TOUR DETAILS:
All tours begin at the registration desk: Ridgewalk Academic Complex, UCSD Campus, on FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25. Buses will leave and return to this same spot.
Tour #1: Urban Planning in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands – SOLD OUT
10:00 am – 3:00 pm
Led by Kevan Q. MALONE, Fellow, Clements Center for Southwestern Studies, Southern Methodist University
Accessibility: This tour will travel by bus but requires walking over uneven terrain. A microphone will be used by tour guides. A microphone will be used by tour guides, and box lunches will be served.
Capped at 30 participants
This tour will highlight historical and ongoing urban planning challenges in the international border zone of San Diego’s South Bay area, adjacent to the Mexican border city of Tijuana. Stop 1: At the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Kevan Malone will discuss how cross-border movements of capital, tourists, and working people have fueled more than a century of rapid and largely informal urban growth in Tijuana, setting the stage for problems of water management on both sides of the international divide within the basin of the northbound Tijuana River. Stop 2: At the international wastewater treatment facilities of the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), Kevan and the head of the commission’s San Diego office will highlight local and international efforts to address the nearly century-old problem of Tijuana sewage polluting American public and private properties downstream along the Tijuana River in San Diego. At the nearby Tijuana River flood control channel, Kevan will recount a history of the binational river channelization project of the 1960s and 1970s and the conservation of the river’s estuary on the U.S. side of the border. From the U.S. Border Patrol’s access road along the border enforcement barriers, tour participants will look south into the densely urbanized landscape of Tijuana and north into the adjacent greenspace of San Diego’s Border Field State Park. Stop 3: Box lunches will be served in the U.S. section of Friendship Park, where the international border meets the Pacific Ocean. As tour participants look through the border fencing into Mexico’s beachfront residential and commercial district of Playas de Tijuana, Kevan will discuss the conception of the binational park in the 1950s, its dedication under presidents Nixon and Echeverría in 1971, and the subsequent division of this binational space by U.S. border enforcement barriers. Stop 4: At the Tijuana Estuary Visitor Center, several miles north of the border, a representative from the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve will discuss conservation efforts in the surrounding wetlands, the protection of endangered species, and ongoing challenges in the face of the cross-border sanitation problem. Bring sunscreen and a hat!
Tour #2: Designing One of the Fastest Growing “Cities”: Campus Planning at UCSD – (Cancelled)
10:30 am – Noon
Led by Todd Pitman and Ingrid Stromberg
Accessibility: This is a walking tour but can accommodate wheelchair needs if requested. A microphone will be used by tour guides.
Capped at 25 participants
UC San Diego’s population has grown rapidly over the past decade, and the campus is increasingly committed to being a student-focused destination and living-learning community. With a $16.5 billion annual economic impact on California, it is not hyperbole to say that the university and the campus have an outsized impact on how people live, learn, work, and play. Join Campus Landscape Architect Todd Pitman as he discusses how the physical campus has evolved alongside considerations of sustainability, community involvement, open space, and history. Ingrid Stromberg, Associate Planner, will explain the evolution of specific spaces. This tour will require walking and include some stairs.
Tour #3: Breweries in the urban economy – (Cancelled)
12pm-4pm
Led by Julie WARTELL, USP faculty at UCSD. Check out her new book, Craft Breweries and Cities Perspectives from the Field.
Accessibility: This tour will travel by car. The tour guides will use a microphone.
Capped at 34 participants
Craft breweries have played an important part in urban economies, and San Diego is at the forefront of developing some of the industry’s most well-known craft breweries. The city has over 150 independent businesses, including some well-known labels like Alesmith, Stone, and Societe. Come on a tour with urban scholar Julie Wartell to Alesmith and learn about the larger phenomenon and the connections between breweries and gentrification, sustainability, and neighborhood growth. This tour includes beer tasting.
Tour #4: Art as Resistance: Chicano Park
1pm-5pm
Led by John ARROYO, Assistant Professor, DUSP, UCSD
Accessibility: This tour will travel by bus but requires walking over uneven terrain. A microphone will be used by tour guides.
Capped at 25 participants
For over a century, Barrio Logan has been the epicenter of San Diego’s vibrant Mexican American and Chicano/a/x/e community. What was once home to the city’s thriving tuna and maritime industry evolved into Naval Base San Diego and its adjacent residential enclave, an area well-known for its legacy of community resistance to poorly designed planning policies and land use interventions. Haphazard rezoning in the 1950s and the construction of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge in the late 1960s further segregated the Barrio Logan community from the rest of San Diego. At the same time, community members long demanded a park to compensate for the heavy infrastructure and toxic health hazards that continued to affect their way of life. In 1970, an attempt by the State of California to rescind the park project in favor of a California Highway Patrol station galvanized the Barrio Logan community to organize through a series of all-night vigils, hunger strikes, and symbolic reclamations for twelve days.
The protests ensured the advancement of one of the nation’s first Latino/a/x/e community-led park projects, which spurred the founding of the Chicano Park Steering Committee to hold local and state politicians accountable as well as consider creative options for a community park that could aesthetically incorporate the concrete pylons upholding the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. A host of Chicano/a/x/e artists coordinated unplanned murals and “mural marathons” on the bridge’s retaining walls and pylons to transmit the history of Chicano/a/x struggle in San Diego to new generations of Mexican Americans. Over time the movement would gain national attention as well as protection on the local (San Diego Historical Site Board) and national registries (National Register of Historic Places; National Historic Landmark). Today, Chicano Park remains a thriving historical site and one of the largest collections of murals by, for, and about people of Mexican heritage in the U.S.
Join us as we learn about over 50 years of history of Chicano Park’s nearly 100 murals. The core of our tour will include visits to both older and recently restored murals relating to farmworker rights, indigenous culture, and housing and to more recent murals relating to women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights. The tour will conclude with a visit to the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center. If we’re lucky, we might even see some of Barrio Logan’s famous lowrider clubs cruising around the park!
Tour #5: Architecture and Preservation at Balboa Park
1pm-5pm
Led by Ross PORTER, Executive Director of Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ Society and President of the Committee of 100 since 2022.
Accessibility: This tour will travel by bus and can accommodate wheelchair needs if requested. A microphone will be used by tour guides.
Capped at 30 participants
One of the most iconic places in San Diego, Balboa Park was the site of the Panama-California Exposition of 1915-16 and the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935-36. Come learn about the Art Deco, Mayan-inspired halls, visit the California tower, see the pueblo-style Palisades, and learn more about a Ford demonstration factory. The World Design Capital pavilion is also housed in Balboa Park, along with a recently renovated botanical garden and 18 different museums.
Tour #6: Salk Institute
2:30 – 4:30 pm
Private tour led by Salk Institute docent.
Accessibility: This is a walking tour but can accommodate wheelchair needs if requested. This tour will not offer a microphone.
The Salk Institute offers tours of their site that combine a wealth of information about the actual research on site with the history and architecture of the buildings. Come and learn about one of Louis Kahn’s most significant works and about Jonas Salk’s transformative research. This site was designated a historical landmark in 1991. The institute also offers hour-long tours that are open to the public, starting at 10am and 11:30am for $25/person. Pre-registration is required: https://www.salk.edu/about/visiting-salk/.