In the last years, our environmental, civic, and architectural work has advocated for a more rooted, embedded, and long-term infrastructure of cross-border partnerships with grass-roots organizations. These solidarities are spatialized through a physical cross-border network of public spaces that educate, taking a longer view of resistance, strategic thinking, anticipatory planning, and architectural intervention.

Our practice works to localize the global, to move from critical distance to critical proximity, from the abstraction of globalization, the “out there” somewhere in the world, to the specificity of the “here and now” of our physical territory and our immediate political context. Obviously, the local can easily devolve into selfish protectionism and identitarian myopia. It therefore cannot be “an end in itself.” But it can be operationalized to gain critical access into the social-spatial manifestations of global conflicts and investigate contested power relations inscribed in the everyday lives of people impacted by those conflicts. Tackling the urban crisis demands visualizing it and “naming” what produced it. We often design methods to visualize political and civic processes and their spatialization across the border territory, to expose the collisions between exclusionary top-down policies and bottom-up social and ecological networks.