是一堵墙,边境墙, 两边分别是圣地亚哥和蒂华纳, 美国和拉美, 这堵墙象征着 两边的排他性规划政策, 这些政策延续并加剧了 世界各地社区之间、司法之间 和资源之间的差距。 在这个边境地区,我们可以找到 一些最昂贵的地产, 我曾经在圣地亚哥的边缘看到过, 而那距离拉美一些 最贫穷的区域仅20分钟车程。 这两个城市有一样的人口数量, 但是在过去的10年里面,圣地亚哥扩张了 近六个蒂华纳的面积。 这就使得我们要立即面对 由于城市扩张和密度增加带来的 紧张和冲突, 也就是我们今天要讨论的 关于环境可持续性的重要内容。 在过去的这些年里,我一直在强调, 事实上,圣地亚哥的扩张可以 从蒂华纳的贫民窟中学到很多东西, 特别是关于社会经济的可持续性, 我们应该关注并学习 这道边境墙两边的 很多移民社区, 这样我们就可以把他们的非正式的实践 运用到城市化进程中去。
What do I mean by the informal in this case? I'm really just talking about the compendium of social practices of adaptation that enable many of these migrant communities to transgress imposed political and economic recipes of urbanization. I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence of the bottom-up, whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana that build themselves, in fact, with the waste of San Diego, or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California that have begun to be retrofitted with difference in the last decades.
我这里的“非正式”是什么意思呢? 其实我说的只是 那些为了适应社会的社会实践的集合, 那些社会实践使得很多移民社区能够 绕过强加的城市化进程中的 政治和经济制度。 我说的仅仅是来自底层的 创造力, 不管是用来自圣地亚哥的垃圾 建造的蒂华纳的贫民窟, 还是过去十年在南加州的 很多重新改造的 移民社区。
So I've been interested as an artist in the measuring, the observation, of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border: in one direction, from south to north, the flow of immigrants into the United States, and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana. I'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades. So these are houses waiting to cross the border. Not only people cross the border here, but entire chunks of one city move to the next, and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames, they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house, with a small business. This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice. But not only houses, also small debris from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana. Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls. But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency. They have figured out how to peel off the tire, how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall. Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana.
作为一个艺术家,我一直对 测量和观察 边境地区的那些跨边境的非正式的流动 很感兴趣。 一方面,从南到北, 移民流入美国, 另一方面,从北到南, 南加州的垃圾流入蒂华纳。 我说的垃圾指的是 那些战后平房, 墨西哥承包商们把它们拉到边境来, 因为美国开发商 为了建造一个更加膨胀的郊区, 在过去的十年里正在将它们抛弃。 看这些就是准备跨越边境的房子。 在这里不仅仅是人们在跨越边境, 而且一个城市的整块区域也被搬过去, 当这些房子被放置于这些钢筋框架上时, 它们就从一楼变成了二楼, 从而有更多的空间填充进更多的房子 作为商业用途。 这种空间和经济的分层 非常有意思。 但是不仅仅是房子,还有一些小的废件 从一个城市,从圣地亚哥到蒂华纳。 很多人应该看过橡胶轮胎 被用于建造贫民窟的挡土墙。 但是看看这些人在突发的社会经济状况下 是怎么做的。 他们学会了把轮胎上的橡胶扯下来, 用线穿起来并固定在一起, 来打造一堵更有效的挡土墙。 还有那些用圣地亚哥的卡车装过来的 车库大门 则成为了蒂华纳边缘 很多贫民窟的 紧急住房的外墙。
So while, as an architect, this is a very compelling thing to witness, this creative intelligence, I also want to keep myself in check. I don't want to romanticize poverty. I just want to suggest that this informal urbanization is not just the image of precariousness, that informality here, the informal, is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures that we could translate as artists, that this is about a bottom-up urbanization that performs. See here, buildings are not important just for their looks, but, in fact, they are important for what they can do. They truly perform as they transform through time and as communities negotiate the spaces and boundaries and resources.
