UC San Diego

Hidden In Plain Sight: La Jolla / UTC Annex, An Edge-City is an inter-textual project (combining theoretical and historical inquiry with performative intervention and documentary filmmaking) that critically investigates the developmental landscape adjacent to the UCSD campus. Via a self-implicating and performative research methodology, the project endeavors to develop a reflexive counter-genealogy and counter-ontology of what Joel Garreau might identify and gleefully laud as "Edge City" in his seminal text of the same name. The project seeks to dissect an aesthetics of banality that conveniently occludes this and such landscape's interrelationship with structural, economic, and physical violence, and by effect works to preclude any resistant cultural response thereto. More broadly, the project endeavors to intervene in a process by which certain myths of progress and exceptionalism are upheld iconographically, in order to develop a new critical hermeneutics of the physical and cultural terrain in question.

The illustrated document submitted sets up a specific historical and geographic terrain for the recapitulation of enacted performances. The latter functions as a set of micro-case studies-out of and against which I have developed a set of theoretical and critical positions vis-à-vis the "Technopole" / "Edge City" urban typology in a characteristically Southern Californian context.