Tijuana is thriving. And you see this mostly in Tijuana's neighborhoods, its rows of new master-planned communities decorating the landscape, "For Sale" signs on every corner.

Two events coming up in October at Art Produce Gallery in San Diego's North Park neighborhood engage with this scramble for land, streets and sidewalks, and roof overhead.

They are part of a six-week binational art installation, performance and lecture series called The Fence/La Barda curated by San Diego's Feminist Image Group and Tijuana's Distrito 10 gallery.

[p]On Saturday night, October 11, beginning at 7 pm, Gabriela Posada del Real will present a talk and slide show "Art as a Public Safety Intervention in Border Communities." With a three-year grant from US-AID, Posada del Real has been managing a host of community projects in Tijuana's neighborhoods of Mariano Matamoros,

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Granjas Familiares and Camino Verde. The program is grounded in the urban development method of CPTED, a strategy for crime prevention that relies on urban studies expert Jane Jacobs' concept of "eyes on the street."

Good urban development should encourage city-dwellers to get out and walk around, Jacobs argued. People need to be able to occupy their streets and parks and sidewalks. When local community members get involved and get to know each other, their very presence in the street drives away crime and violence. Slowly people can start making positive changes in their own space.

[p]Under the guidance of Posada del Real, Tijuana's local architects, urban planners and artists have worked since 2012 to organize people like Alma Teresa Carrillo, resident of Camino Verde. People begin by doing surveys and making maps of their own streets. Then they identify problems in the built environment--like abandoned lot, broken street lights, or spots with no sidewalks. Through genuine long-term commitment and engaged local participation, the program has helped build cohesion among neighbors, many of whom are recent migrants from Veracruz, Michoacán, or Guerrero and don't know each other or share common roots.

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On the following Saturday, October 18, 2014 Minnesotan photographers Laura Migliorino and Anthony Marchetti will be in San Diego to present their ongoing project "Occidente Nuevo: Recycled Tijuana."

[p]In six research trips to Tijuana, the photographers documented architectural traces in Tijuana of houses that were built and occupied in San Diego and then sold and transported to Tijuana as castaway housing.

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Proud Tijuana homeowners have recycled these buildings, turning houses into homes.

The project plays off Robert Adams’s seminal photography series The New West, a stunning photo essay about newly developed tract homes that sprang up throughout the barren western landscape during the mid 1970s.

[p]The Tijuana photographs of Migliorino and Marchetti capture a new "new west" created from the debris of houses that got too old and were thown away, an ironic departure from Adams,

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Housing developments since the 1950s in Tijuana have been created through re-use of old housing stock from the San Diego area. The process of relocating entire houses and cast-off housing debris has continued over the decades, resulting in Tijuana neighborhoods built almost entirely out of recycled architecture. These homes are passed down generation-to-generation, and inhabited with pride.

EVENTS at ART PRODUCE GALLERY

Located in North Park at

[p]3139 University Ave

San Diego, CA 92116

October 11, 2014 at 7:00 PM: "Art as a Public Safety Intervention in Border Communities" by Gabriela Posada del Real, Tijuana

October 18, 2014 at 7:00 PM: "Occidente Nuevo: Recycled Tijuana" by Minnesotan photographers Laura Migliorino and Anthony Marchetti

jill.holslin@sandiegored.com