The international border between the US and Mexico at the San Diego/Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the world. Approximately 60 million people cross annually, moving untold amounts of goods and services back and forth.
By zooming into the particularities of this volatile territory, traveling back and forth between these two border cities, we can expose landscapes of contradiction where conditions of difference and sameness collide and overlap. At no other urban juncture in the world can we find some of the wealthiest real estate, as the one found in suburban San Diego, barely 20 minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America, as the ones found in Tijuana’s southern fringes.

A series of “off the radar”, two-way border crossings – North-South and South-North across the border wall – suggest that no matter how high and long the post-9/11 border wall becomes, it will always be transcended by migrating populations and the relentless flows of goods and services back and forth across the formidable barrier that seek to preclude them.

These illegal flows are physically manifested, in one direction, by the informal land use patterns and economies produced by migrant workers flowing from Tijuana and into San Diego, searching for the strong economy of Southern California. But, while “human flow” mobilizes Northbound in search of Dollars, “infrastructural waste” moves in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency.
In the last five years, we have designed a micro-policy with the Casa Familiar organization that can act as an informal process of urban and economic development for the neighborhood of San Ysidro, and empower it to become a developer of alternative dwelling prototypes.