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.
過去這幾年,經濟的快速發展 導致了過度城市化, 也帶來了嚴重的邊緣化問題, 造成了世界各地 貧民窟的爆炸性增長。 超級富有的飛地周圍 則是各種貧困區, 這種兩極分化和由此造成的 社會經濟上的不平等 正是今天的城市危機的重要內容。 不過今晚我要指出的是, 城市危機 不僅僅是經濟或者環境因素造成的, 它更多的是一場文化的危機, 在這場危機中, 制度機制無法改變 我們一直以來所選擇的 不明智的增長方式, 不敢挑戰這種渴望石油的、 自私的,基於消費的 不斷擴張的城市化進程, 從南加州,到紐約,到迪拜。 所以我只是想跟大家 分享我的思考和體會—— 當今城市的未來 不再取決於高樓大廈 而事實上,更多地取決於 社會經濟關係的全新重組; 塑造未來城市的 好點子 不會來自於經濟實力強大 和富有的飛地, 而實際上會來自於那些 有矛盾和資源稀缺的區域, 那裡有著迫切的想像力, 可以真正啟發我們 重新思考今天的城市增長。
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.
現在讓我來具體解釋一下 為什麼說那些有著矛盾的地方 充滿了創造力,下面 我給大家簡單介紹一下 靠近蒂華納(墨西哥城市)和 聖地牙哥(美國城市)的邊境地區, 那是我重新思考如何做好 一個建築設計師的實驗室。
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.
這是一堵牆,邊境牆, 兩邊分別是聖地牙哥和蒂華納, 美國和拉美, 這堵牆象徵著 兩邊的排他性規劃政策, 這些政策延續並加劇了 世界各地社區之間、司法之間 和資源之間的差距。 在這個邊境地區,我們可以找到 一些最昂貴的地產, 我曾經在聖地牙哥的邊緣看到過, 而那距離拉美一些 最貧窮的區域僅 20 分鐘車程。 這兩個城市有一樣的人口數量, 但是在過去的10年裡面,聖地牙哥擴張了 近六個蒂華納的面積。 這就使得我們要立即面對 由於城市擴張和密度增加帶來的 緊張和衝突, 也就是我們今天要討論的 關於環境永續性的重要內容。 在過去的這些年裡,我一直在強調, 事實上,聖地牙哥的擴張可以 從蒂華納的貧民窟中學到很多東西, 特別是關於社會經濟的永續性, 我們應該關注並學習 這道邊境牆兩邊的 很多移民社區, 這樣我們就可以把 他們的非正式的實踐 運用到城市化進程中去。
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.
我這裡的“非正式”是什麼意思呢? 其實我說的只是 那些為了適應社會的 社會實踐的集合, 那些社會實踐使得很多移民社區能夠 繞過強加的城市化進程中的 政治和經濟制度。 我說的僅僅是來自底層的 創造力, 不管是用來自聖地牙哥的垃圾 建造的蒂華納的貧民窟, 還是過去十年在南加州的 很多重新改造的 移民社區。
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.
作為一個藝術家,我一直對 測量和觀察 邊境地區的那些 跨邊境的非正式的流動 很感興趣。 一方面,從南到北, 移民流入美國, 另一方面,從北到南, 南加州的垃圾流入蒂華納。 我說的垃圾指的是 那些戰後平房, 墨西哥承包商們把它們拉到邊境來, 因為美國開發商 為了建造一個更加膨脹的郊區, 在過去的十年裡正在將它們拋棄。 看這些就是準備跨越邊境的房子。 在這裡不僅僅是人們在跨越邊境, 而且一個城市的整塊區域也被搬過去, 當這些房子被放置於這些鋼筋框架上時, 它們就從一樓變成了二樓, 從而有更多的空間填充進更多的房子 作為商業用途。 這種空間和經濟的分層 非常有意思。 但是不僅僅是房子,還有一些小的廢件 從一個城市,從聖地牙哥到蒂華納。 很多人應該看過橡膠輪胎 被用於建造貧民窟的擋土牆。 但是看看這些人在 突發的社會經濟狀況下 是怎麼做的。 他們學會了把輪胎上的橡膠扯下來, 用線穿起來並固定在一起, 來打造一堵更有效的擋土牆。 還有那些用聖地牙哥的卡車裝過來的 車庫大門 則成為了蒂華納邊緣 很多貧民窟的 緊急住房的外牆。
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.
雖然作為一個建築設計師, 見證這些有創造性的舉動 讓人非常興奮, 不過我還是不能 讓自己興奮過了頭。 我不希望美化貧困。 我只是想說 這種非正式的城市化 不僅僅是表面看上去的危險的樣子, 這裡的非正式性 其實是一系列的 社會經濟和政治行為, 作為藝術家我們可以將其 理解為這是一場自下而上的 城市化進程。 這裡樓房的重要性 不是體現在它們的外表, 而是它們的功能。 它們隨著時間變化調整, 在社區對空間、界限 和資源的談判過程中 真正發揮作用。
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.
