Teddy Cruz is a San Diego based architect and urban critic working extensively on the impoverished communities living around the border between Tijuana and San Diego. Cruz thinks it's not enough to be deeply committed to documenting these extrema topographies, but it is also necessary to actively partake in their solutions. Where Cruz sees a major weak-point is precisely in the disconnection between concerned activists and the support institutions themselves.
While architects often consider themselves best prepared to deal with problems arising from within the civic realm, there is much about architecture education that falls short of the task. Architects are more inclined to plan spectacular buildings then to build everyday communities, or to rely on the latest technology rather than rely on the value of human resources. Architecture has left a troubled legacy of bankrupt clients, underserved citizens, fortifled enclaves and decimated landscapes. Big capital has for too long commandeered the building process leaving cities and infrastructure in the hands of elite private interests. Not that any of these criticisms are new, Bruce Haggart, from the British counterculture group Street Farmer wrote in the early seventies: