The UCSD-CASA Community Station is a public space that anchors a mixed-use affordable housing project in the community of San Ysidro, with cultural, social and economic programming co-curated between UC San Diego & the community.
Teddy Cruz is an American architect, urbanist, and professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he teaches Architecture and Urbanism. He is also the founder and president of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, which he runs in collaboration with political theorist Fonna Forman. The studio is a research-driven architectural and political practice based in San Diego. Together, they lead several urban initiatives aimed at addressing issues of public space and civic engagement, including The Civic Innovation Lab in San Diego, which reimagines urban public spaces, and the UCSD Cross-Border Initiative, which focuses on research and solutions for poverty-stricken regional areas.
Cruz’s architectural and intellectual work has been exhibited at prestigious venues worldwide, including the Tijuana Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Carnegie Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Art Institute, Casa de América in Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement. Beyond his design work, Cruz’s UCSD Community Stations project emphasizes the value of knowledge exchange between universities and communities, recognizing the often-overlooked resources and assets within the communities themselves.
Casa Familiar In Partnership with UCSD Center on Global Justice
The UCSD-Casa Community Station is a partnership with UCSD Center on Global Justice.
The collaboration between UCSD & Casa Familiar has been fostered for over 20 years. Teddy Cruz & Andrea Skorepa created Living Rooms at The Border concept on the early stages of the arts & culture department at Casa Familiar. Through the late 90s, and early 2000s, UCSD had created concepts and ideas of what would soon be constructed at the heart of the community. Albeit, through environmental justice, affordable housing, and creating a cultural hub, Teddy Cruz helped create Living Rooms at The Border for Casa Familiar. On March of 2020, Livings Rooms at the Border officially opened its doors to the community.
Now, Living Rooms at The Border has become a welcomed cultural space by local residents. Thanks to UCSD’s Center on Global Justice, it has now held large scale workshops focused on music, art, dance, theatre, literature, and environmental justice.
Through the help of Teddy Cruz, and UCSD’s Center on Global Justice, Casa Familiar has been able to expand the presence of arts & culture in San Ysidro, CA.
Activating San Ysidro’s inner artist at Living Rooms
Living Rooms at The Border is one of five community stations that UCSD facilitates across the trans-border region. As a collaboration with Casa Familiar, it engages with the local residents to expand arts & culture to its neighboring community.
Twice a year, local residents are invited to participate in a workshop facilitated by a guest collaborator. The guest collaborator meets with residents for a full month to prepare a final presentation that would portray San Ysidro, and it’s community, through art expression.
Past collaborators that have participated include Steven Schick, Lux Boreal, The Walk Productions’ Walk with Amal, Wilfrido Terrazas, Camilo Zamudio, Albane Tamanga & Le Chant des Bailenes, among others.
Where are these community stations located?
The UCSD Community Stations are a network of field hubs located in disadvantaged neighborhoods on both sides of the San Diego–Tijuana border, designed for collaborative research, teaching and advocacy among university researchers, school districts, and community-based non profit partners.
The UCSD Community Stations blur conventional academic boundaries between research, teaching and service, and enhance UC San Diego’s mission to be a “student-centered, research-focused, service-oriented public university.” The UCSD Community Stations are generously supported by University of California Regent Richard C. Blum, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
UCSD’s Community Stations’ Mission:
To REACTIVATE the university’s public mission, merging research, teaching and service to improve quality of life in disadvantaged communities across the San Diego–Tijuana border region.
To DEVELOP long-term partnerships between the university and community-based non profits to tackle today’s most pressing social and environmental challenges together.
To EDUCATE a new generation of leaders capable of thinking ethically and collaboratively across disciplines.
To PRODUCE public scholarship in collaboration with communities.
To BUILD and PROGRAM new public spaces that educate, where buildings and spaces themselves operate as pedagogical tools, rendering transparent the social and energy systems they contain.
To ADVANCE experimental forms of education, research, civic participation and economic development.
To INSPIRE faculty across disciplines to do ethical, community-engaged research and practice in diverse, underserved contexts.
To EXPAND experiential learning opportunities, and develop new field-based curricula that place students into actual communities settings.
To MOBILIZE the arts and humanities as tools of civic engagement that increase public knowledge and collective capacity in disadvantaged communities.
To PRODUCE new evidentiary data that can transform public policy.
To SUPPORT communities developing their own neighborhood civic infrastructure and affordable housing.