How a California couple aim to heal the ‘self-inflicted wound’ of the US-Mexico border

“You have to imagine there is no border,” says Teddy Cruz. It’s a quiet statement but a powerful provocation for exploring the challenges we face, locally and globally.

The architect and his partner, Fonna Forman, a political scientist, have made exploring the border on their doorstep, between the California city of San Diego and the Mexican city of Tijuana, part of their life’s work.

They are brilliant, imaginative and determined not only to look at things differently but also to empower people and communities in building their own practical solutions.

“We live at the border between the United States and Mexico, working in two cities divided by a wall,” Forman says. San Diego is affluent, with postcard-perfect beaches and parks. But it is devastatingly expensive for people on low incomes.

It is also the site of one of centres where the United States Customs and Border Protection agency detains, often for long periods, children who have been stopped while crossing from Mexico.

“It has been devastating to witness the emotional impact on children, their fear and the inevitable psychic internalisation of being socially and morally marginalised,” Forman says.

She and Cruz have responded to the border in part by creating “urban rooms” and “community stations”, a collection of structures and areas that have turned vacant public spaces on both sides into community and civic hubs.

The largest of these is a few kilometres from the border wall on the Mexico side. Here, El Santuario Frontera, or the Border Sanctuary, is a live-work collective for refugees and migrants without homes in the Cañón de Alacrán, or Scorpion’s Canyon, where almost 100,000 people had been living in rough shelters made from refuse, often construction waste scavenged from the US side of the border.

Some might ask whether building something in this space risks making permanent a temporary problem. But, whether escaping climate change, oppression or the violence of drug cartels, people have been camping here for years; the amplifying problems now belong to us all.

Cruz points out that the building of the US border wall has included concrete dams and drainage systems that have interfered with the canyons in the valley, altering water flows and diverting topsoil and rubbish.

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He describes borders as “a self-inflicted wound”, and while they may historically have been drawn along the lines of rivers or mountain ranges – you know you’re in serious trouble when you see one that is a straight line – geography and climate don’t care about national boundaries. Damage the ecosystem on one side and you damage it on both.

“I first learned about borders studying Ireland in college,” Forman says. “We studied agrarian reform in 19th-century Ireland, and I became captivated by Daniel O’Connell. The history is there: land reform, tenants’ rights. It’s doable. It is all doable.”

El Santuario Frontera is modelled on local pueblos, the multistorey dwellings traditionally built from sun-baked mud and straw. Here, concrete and steel frames rise from stone-filled gabions, or wire cages, which also stabilise the natural landscape and collect water for irrigation.

The modular design creates open bays in which individual families can build their own sections. The project also includes workshops, a kitchen, a community centre, sports grounds, a school, clinic, a market and a laundry.

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Funding initially came through a donation from the collector and cultural historian Robert M Rubin, who sold a mid-century modern Jean Prouvé chair for $400,000 at Sotheby’s to finance this particular piece of philanthropy (which gives you an idea not only of his generosity but also of the astonishingly skewed scale of wealth distribution, and of values that pass for normal).

In a nice piece of circularity, Prouvé’s modular and prefabricated social and emergency housing designs from the 1940s and 1950s provided inspiration for El Santuario.

Rubin made his donation to the Center on Global Justice at the University of California San Diego, of which Forman is founding director. (She is also professor of political science at the university; Cruz is professor of architecture and urbanism there.)

Cruz points to an illustration: the university provides programming capacity and enables political representation; the architects add design, visualisation and facilitation; and NGOs enable access to land and to social programming and, crucially, give a structure for the community sweat equity that built El Santuario and the other community stations. It’s a question of using what you’ve got to leverage where you can.

“Everything has been built with migrant labour,” Cruz says. “Because obviously they feel, and are, part of the whole.”

He says the municipality of Tijuana, “understanding the robustness of the investments”, finally built infrastructure. “They built the street; we began to plug in with services and utilities. So it became an example of how to develop a city from the bottom up.”

The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, refers to “zones of peace” in describing the importance of reinvesting in places of poverty. “We’re trying to create more of a sense of collective wellbeing, to stitch the edges with the centre,” Forman says; she points to Latin American success stories such as the transformation of the Colombian city of Medellín.

While Cruz darts off to get a laptop in order to show more maps, plans and images, Forman describes a recent trip to the Vatican, where the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences invited her to speak about climate-forced migration.

