Slow Design, Placemaking and Urban Space Across the Border | Lecture by Lawrence Herzog

Through examples from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Tijuana, Mexico, this lecture explores ways of thinking about urban space through the lens of placemaking and ‘slow design’.

Herzog draws on his experiences in Latin America, using the examples of recent work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Tijuana, Mexico. In both Brazil and Mexico, placemaking offers an extension of national traditions of preserving the “cultural patrimony” (buildings, public spaces). In Rio de Janeiro, a cultural corridor project running through the center of downtown is one example; in Tijuana, a grassroots movement to revitalize the downtown offers an innovative way to reinvent cross-border urban space in the future.

Lawrence Herzog (Ph.D.), born in New York City, is a writer, photographer and visiting scholar in the Bio Regional Center, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of California, San Diego, and professor emeritus of city planning in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University (SDSU), San Diego, California.  

He has written or edited 11 books on urban planning, design and global/cross-border development, including: Global Suburbs:  Urban Sprawl from the Rio Grande to Rio de Janeiro (Routledge, 2015); Return to the Center (University of Texas Press, 2006) and From Aztec to High Tech (Johns Hopkins, 1999). Herzog has been a Fulbright Scholar in Peru and the United Kingdom, an international planning consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. A.I.D.) in Peru and Bolivia, and has lectured at universities in Mexico, Peru, Brazil, France, Spain, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom.  In 2015, he was a TED speaker at the TEDx Monumento event on the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego/Tijuana. In 2018 he was a awarded the annual Faculty ‘Monty’ Award for Outstanding Lifetime Scholarly Achievement at SDSU. 

Dinsmore - Architecture West Building Room 200
Light Lunch Served.

Header photo by Poswiecie, courtesy Pixabay.