Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

Please contact us at:
teddycruz.fonnaforman@gmail.com


Teddy Cruz (MDes Harvard) is a professor of Public Culture and Urbanism in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is known internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana/San Diego border, advancing border neighborhoods as sites of cultural production from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing, and public space.

Fonna Forman (PhD Chicago) is a professor of Political Theory and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego. A theorist of ethics and public culture, her work focuses on human rights at the urban scale, climate justice in cities, border ethics, and equitable urbanization in the global south. She is known internationally for her revisionist research on Adam Smith, recuperating the ethical, social, spatial and public dimensions of his thought.

Cruz & Forman are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, investigating issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture, with a special emphasis on Latin American cities. Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, Cruz + Forman lead variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. From 2012–13 they served as special advisors on civic and urban initiatives for the City of San Diego and led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. Together they lead the UCSD Community Stations, a platform for community-engaged research and teaching on poverty and social equity in the border region.

Their work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and M+ Hong Kong. They represented the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. They co-edited Informal Market Worlds Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure (Rotterdam: nai010); and have two forthcoming monographs: Top-Down / Bottom-Up: The Research and Practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Berlin: Hatje Cantz); and The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship (London: Verso).