Also Migrating From Latin America: A Wave of Urban Innovation

Source: Bloomberg CityLab | By Linda Baker

For US cities, grassroots solutions from metros south of the border can be more useful than better-known urban practices from Europe.

Over the last few years, a first-of-its-kind sanctuary neighborhood for migrants opened in a canyon next to the San Diego-Tijuana border wall. The UCSD-Alacrán Community Station, created through a partnership with the University of California San Diego Center on Global Justice, houses around 1,800 people; the three-acre site also features a health care clinic, food hub, school and outdoor plaza. More than an emergency shelter, Alacrán is designed to help those fleeing violence in their countries of origin participate actively in shaping the social, cultural and economic life of the ad-hoc city that they now call home.

UCSD-Alacrán is one of four cross-border community stations — two in Tijuana, two in San Diego — that the Center on Global Justice launched with local nonprofits and school districts. But their inspiration comes from the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Medellín, says Teddy Cruz, the center’s director of urban research. As they emerged from years of drug cartel violence in the 1990s and early 2000s, those cities implemented a variety of experimental social policies to improve urban life, from hiring mimes to direct traffic to building a network of library parks in high-poverty neighborhoods.

The idea, according to Cruz and center founding director Fonna Forman, was to rebuild patterns of trust and social cooperation from the ground up.

UCSD’s community stations seek to apply similar ideas about the value of such social infrastructure to the conflicted US-Mexico border zone and ultimately help reshape the political dialogue nationwide. “We have been convinced,” Cruz and Forman said in an email, “that it is in Latin American cities where we can find the DNA for reclaiming a new public imagination in the US.”

Importing urban innovations from Latin America is hardly new — a host of cities in the US and elsewhere have borrowed another concept from Bogotá, the car-free Ciclovía, for example. But for decades, the gold standard for enlightened city-making has tended to focus on central and northern Europe. It’s the bike lanes of Amsterdam, the superblocks of Barcelona or the “15-minute city” model of Paris that get so many US planners fired up.

But as migration strains city coffers and climate change fuels population shifts, Latin American cities are attracting fresh interest from practitioners and academics seeking solutions to the most pressing urban challenges in the US.

According to Juan Miró, a professor of architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, European best practices have proven ill-equipped to address many urban challenges. “People go to Paris, and say: ‘It’s so beautiful, a model high-density city,’” he said. “But go to the outskirts where immigrants are and they are terrible places to live.”