Spatializing Justice and Socializing Architecture

Copublished by the MIT Press and Hatje Cantz, Spatializing Justice and Socializing Architecture by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman are now available everywhere books are sold. 

Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks (22.95 USD, October 25, 2022) is a manifesto calling for a new kind of architecture that confronts social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth. In thirty short credos that come together in a practical handbook, Cruz and Forman offer architects and urban designers the building blocks to do more than design buildings and physical systems. 

With approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions, Spatializing Justice is a practitioner's guide for complicating the ideas of ownership and property, and imagining new sites of research, pedagogy, and intervention.

Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up (54.95 USD, March 21, 2023) is a richly illustrated monograph of social practice at the intersection of architecture, art, public culture, and political theory. Building on Spatializing Justice, Socializing Architecture presents analysis and diverse case studies illustrating how to alter the exclusionary policies that produce public crisis. Cruz and Forman urge architects and urbanists to intervene in the contested space between public and private interests to design political and civic processes that mediate top-down and bottom-up urban resources and mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization. 

“As the world is burning, we hope this work will contribute to accelerating dialogue and commitment among architects, urbanists, and design schools everywhere to resist injustice and ecosocial catastrophe, and to engage in solidaristic modes of operation with communities at the frontlines,” write the authors. “Our community partners at the US-Mexico border remind us everyday that spatial practices can do more—must do more—than ride these waves of history.”

Drawn from decades of lived experience, Socializing Architecture studies the San Diego–Tijuana border region as a global laboratory with lessons to address the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, explosive urban informality, climate disruption, the thickening of border walls, and the decline of public thinking.

Speaking to the importance of these two titles, Commissioning Editor in Design and Visual Culture at the MIT Press Victoria Hindley says, “Not content to rest at pointing to the complex layers of social and economic inequality inherent in contested border zones, Cruz and Forman make it their daily work to understand, develop, and apply real-world solutions that can catapult us toward just urbanization with alarming speed if we would only listen.”

Cruz and Forman are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice. Cruz is Professor of Public Culture and Urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of Urban Research in the UCSD Center on Global Justice. Forman is Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, San Diego, and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice. 

Spatializing Justice
144 pp., 7 x 9 in, 120 b&w illus.
ISBN: 9780262544535

Socializing Architecture
584 pp., 7 x 9 in, 843 color illus., 89 b&w illus.
ISBN: 9780262545181