“The Vatican is this amazing summoning body,” she says, noting how Pope Francis and Pope Leo have used their office to draw together thinkers on some of the most pressing social, environmental and technological issues.

Her point is that change can come only through a combination of new thinking and working with existing systems.

Some of this involves unpicking things we think we know. “There was a big study at Harvard a few years ago on social happiness,” Forman says. “What they discovered is that the very poor who are driven to cities, because of their poverty and climate change, were actually happier in all sorts of metrics before they arrived.

“Then, when they began to see conspicuous wealth around them, they became demonstrably unhappy in all sorts of ways that were unknown to them before.”

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Cruz regards the “dramatic obscenity of wealth and poverty” in San Diego and across the border as fundamental to the polarisation that is becoming more entrenched and more problematic.

“How to produce a more equitable redistribution, beginning with mutual recognition, of course: that’s really at the centre of the work.”

The architect doesn’t mean educating “others” to be more like “us”. Part of the solution is to “support a community-owned model of development that enables long-term sustainability, that protects itself from the fluctuations of the market”, he says.

“And we can open up unorthodox approaches to mutual recognition. What can the informal settlements of Tijuana teach the selfish suburban sprawl of the United States?”

Cruz and Forman were introduced by the eminent American sociologist Richard Sennett. Forman is from Milwaukee, in Wisconsin. Cruz is from Guatemala; he moved to the United States when he was 20.

In 2018, when he won the Vilcek Prize, which recognises the contributions immigrants make to the US, Cruz recalled his introduction to the idea of architecture as a profession, when he was visiting an architecture-student family friend.

“He had his table near a window, and he had a cup of coffee and sketch paper, and he was doodling,” Cruz said at the time. “And it was raining outside, and I said: ‘This is exactly what I want to do: to be involved in shaping things.’”

Learning architecture in Guatemala was then very technological and practical. “But when I got to the United States I began to engage with theory. It was a more artistic approach. The sensibilities were opened up.”

“It’s a very sweet part of Teddy’s biography,” Forman says, looking at her partner, “that he left Guatemala, arrived in San Diego, completed his architectural education only to cross back over the border to work in Tijuana, because I think you had a new appreciation of the informal.”

“I’m really against that kind of identitarian packaging through aesthetics,” Cruz says. “I had to come to the US to understand that, only to return to see with new eyes the potential of these marginalised zones.”

What exactly does he mean? Forman describes the challenges of suburbanisation, of how the idea of rational choice dominates thinking in political science, as if everything were predictable, fixable, perfectible.

“When I first came to the United States it was in the early 1980s,” Cruz says. “The sprawl was beginning.”

He saw the neat, ordered houses, the little boxes with their lawns and carports. He thought it was wonderful. And then, little by little, he changed his mind.

“Crossing the border, back and forth, I began to see this contrast. I began to see the social alienation” in the US.

Violence was emerging across those idealised American suburbs, unacknowledged by the authorities invested in their success.

“These places that are designed to be picturesque and harmonious are where this strange monster is bubbling,” Cruz says. “Like Columbine,” he adds quietly, referring to the 1999 tragedy that was then the deadliest mass shooting at a US school.

When we meet, Cruz and Forman are in Dublin to present at the annual conference of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, which this year explored the theme of architecture for the common good.

Other speakers included the chief architect for Barcelona city council, Maria Buhigas San José; the senior Cork County Council architect Giulia Vallone; and the Dublin-based architects Róisín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng, whose firm is the only architecture practice on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential companies for 2026.

At events like this, brilliant ideas can flow like water. But an uneasy feeling can settle on leaving: the skills and the will are there, yet we emerge to a world in which the problems remain seemingly intractable.

“A colleague said to me recently that optimism is a sin but hope is a virtue,” Forman says.

I think about the images Cruz and Forman have shown of people working to build shelter and homes at the US-Mexico border. Political rhetoric characterises these men, women and children as problem populations: nuisances, threats, infestations.

But each has their own story. Who knows what they may go on to become and do? Cruz came to the US as an immigrant. One of the young people in these photographs may yet change the world. Whether that is for better or for worse is not only up to them; it is also up to us and how we see and recognise them.

Cruz and Forman may be working at a border more than 8,000km away, but their ideas are vital here, and now.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman’s books Socialising Architecture: Top-Down/Bottom-Up and Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks are published by MIT Press