Socializing Architecture

Rising inequality is reshaping cities around the world, and this illustrated book argues that architects can help border regions move toward positive change. It sits where architecture, art, civic life, and political theory meet. Its central call is for designers and urban planners to work in the contested territory between public and private interests, to shape the political and civic processes that connect top-down and grassroots urban resources, and to revive a public imagination aimed at fairer cities.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman ground their argument in years of hands-on work in the San Diego and Tijuana borderland, which they treat as a testing ground for pressing urban problems. These include unequal economic growth, large-scale migration, rapidly expanding informal settlements, climate disruption, the proliferation of border walls, and the shrinking of public debate.

The book is a sequel to Spatializing Justice (2022) by the same authors. It has two main parts, one of essays and one of projects, and it extends the case that architects and urban designers should look beyond buildings and physical systems to the forces that shape them.

Through analysis and a range of case studies, the authors show how exclusionary policies that generate public crises can be altered, and how new political and economic strategies can produce a more equitable and sociable architecture.