虽然作为一个建筑设计师, 见证这些有创造性的举动 让人非常兴奋, 不过我还是不能让自己兴奋过了头。 我不希望美化贫困。 我只是想说 这种非正式的城市化 不仅仅是表面看上去的危险的样子, 这里的非正式性 其实是一系列的社会经济和政治行为, 作为艺术家我们可以将其 理解为这是一场自下而上的 城市化进程。 这里楼房的重要性 不是体现在它们的外表, 而是它们的功能。 它们随着时间变化调整, 在社区对空间、界限和资源的谈判过程中 真正发挥作用。
So while waste flows southbound, people go north in search of dollars, and most of my research has had to do with the impact of immigration in the alteration of the homogeneity of many neighborhoods in the United States, particularly in San Diego. And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest that the future of Southern California depends on the retrofitting of the large urbanization -- I mean, on steroids -- with the small programs, social and economic. I'm referring to how immigrants, when they come to these neighborhoods, they begin to alter the one-dimensionality of parcels and properties into more socially and economically complex systems, as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage, or as they build an illegal granny flat to support an extended family. This socioeconomic entrepreneurship on the ground within these neighborhoods really begins to suggest ways of translating that into new, inclusive and more equitable land use policies. So many stories emerge from these dynamics of alteration of space, such as "the informal Buddha," which tells the story of a small house that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico, but it was retrofitted in the end into a Buddhist temple, and in so doing, this small house transforms or mutates from a singular dwelling into a small, or a micro, socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood.
垃圾流向南边, 同时人们为了发财致富流向北边, 我大部分的研究都是关于 这些移民 对美国的很多社区, 特别是圣地亚哥的社区的同质性 造成的影响。 我要说的是,这意味着 南加州的未来 取决于对快速城市化的重新改造, 要大规模地, 引入小的 社会和经济项目。 我指的是,当移民 进入到这些社区的时候, 它们开始把简单的 物品和居住地 改造成更加复杂的社会和经济体, 比如在车库开始非常规的经济, 或者建造一个非法的给奶奶居住的公寓房 以支持一个大家庭。 在这些社区里面的 这种社会经济创举 给我们提供了制定 新的,更有包容性的,更公平的 土地使用政策的参考。 从这些空间改造的活动中 涌现出了那么多的故事, 比如“非正式的菩萨”, 这个故事讲的是一个 “活下来”的小房子,它没有被拉到墨西哥, 而是被重新改造成了 一个佛教寺庙, 这样 这个小房子摇身一变, 从一个单一的住宅 变成了社区里面一个小的,微型的, 社会经济和文化的基础设施。
So these action neighborhoods, as I call them, really become the inspiration to imagine other interpretations of citizenship that have less to do, in fact, with belonging to the nation-state, and more with upholding the notion of citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes institutional protocols in the spaces of the city.
这些我称之为“行动社区”, 它们让我们重新思考和定义 “公民”的涵义, “公民”其实和 属于哪个国家并不那么相关, 而是和维护这样的一个公民概念更相关, 即“公民”是 人们在城市空间里面重组社会规定的 有创意的行为。
As an artist, I've been interested, in fact, in the visualization of citizenship, the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories, in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces. This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night, a few months ago, decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park. With shovels in hand, they started to dig. Two weeks later, the police stopped them. They barricaded the place, and the teenagers were evicted, and the teenagers decided to fight back, not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process. The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space. They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy. Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway, so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them. They were lucky, they said, because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality. They were also lucky, they said, because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction, between port authority, airport authority, two city districts, and a review board. All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space. With this knowledge, these teenagers as skaters confronted the city. They came to the city attorney's office. The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO, and of course they didn't know what an NGO was. They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience. And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise, to organize budgets, to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city, expanding it to other categories. At the end, the teenagers won the case with that evidence, and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway.