垃圾流向南邊, 同時人們為了發財致富流向北邊, 我大部分的研究都是關於 這些移民 對美國的很多社區, 特別是聖地牙哥的社區的同質性 造成的影響。 我要說的是,這意味著 南加州的未來 取決於對快速城市化的重新改造, 要大規模地, 引入小的 社會和經濟方案。 我指的是,當移民 進入到這些社區的時候, 它們開始把簡單的 物品和居住地 改造成更加複雜的社會和經濟體, 比如在車庫開始非常規的經濟, 或者建造一個非法的 給奶奶居住的公寓房 以支持一個大家庭。 在這些社區裡面的 這種社會經濟創舉 給我們提供了製定 新的,更有包容性的,更公平的 土地使用政策的參考。 從這些空間改造的活動中 湧現出了那麼多的故事, 比如“非正式的菩薩”, 這個故事講的是一個 “活下來”的小房子, 它沒有被拉到墨西哥, 而是被重新改造成了 一個佛教寺廟, 這樣 這個小房子搖身一變, 從一個單一的住宅 變成了社區裡面一個小的,微型的, 社會經濟和文化的基礎設施。
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.
這些我稱之為“行動社區”, 它們讓我們重新思考和定義 “公民”的涵義, “公民”其實和 屬於哪個國家並不那麼相關, 而是和維護這樣的 一個公民概念更相關, 即“公民”是 人們在城市空間裡面 重組社會規定的 有創意的行為。
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.
作為一個藝術家,事實上我一直對 “公民”的可視化, 收集趣聞軼事和城市裡 發生的故事很感興趣, 目的是為了能夠講述 社會進程和空間之間的關係。 這個一個關於一群青少年的故事, 一天晚上,幾個月前, 他們決定侵占高速公路下面的那塊空地 來建造他們自己的滑板公園。 手裡拿著鏟子,他們就開始挖了。 兩個星期以後,警察制止了他們。 警察把那個地方圍了起來, 把這群青少年趕了出去, 這群青少年決定回擊, 不是通過銀行卡或口號, 而是通過一系列的關鍵行動。 他們做的第一件事情就是找出 管轄那片空地的 政府。 他們很幸運地發現 他們還沒有挖到 加州運輸局下轄的領土。 加州運輸局是一個 管轄高速公路的政府部門, 如果要跟他們談判就很麻煩了。 這群青少年說,他們很幸運因為他們 挖的是高速公路延伸出去的 一段公路下面的領土, 那是屬於當地政府的。 他們說,他們還很幸運的是, 他們開始挖到一個 類似百慕大三角的司法管轄區, 由港口管理局、機場管理局、 兩個城市和一個審查委員會組成。 所有的這些紅線都是 那些看不見的管理那塊剩下的空地的 政治機構。 在了解了這些背景資料後,這群青少年 作為溜冰者跟這座城市進行了對峙。 他們來到了這個城市律師的辦公室。 律師告訴他們 如果要繼續談判, 他們必須先成立一個非政府組織(NGO), 當然他們完全不知道 NGO 是什麼東西。 他們和他們在西雅圖的 經歷過類似事件的朋友進行了交流。 然後他們意識到有必要 更好地組織自己、 籌資、管理資金, 更好地了解所有 有關聖地牙哥這個城市的知識, 這樣他們才能開始重新定義 城市裡的公共空間的真正意義, 並把它擴展到其它範疇。 最終,這群青少年用那些證據 贏得了這唱官司,並且他們還被允許 在那個高速公路下面建起了 他們的滑板公園。
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.
對你們很多人來說,這個故事 可能看上去微不足道或者有些天真。 而我作為一個建築設計師,這對我 是一個非常重要的故事, 因為它教會我 這個微型社區 不僅僅創造了另一類的 公共空間範疇, 他們還創造了這個空間的 長期可持續發展所需要的 社會經濟規則。 他們還教會我, 就像邊境兩邊的 移民社區一樣, 他們把矛盾轉化成了 一個有創意的工具, 因為他們需要創造這樣一個機會 讓他們能夠重組資源 和這個城市的政治。 通過這樣的行動,這種非正式的、 自下而上的變動 慢慢開始流向上層 來影響自上而下的政策。
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.
這種從自下而上 到自上而下的變革 正是我今天懷抱希望的理由。 我在想,這些 在世界各地的 空間和政策的變動, 主要是出於集體的 迫切需要, 所以這些社區 重新想像他們自己的管理模式、 社會組織和基礎設施, 這些正是 城市的民主政治 新變化的重要內容。 事實上,這些正是可以成為 追求城市裡的新的社會 和經濟公平的框架。 我想說這一點並強調它, 因為我覺得這是今天唯一的 可以讓我們從 消費型的城市化 轉向生產型的社區的唯一辦法。
Thank you.
謝謝!
(Applause)
(掌聲)