Spatial Justice, Surveillance, and Shade II
What do we deserve from public space? An interview with Ersela Kripa on shade, the state, and surveillance.
We first spoke with Ersela in December of 2022. Today we share our follow up.
This interview with Ersela Kripa, an architect and founding partner of AGENCY, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
My name is Ersela Kripa and I am the director of the Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University in El Paso. And I am a partner in the practice called AGENCY.
Why is heat especially important to pay attention to?
One of the most readily available answers is the fact that we are in the Chihuahuan desert. The Environmental Protection Agency has identified the 50th-degree parallel as a significant area at risk of heightened UV damage, where it will start to behave like an equator. This parallel intersects right at the center of the US-Mexico border, very close to El Paso and Juarez.
So with global warming and more extreme summers, like the one we just had, we're seeing that we are receiving disproportionate levels of UV damage and exposure because we lack investment in public infrastructure and shade. The work we've been doing is concerned with who does this impact, and who does it impact the most. More and more migrants continue to cross, specifically here at the El Paso Juarez border, and they're waiting longer hours, exposing them to more heat. Those who are the most vulnerable spend the most time outside in exposed public spaces.
Can you describe some of what underpins your thinking in your work?
As architects, it just feels like we have very direct responsibilities towards the built environment. And the built environment is complicit, if not planned properly, in these asymmetries of exposure.
We're interested in understanding how we've planned cities over decades and the impacts on communities that have historically been negatively affected by disproportionate levels of investment. The new project that we're embarking on is specifically looking at the Segundo Barrio, which is a neighborhood in El Paso that used to be called El Bosque.
If you look at all the maps, it was this really lush, forested, shaded neighborhood. And now very seldom do you find trees or any shade. And so that has negatively impacted the community's ability to be outside, to connect with each other, and to have a sense of place. We just had a 45-day streak of triple-digit temperatures this summer. So think about the generational impacts. The kids in this neighborhood will be impacted for the rest of their lives by their inability to play outside, to be physically engaged with their context.
Your work involves a lot of observation, research, and critical thinking. Once you identify the issues, particularly in a relatively small space like Segundo Barrio, how do you think about the next steps? Is it primarily a local effort, or does it involve the city as a whole? How does the proximity to the border influence policymaking in this context?
We work at multiple scales. We've broken down a major upcoming project. The first year is really at the scale of the neighborhood, and we are collaborating closely with Dr. Yolanda Leyva, who is an oral historian at the University of Texas in El Paso. She's going to be working through building an oral history archive through interviews and through community engagement in the neighborhood to understand the generational impacts of this.
In the second year, the idea is that we take the learnings of the research and of the oral histories and understand how bi-nationally they are relevant. And so then we'll be collaborating with Jaurez Limpio, which is an amazing nonprofit in Juarez. The idea here is to look at these things citywide, in a binational context, and examine how these lessons that are learned from real human beings relate to data and research.
And then in the third year, the goal is to build an online platform and an oral archive that could start to project the findings and recommendations to other desert, border cities all over the world.
What do you think we deserve from public space?
Yeah, that's an amazing question. What do we deserve from public space? I think it's also a cultural question, but it's always related to the history of American cities in relation to public space. American cities, you know, tried in the middle of the 20th century to think about public housing and public space as it relates to public housing, and that did not work out well. It wasn't a holistic approach. It seems as though American cities have always seen a disinvestment from public spaces.
And here, being so close to Mexico, understanding immigrant families and cultures that live intergenerationally, like my own from Albania, we greatly value outdoor and public spaces. It's where you see your neighbors, where everyone keeps an eye on each other's kids, where things are a bit messy and unpredictable. Kids playing soccer on the streets—it's our living room outside. Our Italian friends always say that their living room is outside. Like, that is the space that needs to be inhabited to build communities. And that just is not the nature of American cities.
In America, fractured by zoning and significant disinvestment in inner cities, the suburbs have been allowed to thrive, leading to a loss in the city's tax base and a lack of interest in developing public spaces within the city. Despite being in Texas, I think that El Paso seems determined to revive this sense of community and public space.
The elephant in the room is that there's a huge security and surveillance apparatus in El Paso. Between Fort Bliss and the physical border, there’s the presence of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, local police, the army, and it goes on…How does that come into play when you're looking at what people want?
El Paso is a paradoxical city. We're approaching the holidays. El Paso really loves the winter holidays, so downtown has already been decorated with lights and things like that. It seems like there's a true effort to find ways to transport migrants to other cities and states. We work at a functioning train station downtown, and the city and the state have set up their emergency management services here, processing migrant paperwork and essentially scheduling buses to send migrants out of here. This has been on the news a lot lately. To be a migrant here and be out in the streets is kind of paradoxical because once their paperwork is processed and they're waiting for a case hearing, they're considered ‘legal’ or ‘documented’. They're free to be anywhere. But they are not free to congregate or hang out or set up camp downtown. So they constantly have to be in flux. They're always moved to centers or wherever a bed might be for an overnight stay. It's constantly in flux. Layering the idea of public space with who has access to it and who's allowed becomes really complex here.
Do you think if people spent time in El Paso — where they could see with their own eyes what was happening it would change perception?
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. U.S.-Mexico border towns are not just compassionate because, in terms of population percentage, they mostly consist of families of Hispanic heritage or migrants, but also, infrastructurally, they are set up to handle any kind of migrant issue. There are shelters, and the city recently purchased an empty school where migrants can spend the night. Every time the media portrays it as an 'influx,' it never materializes. The city always issues messages on Thursday night, we expect 10,000 people to roam the streets, so be aware, but nothing like that ever happens. People move in groups to processing centers or bus stations to reach their sponsors across the United States. If people could spend a month or even just two weeks here, they would understand it's just a normal daily routine that doesn't change the city's nature, despite the rhetoric about safety or other concerns.
I wanted to talk about Ultraviole(n)t and your other upcoming work. What are you looking forward to most?
I'm excited about two things. One is that the Mellon Foundation is funding the work, and they really focus on the humanities. Their team really emphasized that they were most interested in how our data becomes a humanities project. They're not interested in data without impact. For us, to be supported to leave the research center's walls, to reach out to an oral historian, and to reach out to community organizations in order to understand how our data becomes human, is really really exciting. Data often presents itself as detached and unemotional, despite not always being objective. I'm excited for it to become this more empathetic and emotional thing.
The second thing I'm excited about is our opportunity to collaborate with colleagues in Juarez and design a portable structure for exhibitions. After showcasing it at the Biennial in two years, we plan to donate it to our local governance—either the city or county—for its continued use.