9 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31 10 See the interview with Bert Theis in this volume
San Diego (car tires, construction materials, and entire prefabricated houses) is used to build a vast, improvised housing area. In these exchanges, Cruz sees the emergence of new hybrid models in which the sterile life of suburban America can draw on the Latino social heritage, and he designs prefabricated frames that can be used as load-bearing structures to support temporary homes in Tijuana. A new paradigm may thus emerge from a rethinking of the architect’s role: by mediating between entrepreneurs, authorities, and citizens, the architect is able to transform the intelligence and needs of these neighborhoods into economic policies and models that are capable of triggering off a process of empowerment. In the neighborhood of San Ysidro in San Diego, Cruz is experimenting with a new housing model in which, together with the inhabitants, he brings together ecological issues, new social possibilities, and the emergence of a new, endogenous entrepreneurship. Formal aspects become simply the underlying structure for a series of cooperation processes and for making it possible to try out new forms of aggregation. Defining methodological and housing alternatives goes hand-in-hand with the possibility of creating new models to which to be aspired. This is what the Indian anthropologist Arjan Appadurai refers to as “the imagination as a social practice.” 9 Bert Theis’s work in the Isola Art Center project comes from an attempt to imagine a world where a commonly shared understanding can be built up in the Isola district, an area of Milan which is undergoing dramatic transformation. By establishing the limits, potential, and objectives of the community, Theis has facilitated a discussion and a process of ideas about the future of the district, in both spatial and social terms. Daily discussions with the community, cooperation with neighborhood associations, and the involvement of artists and intellectuals has led to a process of greater awareness, emancipation, and self-determination, thus legitimizing the role of the citizens, but also encouraging different groups to interact. The idea of using a space for contemporary art as a place for dialogue and interaction has led many residents to redefine the role of art and, at the same time, it has allowed a number of artists to start listening more carefully, and this has led to projects for the community outside of exhibition spaces. Since 2007, when the Isola Art Center was demolished10, the project has continued with a series of art projects, events, and actions in the district, considerably broadening out the sphere of intervention. Projects like Rosta, in which artists such as Dan Perjovschi, Andreas Siekmann, and Christoph Schäfer made works on the shutters in the district, or museo aero solar, by Tomas Saraceno, could not have come about without the active cooperation of many local residents and a constant reappraisal of the role of art as a means of bringing about new collective ideas. Sharing these intentions, even though in a profoundly different context, has started up a series of projects of community involvement with the aim of making the aesthetic process a fundamental factor in development. In a city like Douala, the financial capital of Cameroon, in which there are no art schools or museums, art can become a new code for initiating dialogue with Goddy Leye