作为一个艺术家,事实上我一直对 “公民”的可视化, 收集趣闻轶事和城市里发生的故事很感兴趣, 目的是为了能够讲述 社会进程和空间之间的关系。 这个一个关于一群青少年的故事, 一天晚上,几个月前, 他们决定侵占高速公路下面的那块空地 来建造他们自己的滑板公园。 手里拿着铲子,他们就开始挖了。 两个星期以后,警察制止了他们。 警察把那个地方围了起来, 把这群青少年赶了出去, 这群青少年决定回击, 不是通过银行卡或口号, 而是通过一系列的关键行动。 他们做的第一件事情就是找出 管辖那片空地的 政府。 他们很幸运地发现 他们还没有挖到 加州运输局下辖的领土。 加州运输局是一个管辖高速公路的政府部门, 如果要跟他们谈判就很麻烦了。 这群青少年说,他们很幸运因为他们 挖的是高速公路延伸出去的一段公路下面的领土, 那是属于当地政府的。 他们说,他们还很幸运的是, 他们开始挖到一个 类似百慕大三角的司法管辖区, 由港口管理局、机场管理局、 两个城市和一个审查委员会组成。 所有的这些红线都是 那些看不见的管理那块剩下的空地的 政治机构。 在了解了这些背景资料后,这群青少年 作为溜冰者跟这座城市进行了对峙。 他们来到了这个城市律师的办公室。 律师告诉他们 如果要继续谈判, 他们必须先成立一个非政府组织(NGO), 当然他们完全不知道NGO是什么东西。 他们和他们在西雅图的 经历过类似事件的朋友进行了交流。 然后他们意识到有必要 更好地组织自己、 筹资、管理资金, 更好地了解所有 有关圣地亚哥这个城市的知识, 这样他们才能开始重新定义 城市里的公共空间的真正意义, 并把它扩展到其它范畴。 最终,这群青少年用那些证据 赢得了这唱官司,并且他们还被允许 在那个高速公路下面建起了 他们的滑板公园。
Now for many of you, this story might seem trivial or naive. For me as an architect, it has become a fundamental narrative, because it begins to teach me that this micro-community not only designed another category of public space but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols that were necessary to be inscribed in that space for its long-term sustainability. They also taught me that similar to the migrant communities on both sides of the border, they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool, because they had to produce a process that enabled them to reorganize resources and the politics of the city. In that act, that informal, bottom-up act of transgression, really began to trickle up to transform top-down policy.
对你们很多人来说,这个故事 可能看上去微不足道或者有些天真。 而我作为一个建筑设计师,这对我 是一个非常重要的故事, 因为它教会我 这个微型社区 不仅仅创造了另一类的公共空间范畴, 他们还创造了这个空间的 长期可持续发展所需要的 社会经济规则。 他们还教会我, 就像边境两边的 移民社区一样, 他们把矛盾转化成了一个有创意的工具, 因为他们需要创造这样一个机会 让他们能够重组资源 和这个城市的政治。 通过这样的行动,这种非正式的、 自下而上的变动 慢慢开始流向上层 来影响自上而下的政策。
Now this journey from the bottom-up to the transformation of the top-down is where I find hope today. And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations with space and with policy in many cities in the world, in primarily the urgency of a collective imagination as these communities reimagine their own forms of governance, social organization, and infrastructure, really is at the center of the new formation of democratic politics of the urban. It is, in fact, this that could become the framework for producing new social and economic justice in the city. I want to say this and emphasize it, because this is the only way I see that can enable us to move from urbanizations of consumption to neighborhoods of production today.
这种从自下而上 到自上而下的变革 正是我今天怀抱希望的理由。 我在想,这些 在世界各地的 空间和政策的变动, 主要是出于集体的 迫切需要, 所以这些社区 重新想象他们自己的管理模式、 社会组织和基础设施, 这些正是 城市的民主政治 新变化的重要内容。 事实上,这些正是可以成为 追求城市里的新的社会 和经济公平的框架。 我想说这一点并强调它, 因为我觉得这是今天唯一的 可以让我们从 消费型的城市化 转向生产型的社区的唯一办法。
Thank you.
谢谢!
(Applause)
(掌声)